Dual-boot windows/mac

[Tony1094]

First of all I hope I'm not beating a dead horse here. I've searched, searched, attempted and attempted to get this working but can't seem to get it where I would like it to be.

To begin I have a 2011 17' MacBook pro. I have 2 SSD's; a 128gb and 160gb along with an optical bay converter from OWC. I have had no issue installing the drives, formatting, installing etc...

What I want to accomplish is having the 160Gb drive being my primary Mac drive and the 128gb being strictly my windows 7 drive. I do not mind taking the laptop apart 5 or 10 times to accomplish this because I know I need to boot windows from my internal SuperDrive. The farthest I have gotten is practically having everything working after boot camping the 128gb drive and installing windows and having both SSDs running side by side. The problem arose when I wanted to remove the small partition on the 128gb that still had Mac on it. I received check disk errors and pretty much fubar'd it from there.

Again I'm sorry if this has been asked numerous times, maybe I just wasn't searching for the right guide. If someone has any ideas for me or has done the same thing with their laptop please try to help me! I'm going crazy with this!

Recap: goal is have 160gb SSD as strictly Mac osx and 128gb SSD as strictly windows 7.

 

[murphychris]

Any number of things could be going on. For one, Boot Camp Assistant is not needed for a Windows only disk. In factor, it's unhelpful. Just partition it as an MBR disk, instead of GPT. The main thing BCA does is create a hybrid MBR on a GPT disk, and resize the Macintosh HD HFS+ volume, neither of which applies to your 128GB SSD.

Upon deleting one of the partitions, you probably created a discrepancy between the MBR and GPT. Did the 160GB disk ever have Windows on it? If so it's possible there is a residual bootloader on that disk that needs to be removed so that only the 128GB disk has a bootloader.

Use the following Terminal commands:

diskutil list

Find the /dev/diskX value for the two SSDs, and replace the X in the following command with the number for each disk:

sudo gpt -r -vv show diskX

That most likely means disk0 and disk1, so you need to issue the command twice, once for each SSD. Do the same thing with this command:

sudo fdisk /dev/diskX

When you copy the results, include the command line, and after pasting the text into the forum, highlight the results text and click the # button in the forum toolbar so it formats correctly.