rEFIt doesn't fix the root of the issue. You have additional boot options, but booting into _any_ Windows partition will continue to fail. This includes boot disks, external drives, the SSD itself...
Here's the madness I've gone through so far:
- I took my old spindle drive, hooked it up to an external enclosure and tried to boot from my Boot Camp partition with rEFIt. I got the same boot hang booting into my Boot Camp partition from that drive.
- I've imaged the Boot Camp partition from my spindle drive to my SSD. Continues to hang at boot.
- I've zeroed out the entire drive and attempted to boot from the Win7 DVD. No dice.
- I've set up a machine with testdisk and attempted to re-write the GPT partition information to the SSD based on a thread with similar problems using XP on completely unrelated hardware. Nothing.
- I set up a thumb drive with the Win7 ISO and attempted to boot from that using rEFIt. No dice.
- I've tried to boot from the FreeDOS ISO images to flash my drive. Those don't even boot.
- I've flashed from 1517 to 1819 and tried all this stuff again. Still nothing. Note that in order to update the firmware, I had to _ignore_ the "firmware flash" switch on the drive that people have been posting about. Additionally, I had to hook the drive up to the internals of another computer that is nearly 5 years old. It recognized the drive like a champ, though, which is more than I can say for my MacBook.
- I've tried to flash the EFI 1.6 firmware using the leaked 1.7 to 1.6 downgrader. The flasher errors out (probably for the better, in my case)
- I've posted my lament on the Crucial support forums.
- I've posted my lament on superuser.com
- I've posted my lament on the OCZ forums.
From what I can tell, the M225 isn't visible through the emulated BIOS layer used to make Boot Camp happen. Something terrible happens when the machine attempts to access it, and the whole thing just hangs at the gray "Booting" screen.
Note that this is specific to _early_ 2008 MacBook models (4,1 I believe). I bought my MacBook brand new from Apple in December of 2008, and that was an early 2008 model.
To make matters worse, searching for this problem is a huge hassle because the surface area is so huge and MacBook models vary so much while using the same name. Is it an EFI problem? A Crucial problem? An SSD problem? An OSX 10.5 problem? A Boot Camp problem? An OSX 10.6 problem? A Win7 problem? An optical drive problem? An Indilinx Barefoot controller problem?
My current research has me believing that the Apple EFI 1.7 Firmware updater fixes this issue, but Apple hasn't extended that olive branch to early 2008 MacBook models. A machine I purchased _less than a year ago_ is outside of that support window. I could be wrong, though.
All that said, the drive works great within OSX. Not being able to Boot Camp the machine is a huge deal breaker for me, though.
