boot0: GPT boot0: test boot0: error

[iJohn]

OK, this is unexpected.

As I previously mentioned in another thread, I've successfully got
10.6.8 installed and booting on a 500 GB (465.66 GiB) Seagate
ST9500325AS 2.5" drive.

I tried what I believe ... and am convinced at the moment WAS ... the
exact same install process on a 750 GB (698.49 GiB) Seagate
ST9750422AS 2.5" drive. (It's one of Seagate's GoFlex Pro externals
that is connected via iSATA to use Peter's notation for internal
SATA.)

That drive won't boot, at least not directly. When I try to boot that
drive I get the following messages:

boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: error
boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: error

However, I CAN boot the 500 GB drive to the Chimera menu and then
choose there to boot the partition I installed on the 750 GB drive. So
that works just as booting the 500GB directly works. Booting the 750
directly ... using boot0 on the 750 GB ... does not work.

FWIW, the number of "boot0: test" messages above seem to correspond to
the number partitions on the two drives. The 500 GB drive has 5
partitions and the 750 GB drive has 3 partitions.

There are two thing which are strange (to me) about this. First, why
would booting the boot0 on the 750GB result in looking at the 500 GB
drive. Second, and strangest, I get the same set of message even when
the 500 GB drive is powered off and so should not be seen in the
system. Strange.

I have tried
- reinstalling Chimera to the 750 GB using MultiBeast (v3.7.3)
- installing Chameleon to the 750 GB using MultiBeast (v3.7.3)
- completely wiping out and then recreating the partitions on the 750
GB and repeating the entire install process including repeating the
boot loader installs after the userDSDT MultiBeast install resulted in
the same error.

It beats the heck out of me. Googling about I saw that at one point
Chameleon would not boot a drive that was over 1TB. That was long ago
(relatively) and fixed in a previous RC of Chameleon. And besides, my
drive is UNDER 1TB. So it should not be an issue here.

Anyone have any other ideas? I'm not sure what to try next.

-irrational john

[mosslack]

Just a quick thought, are you changing the boot priority in the BIOS prior to attempting to boot from the other hard drive?  I've seen this happen when even using F12 or whatever key press is necessary to change the boot drive on the fly.  HTH

Just a message from mosslack...

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[mosslack]

Another thought, I've also had problems with drives where Chameleon was installed on a drive which is not the one you are presently booted up on.  IOW, when the screen comes up that asks where you want to install to and you have to change it from the default drive.  

[iJohn]

tonOn Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:03 PM, mosslack <hacki...@embarqmail.com> wrote:
> Just a quick thought, are you changing the boot priority in the BIOS prior
> to attempting to boot from the other hard drive?  I've seen this happen when
> even using F12 or whatever key press is necessary to change the boot drive
> on the fly.  HTH

Well, I have tried scenarios where the only drive powered up/attached
was the 750 GB. In that context, boot priority in the BIOS reduces to
just that drive. So I think that angle is covered.

> Another thought, I've also had problems with drives where Chameleon was
> installed on a drive which is not the one you are presently booted up on.
>  IOW, when the screen comes up that asks where you want to install to and
> you have to change it from the default drive.

Again, when I did the installs I'm pretty sure that the 750GB was the
only drive active. I did them with MultiBeast and I assume MultiBeast
always defaults to the drive/partition that was booted. But I might as
well try the stand alone installer for Chimera from the TonyMacOSx86
site. Got nothing to lose at this point.

-irrational john

[pete...@cruzio.com]

> There are two thing which are strange (to me) about this. First, why
> would booting the boot0 on the 750GB result in looking at the 500 GB
> drive. Second, and strangest, I get the same set of message even when
> the 500 GB drive is powered off and so should not be seen in the
> system. Strange.

The boot loader on the FIRST (lowest SATA port which has a hard drive) is
booted first, and that loads an instance of the boot loader which will be
used for booting the remaining devices.

If there are other devices, it is likely that these will be listed in the
usual way.

This is how I dual boot MacOS X and Win 7 ... the lowest (address 1) SATA
HD has Chameleon and the next lowest (address 2) SATA HD has Win 7.

When and if I need to run specialized Win 7 maintenance, such as the
Service Pack 1, which CANNOT be executed if Win 7 was not booted using its
own boot loader, then I simply power-off the MacOS X drive, and the first
HD which the BIOS will see will be the Win 7 drive.

Plug the MacOS X drive back in and it will see both drives, and the boot
loader for MacOS X will display all bootable partitions of itself, and the
MBR partitions which are involved with Win 7. Of course, it also displays
the DATA partition on the Win 7 drive, but that is not really a bootable
partition, but the boot loader cannot tell this as it expects, and
requires GPT (GUID) partitions for its normal booting process, and the Win
7 is just a benefit.

A powered-off drive should not be seen under any circumstances as there is
no power to the logic board, hence the drive cannot act as a "respoonder"
to the device "roll call" function.

[iJohn]

Tried the Chimera stand-alone installer to the 750 GB disk (only one
that was active). Install says it was successful. The boot, not so
much. Still have the same problem.

I'm about ready to try posting this over at TonyMac's forum. But I'm
not sure how much interest it will be since it involves "Legacy"
hardware (an LGA775 mobo).

-irrational john

[mosslack]

As I talked about previously, the bootloader on modern computers is comprised of multiple bootstrap sections of code, arranged in a way to boot the OS of choice.  If the a bootloader is detected on the MBR, then you will get a message similar to the one you have.  Otherwise, you will get the familiar no boot device found from the BIOS and will be asked to press a key once a boot device has been inserted.

What this means is that the second stage of the boot process, for whatever reason, is not being loaded.  If you look here:

http://www.ihackintosh.com/2009/04/how-to-install-chameleon-20-rc1/

You can see the boot process of OS X on a Hackintosh consists of 3 such code sections.  

boot0 is the part on the MBR

boot1h is the second stage and it is installed directly to the OS X partition you wish to boot.

The final stage is what actually boots OS X and it is located in the root folder of your install.

My guess is that boot1h is not present and therefore the process looks elsewhere for this elusive code section.  

The Chameleon/Chimera installer is not fool-proof and even the creators of Chameleon no longer provide this installer.  It is usually provided by Dr. Hurt or others in the community and they will also tell you it doesn't always work.

You might try a utility like Lizard to see if that helps, but I've experienced similar problems with it as well, the only sure way to know the code sections are properly placed is to do it manually and make sure there are no error messages in Terminal.  HTH

[mosslack]

On Jul 5, 2011, at 2:27 PM, iJohn wrote:

One more thought to add is to make sure the drive has been formatted as GUID and not MBR or even worse, Apple Partition Map.  I had a devil of a time once with a  drive I previously used in an actual Mac and just could not figure out why it would not boot on my Hack.  Of course it was partitioned using APM, so the explained a lot!

[Kris Tilford]

On Jul 5, 2011, at 1:51 PM, mosslack wrote:

> The Chameleon/Chimera installer is not fool-proof and even the
> creators of Chameleon no longer provide this installer. It is
> usually provided by Dr. Hurt or others in the community and they
> will also tell you it doesn't always work.

Whomever has been doing recent development on Chameleon has been
posting daily updates to Kexts.com and the current v.Chameleon 2.0 RC5
r1115 [VS] seems to work well as an installer package that you can
target to any HD ([VS] means the vanilla screen version for cleaner
look, there is also a normal version with some of the boot stuff
displayed).

[iJohn]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 2:51 PM, mosslack <hacki...@embarqmail.com> wrote:
> ... the only sure way to know the code sections are properly placed is to do

> it manually and make sure there are no error messages in Terminal.  HTH

I'm perfectly willing to do it manually, but it seems to be something
of a challenge to track down the installable pieces these days. I'm
not sure where to look for the compiled boot components for Chimera.
Chameleon I hope I may find on their website.

Things just aren't as clear cut these days for me as I remember them
from 2 years ago now that everything is done by some "magic" package.
<sigh>

-irrational john

[mosslack]

Actually the package installers usually work just fine, but every now and then you get a drive/system that refuses to cooperate.  When that happens you just have to go back to the basics my friend.  I don't know exactly which package you are using, but a lot of times you can just right click and choose Show package contents to get the files you need.  HTH

[iJohn]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:32 PM, mosslack <hacki...@embarqmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know exactly which package you are using, but a lot of times you can
> just right click and choose Show package contents to get the files you need.  HTH

I'm using the standalone Chimera installer and MultiBeast packages
from TonyMac. And for some reason these *.pkg files are not like the
other package files I'm used to dealing with. The option of "Show
package contents" is not available in finder. In terminal I found out
that this package does not come as a directory so you cannot explore
it.

Maybe there's some way to open it up, but if so I don't know what that
would be. Drat.

As I said, in this new day of the package that does it all, they don't
make it easy for those trying another way. ;-)

-irrational john

[mosslack]

Well, some people don't care to share their work with others and I can't fault them for that, but you might want to poke around here:

http://forge.voodooprojects.org/svn/chameleon/branches/Chimera/

To find the files you are looking for.  HTH

[iJohn]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 6:02 PM, mosslack <hacki...@embarqmail.com> wrote:
> Well, some people don't care to share their work with others and I can't
> fault them for that, but you might want to poke around here:
> http://forge.voodooprojects.org/svn/chameleon/branches/Chimera/
> To find the files you are looking for.  HTH

Oh, I'm sure they have a good rational for doing it whatever way they
did. I just get frustrated not knowing all the secret developer tricks
for getting things done.

I installed Chameleon 2.0 RC 4 since I could easily download the
binaries for that one from here:
http://chameleon.osx86.hu/file_download/34/Chameleon-2.0-RC2-r640-bin.tar.gz

Whew! Big change! Now on boot with only the one drive powered up I get

boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: error

OK, so it's still broken. But at this point I'm happy just to see
something change even though I still have no idea what's going wrong.
(Probably something embarrassingly simple ... It always is.)

Time to go cat-sit. Maybe something will occur to me as I'm cleaning
the litter box. :-)

-irrational john

[mosslack]

Don't know if you read my latest post on the homepage blog, but that was one of my suggestions.  8^)

[Kris Tilford]

On Jul 5, 2011, at 5:28 PM, iJohn wrote:

> I installed Chameleon 2.0 RC 4 since I could easily download the
> binaries for that one from here:

Boot your "other" bootable HD, download the installer package for
Chameleon here:

<http://www.kexts.com/view/1434-chameleon_2.0_rc5_r1115_[vs].html>

Install package targeting your unbootable volume. Reboot selecting the
unbootable volume from BIOS. Should boot if it's bootable.

[iJohn]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Kris Tilford <ktil...@cox.net> wrote:
> Install package targeting your unbootable volume. Reboot selecting the
> unbootable volume from BIOS. Should boot if it's bootable.

Thank you for giving me another alternative to try.

Strictly speaking, the drive does boot and is "bootable". I just
cannot get it to boot with a bootloader installed on the drive. But
iBoot works (as you'd expect) and so does Chimera which is installed
on the 500GB drive. It detects the bootable partition on the 750GB
drive and displays it as one of the boot choices in its menu.

Unfortunately, no joy with Chameleon 2.0 RC5 r1115 [VS]. All that
changed was now I get the single error message below.
boot0: error

I'm tempted to use dd to do a sector for sector copy of the 500 GB
drive onto the 750 GB drive just to see what happens. I can't for the
life of me think there is any significant difference between the
installs I did to these two drives. Yet one drive boots directly and
the other does not. Puzzling & frustrating.

-irrational john

[Irrational John]

On Tuesday, July 5, 2011 2:26:32 PM UTC-4, PH wrote:

A powered-off drive should not be seen under any circumstances as there is
no power to the logic board, hence the drive cannot act as a "respoonder"
to the device "roll call" function.

I completely agree. So I really don't know what I am seeing with the multiple "boot0: GPT" and  "boot0: test" messages. (If my code skills were not so vestigial I'd probably try taking a peek at the source code. Oh, well.)

Out of curiosity I cloned my 500GB drive which boots directly to my 750GB drive which does not. I booted Ubuntu and used dd to do the cloning ala the command below.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=256k

After the cloning the 750GB drive booted directly just as the 500GB does. (Not surprising since it should look pretty much exactly like the 500GB drive to any bootloader). My take away from this is that something is definitely going wrong at some point during the install process. It's not a hardware problem.

That may seem an obvious assumption, but I am so confused by this I just wanted to rule out what little I could rule out.

Anyway, I booted up Windows 7 and then did a drive CLEAN with diskpart to completely wipe any partition info from the 750GB drive. I then partitioned it with diskutil on my 500GB Hackintosh drive and went through the install process again.

Same boot0 error messages as in my first message.

So I repeated the above CLEAN & repartition process only this time I did the partitioning using diskutil on my MacBook. No change. Same boot errors.

I really wonder what (simple?) thing is either going wrong or I am doing wrong that leads to this error. I think it's time to ask over at TonyMac and see if anyone there is at all interested.

-irrational john

[mosslack]

On Jul 6, 2011, at 12:39 PM, Irrational John wrote:

I really wonder what (simple?) thing is either going wrong or I am doing wrong that leads to this error. I think it's time to ask over at TonyMac and see if anyone there is at all interested.

-irrational john

Take it from one who has been there, the fault lies with the package installer.  I drove myself nuts trying to figure out why a guys on the mini 311 thread would not work for me.  It worked fine if I used the terminal commands, but his installer would not work at all for me, even though it seemed to work for others just fine.  I did check his code and I believe there was enough of a difference between the one I used and what he had which caused the problem, but I never could convince him of that.

If you go over to the Tonymac forum, do let us know if you find out anything.