Finally, a solution that worked (for my MBP at least).
You will need:
1) rEFIt (by Christoph Pfisterer).
http://refit.sourceforge.net/
rEFIt allows to select partition/OS on boot. Its gptsync command syncs GPT to MBR and restores MBR after gparted or diskpart (below) had its way with it.

2) Modified diskpart (by Nebojsa Sabovic)
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=31562
This diskpart allows resetting msftres-flagged partition back to Microsoft Basic Data type. (As per author's words, use at your own risk.)

What to do:
a) Install rEFIt
b) Drop compiled diskpart.efi in Macintosh HD \efi\tools
c) Re-boot to rEFIt screen.
d) Go to rEFIt shell
e) Start diskpart, type the following commands:
select <zero-based disk number, usually 0>
inspect (will list partitions on selected HD, write down the msftres-cursed partition number, which will show up labeled as MSRES)
chtype <zero-based partition number> MSDATA
inspect (check that MSRES became MSDATA)
f) exit diskpart (but do not exit the rEFIt shell yet)
g) run gptsync to restore MBR

All done. Many thanks to Christoph Pfisterer (for rEFIt), and to Nebojsa Sabovic (for modified diskpart)!

[ Reply to This | # ]

I discovered that having more than four partitions caused my problem with the msftres flag. When I deleted a swap partition and returned to having 1: EFI, 2: HFS (Leopard), 3: ext3, and 4: NTFS (Vista) I was able to get rid of the flag. (Puppy linux doesn't really need the swap partition so I'm ok now on my MacBook Pro.)


[ Reply to This | # ]