joevt

I don't know Windows. Can you run gdisk in a terminal window as Administrator?

The boot restore process is doing legacy/BIOS boot restore, so its not going to affect the EFI boot settings. You have to change EFI boot settings to make it boot legacy BIOS boot by default (select the Windows startup option in Startup Disk preferences panel or hold option key at boot to enter the Startup Manager EFI app, select the Windows option, hold control key and press enter, or use the bless command). Doing any of those three will set the EFI boot nvram variable to the Boot Camp EFI program...

I'm using 10.4.11 on a PowerPC Mac but it should be the same as an Intel Mac. Here's the output when I paste the text (I removed the tabs to be safe): JoeG5:~ joevt$ echo $BASH_VERSION 2.05b.0(1)-release JoeG5:~ joevt$ testit () { > if perl -ne 'exit !(/vmlinuz|bzImage|kernel/)' <<< "$FirstCmdlineOption"; then > echo match > else > echo nomatch > fi > } JoeG5:~ joevt$ FirstCmdlineOption=vmlinuz ; testit match JoeG5:~ joevt$ FirstCmdlineOption=bzImage ; testit match JoeG5:~ joevt$ FirstCmdlineOption=kernel...

I'm using 10.4.11 on a PowerPC Mac but it should be the same as an Intel Mac. Here's the output when I paste the text (I removed the tabs to be safe): JoeG5:~ joevt$ echo $BASH_VERSION 2.05b.0(1)-release JoeG5:~ joevt$ testit () { > if perl -ne 'exit !(/vmlinuz|bzImage|kernel/)' <<< "$FirstCmdlineOption"; then > echo match > else > echo nomatch > fi > } JoeG5:~ joevt$ FirstCmdlineOption=vmlinuz ; testit match JoeG5:~ joevt$ FirstCmdlineOption=bzImage ; testit match JoeG5:~ joevt$ FirstCmdlineOption=kernel...

The fdisk output in your Boot Info says the EFI partition is marked as the active partition. That seems strange but it might work. xxd the PBR of sda1 to see if it has boot code (before and after you repair boot to see how things get modified). From the output of od, it looks like it does have boot code. xxd output will make it more clear. Also do xxd for the mbr as well. dd if=/dev/sda count=1 | xxd dd if=/dev/sda1 count=1 | xxd dd if=/dev/sda3 count=1 | xxd Normally I would expect the boot code...

Maybe you can show me how you are running it through bash. In my tests, I just copy and paste the text into a Terminal.app window.

I don't know if you can boot legacy BIOS using USB on a 2008 Mac. I would stick with a CD to be sure. Legacy BIOS boot for old Macs is usually limited to internal disks and built-in CD/DVD. BootCamp Assistant.app from a version of macOS that supports your Mac will instruct you to make a CD or USB or something, depending on what that Mac supports.

Isn't sda1 partition 1? I think sda is the entire disk which has the MBR? I would use xxd instead of od to view hex. All those control character names are distracting. parted says sda1 has the boot flag. Does that mean it's the MBR's active partition? The fdisk command should be able to show the partition table of the MBR including which partition is active. sda3 doesn't seem to have any boot code since it's all nul characters. What is the contents of sda1 (list of files)? I think it's just the EFI...