Black screen with cursor on boot camp boot

A

Alexander42

Bit poster
I'm running a Mid 2009 Intel Macbook Pro (8GB ram, 2.8Ghz) with an optibay SSD (Intel 120GB) as the main boot disk; and a secondary HDD in the standard location.
After a fresh OS X install, I installed Windows 8 (using the built in drive with the SSD in the main bay); and successfully booted into boot camp. However, after booting back into OS X, putting the SSD into the Optibay and returning the HDD, and getting windows setup with Parallels 7, I've run into a couple of (possibily related) problems.

The first is that I can no longer boot into boot camp. After selecting the partition, I simply get a black screen with a blinking cursor. Everything is completely unresponsive, even after waiting several hours. Moreover, after booting into Parallels and checking the event viewer, there is no record of any boot occurring.
I've tried resetting SMC and NVRAM, as well as the disk repair utilities on the windows 8 disk, nothing's helped so far.

The second issue is that the system hangs under relatively small loads in Parallels, such as opening new tabs in Internet explorer or installing parallels tools. I can access the event recorder, task manager, and explorer, but that's about it. It then spikes the Mac's CPU usage, but stays stuck.

I've been looking for a while, but I haven't found anything yet. Any help would be awesome.

Thanks
 
I would say that if you can't boot into Boot Camp that you should not try to run Parallels on your BC partition. For Parallels to use a BC partition that partition should be problem free.

Regarding your BC partition no longer booting it is likely because you moved the disc it is on. Bootcamp makes a configuration file that tells the Mac where the needed bootstrap and Windows files are. Moving it from one connection on your SATA drive to another means that when your Mac boots it's not looking in the correct place for the drive.

I installed a new SDD drive and was going to put it where the original hard drive was and then put my original hard drive in the CD ROM drive using an OWC data doubler. I quickly realized that the Mac would still boot but Boot Camp no longer got past a black screen. In my case I just swapped which drive was attached to which SATA connector and all was well again.

An alternative which MIGHT work would be to use iPartition and make any change to the Windows partition and save it. You can then change it back and save it again. iPartition seems to write the updated information to the Mac partition table and the partition table Windows uses. When I expanded my Windows partition this program allowed everything to work without the need to format and reinstall Windows.
 
Thanks for the reply, I seem to have gotten it working. I'll write what I know in case anyone else has this issue in the future.

For the first issue, switching the location of the drive seemed to fix it. The problem seems to be that the SSD is is the HDD bay during the windows install (since windows won't install from an external hard drive as far as I know, although the tutorial at http://allmactweaks.blogspot.com.au/ claims to work.) Then, as Megavolt explained, it doesn't know where to boot from. Keeping the SSD in the HDD spot and putting the HDD in the CD drive solves this.

As far as the extremely slow performance goes; I've found that it only occurs when you run Parallels after restarting from bootcamp. For whatever reason, restarting the mac a second time (so it goes bootcamp>restart to os x> restart to os x) solves this completely.
I've got no idea why, but it works.

Hopefully this might help if anyone runs into this problem in the future
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top