#73 Empty NTFS formated showing as bootable

[Anonymous]

Hello,
We have a Mac Pro with 4 GPT drives. The first drive contains OSX,Ubuntu,XP and Vista, if the additional 3 drives are formated as fat32 Refit works well showing icons for all four OSes and boots into each without a problem. Whenever the additional drves are formated as NTFS however they are added to the boot menu, we would like to have the additional drives in NTFS which is available to all the OSes without the ~4 gig file limit that comes with fat32.

[Christoph Pfisterer]

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So, unfortunately Microsoft does funny things every once in a while *cough*. One of them is that they mark the boot sector of FAT32 and NTFS volumes as bootable, and then put a bit of code in there that just prints a message like "This is not a system disk" when it is booted. rEFIt tries to compensate for that my scanning for a substring of that particular message. This doesn't work in some cases; one known case is localized versions of recenct Windows versions (I believe it started with XP). It seems that in your case it works for FAT32, but breaks for NTFS.

If you can send me a dump of the boot sector of the NTFS partition in question, I can try to hack around this.

As a stop-gap measure, you can try putting "disable external" in your refit.conf file. That flag will stop hard drives classified as "external" from showing up. I guess it won't help if the 3 additional drives are mounted internally.

[Paul St. Denis]

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Thanks Christoph,
Here is the dump I got using dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/tmp/disk1.dmp bs=512 count=1
http://129.49.101.216/public/users/paulrt/disk1.dmp
Thanks for looking into this and for sharing your great tool to the community.
Let me know if you need additional info.
The 3 disks are internal unfortunately.
Paul

[Paul St. Denis]

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Christoph,
Following your explaination of the problem I used leopard disk utility to format one drive /dev/disk1 as FAT and then ran
dd if=/dev/disk1s1 of=/dev/disk2s1 bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/disk1s1 of=/dev/disk3s1 bs=512 count=1
on the two NTFS formated drives.
This appears to have worked! The drives needed to be unmounted first before running dd. I am currently booted into XP and the drives are viewable, but did not show up in refit's loading screen.
At first I tried dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2 bs=512 count=1 which didn't do it even though there is only one partition on the drive, does this have to do with GPT?
I don't think the dump I supplied would help since refit seems to be reading off of /dev/disk1s1. Unfortunately I no longer have a non-working boot sector to send you!
I don't know a lot about MBRs, do you think there could be neagative effects to blindly copying a FAT32 MBR to NTFS this way?
Thanks again.

[Paul St. Denis]

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Sorry I spoke way too soon, after booting into Ubuntu I got a series of FSCK files on these drives and they are listed as fat32, this technique would be of limited use anyway because all the drives would need to be the same size.
I'll keep trying but I still think I would need to send you a different dump.

[Ageostrophic]

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I am having the same issue with my shared local data partition formatted as NTFS.

ageostrophic$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *232.9 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Data (NTFS) 150.0 Gi disk0s2
3: Fedora 25.0 Gi disk0s3
4: Vista 25.0 Gi disk0s4
5: Leopard 32.6 Gi disk0s5

Any more thoughts on this. Not a critical issue, but it would be nice not having the other Windows option. Thanks.