Cannot choose startup partition

#1 Wed, 21 Jan 2015 - 22:24 68kMLA

Hi,

on System 7.1. and 7.5 I cannot choose another partition of my external drive to boot from. I can click on e.g. the 2nd partition/volume in the control panel but it does not stick. When I reopen the panel, all partitions are highlighted. When I reboot the Mac (SE/30) boots from the first partition.

Wasn't it possible to choose a different startup partition in System 7.x? I do not remember anymore.

TIA

bobo68

#2 Wed, 21 Jan 2015 - 22:33 68kMLA

Sorry, just re-read the part about the external drive. My post didn't apply. ignore.

#3 Thu, 22 Jan 2015 - 15:44 68kMLA

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix this. The work-around I use, is to unbless one of the System Folders.

#4 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 - 10:49 68kMLA

Ok. There was a tool called "System Picker" to do this AFAIR.

#5 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 - 19:39 68kMLA

System Picker works real well if all of your systems are on the same partition. It doesn't work well (in my experience), picking systems on different partitions. I just wound up putting 6.0.8, 7.1 and 7.5.5 on the same partition with different System folder names, and then choose with System Picker. Anyways, yeah, that's what worked for me.

#6 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 - 19:48 68kMLA

Yeah i use system picker all the time... Especially now with the HD20 emu and a 900 mb image.

i have like 4 installs in one image haha

#7 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 - 19:51 68kMLA

It looks like I only have 7.5 and 7.1 on the SE/30. At one point it had 6.0.8 but you get the idea. All Systems are on the same partition. I think I installed them to different partitions to begin with, then just copied them all to one and renamed them a bit, when System Picker failed picking from different partitions. Maybe this will work for you?

#8 Sat, 24 Jan 2015 - 05:39 68kMLA

I've tried a few of these "System Folder Pickers"… none of them fixed the problem with multiple partitions.

It looks like the system will boot from the System Folder with the greatest version number.

#9 Sat, 24 Jan 2015 - 07:26 68kMLA

Now that you mention it, I do remember the issue you were haveing. It was like Mac OS 7.5.3 - 8.1 had no problem with this, choosing different partitions. But once you chose 7.1 or less 6.0.8 you could only toggle back and forth of those, unless I booted up from an external Zip drive with 7.5 on it, then I could toggle systems again

#10 Sun, 1 Feb 2015 - 20:47 68kMLA

Same results here. System Picker can only choose between System Folders on one partition (it blesses one of them which is then used to boot).

It is actually possible to select partitions to boot from by setting the "bootable" bit of the partition. Can be done e.g. with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit (they call the bit "boot priority"). You'll have to unset it on all partitions with a System on it except the one you want to boot from. Clumsy.