Boot Camp Control Panel does not show my Startup Disk as an option

Question

I have successfully installed an OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 (a PCI-Express card which behaves like an SSD drive) in a Mac Pro workstation, and restored a Windows image on it using Shadow Protect IT Edition. My machine has also another HDD (in slot 1) which contains Mac OS X.

When I turn the Mac on, it boots on the OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 and successfully starts Windows.

However, the Startup Disk section of the Boot Camp Control Panel only lists one drive, which is the HDD containing Mac OS X. The SSD does not show up in the list: I fear that if I reboot once to OS X, I won't be able to get the machine back to booting from the Windows SSD again.

Pressing Alt when rebooting the Mac does also only show the HDD, not the SSD card, as its BIOS only gets initialized later on.

In Disk Management, I see this:

• The HDD is Disk 0, Basic, with a 200 MB EFI System partition and 900GB HFS partition containing Mac OS X.
• The SSD is Disk 1, Basic, with a single system, boot, page file,active, crash dump, primary partition spanning the whole disk, containing my Windows 7 x64 system.

How can I make the Mac aware of the fact that I have an SSD drive to boot from? I had a setup with another OCZ PCI-Express SSD where I could indeed select to boot either from Mac OS X or from Windows. I remember that the special System Reserved 100MB partition holding the Windows boot loader was located on a second HDD. Is this the key? If so, how can I rebuild/restore and reconfigure the System Reserved partition on the new machine, so that it will boot from my SSD?

Answer 1

I finally solved my issue by using ShadowProtect. I backed up the System Reserved partition from another machine, then restored it on a HDD located in the disk slot #1.

The Mac still does not see the SSD when I turn it on while holding down the Alt key, however I can boot to it by selecting the HDD identified as a Windows disk. The boot code found on the reserved system partition is usually only useful when booting from encrypted disk drives, but in my case, it allows me to boot from the SSD card, as its BIOS is set up after the Mac handles the boot media selection.