Windows Vista Hijacked My Macbook
Your Morning Reboot was hideously delayed this morning by a snafu on my main machine. Yesterday evening, while getting ready to post a few things to Monkey Bites, Apple’s Software Update program popped up to remind me that OS X 10.4.9 was available.
I’ve never had a problem with incremental upgrades to OS X so I started the process without giving it much thought. Eventually everything was installed and I closed up what I was working on and restarted the machine.
When I came back I noticed my Macbook had booted into Windows Vista rather than OS X. Frustrated, but not alarmed, I rebooted, held down the option key and noticed that the OS X drive was already selected. I hit return and the Macbook promptly booted into Vista again. Not Good.
For the next couple hours I tried every startup keyboard shortcut I could find, hacking and pounding away, but nothing changed — much like the black knight in Monty Python, Windows Vista just kept booting up as if screaming, “I’m not dead yet!”
Since Vista is not officially supported via Boot Camp, it occurred to me that perhaps the OS X upgrade contained some new drivers or something that had messed up the Vista partition, but as far as I could tell from scouring the Google, that’s not the case. After hours of searching I only found one person who had written about this issue in a blog comment and they never followed up with a solution.
So for that person, and anyone else who might run into this issue, here’s what I did this morning that finally worked: startup from the original install disks, open the “Startup Disk” program, select your OS X volume and restart.
I have no idea what was causing this issue, no idea why the Startup Disk program seems to be more powerful than just holding down the option key at startup, but that’s what worked for me. YMMV.
Also if any of our uber-savvy readers would care to enlighten me as to what the heck was happening please let everyone know in the comments below.
