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Author Topic: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot  (Read 32046 times)

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nano2nd

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Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
« Reply #15 on: July 08, 2009, 05:36:40 PM »
My wife would have killed me if I'd done that to her MacBook last time I created a new system disk via USB!

I'm sure there's a slick technical way to resolve this but I'm in a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut mood today. You could always boot the Mac Pro using your Leopard DVD and make a fresh install to another HDD that is formatted with a GUID partition. Then use migration assistant to get your stuff moved over. But this is probably the lamest way to do it.

zhell

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Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
« Reply #16 on: July 08, 2009, 07:38:42 PM »

Terc

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Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
« Reply #17 on: July 08, 2009, 08:33:31 PM »
zhell, I wanted to play with him for a bit before sending him over to that thread.

Oh well, I'll just wait for the next one.

By the way, where'd the binary only download go?  The link seems to be broken.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2009, 08:35:25 PM by Terc »

nogo

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Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
« Reply #18 on: July 08, 2009, 10:55:54 PM »
I can laugh at myself.

I will also allow others to poke fun at me, especially in this situation...but...

How dare you ask me to use the "search" function !!!


Actually, I don't play well with forum search engines... Just one of those things.

Luckily, you guys were here to help. I really do appreciate it.

It has been a while since I did a clean install, etc. So maybe this was just the
thing to get me back in step. Good thing it was only a "semi", and not "full blown" emergency.


I'll try REFIT, once I get done with formatting a spare drive.


Also, it may be a good idea to create a program called "UnFuckIt". It could undo the
things people like me have done. You could charge for it. You would be able to retire early   ;)


One last thing... Chameleon 1.0.11 works great with the MSI OSX install. 2.0 gets stuck [will not work]. That may be why I made this large mistake. Logic seems to have 20/20 vision in these situations. Either way, great work guys ! If you need help breaking anything, let me know   ;D

randomm

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Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
« Reply #19 on: July 10, 2009, 06:20:36 PM »
Yes, I know... I really shouldn't have, but for some reason I installed Chameleon RC1 on my macbook (really should read what something does before installing) and now the machine does not boot. I get a flashing question mark on top of a folder icon when trying to boot the machine.

Running Disk Utility with an installer DVD and verifying the disk shows no errors, nor does the "repair disk" help.

You can believe I'm sorry to take anybody's time with this problem, just hoping that someone in the know might be able to tell me where to go looking next, or what to do...

many many thanks!
« Last Edit: July 12, 2009, 06:00:51 PM by randomm »

nogo

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Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
« Reply #20 on: July 11, 2009, 01:03:57 AM »
http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,544.0.html


Had the same problem this week.


REFIT did not work for me. I had to use a spare drive and Carbon Copy my"screwed up" drive to it.

It boots fine now. This is a very time consuming fix. It was relatively easy using my Mac pro but you might have some difficulty using a laptop. If you have a large enough external drive, you can CC your HDD there, format your Macbook drive, then transfer it back to the Macbook drive.

I'm sure there is an easier way to fix this but the people on this forum don't really care. I understand their position but with this many people making a simple mistake, it only makes sense to include an "un-install" utility.

I guess what troubles me most is the fact that no one could tell me how to undo what had been done. This is computer science, not pharmacology, the way it works should not be such a mystery.

I'll try to help the best I can, so just post as many details as possible.

randomm

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Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
« Reply #21 on: July 12, 2009, 06:03:23 PM »
eEFIt didn't solve this issue, at least not with using the regular "Installing on a separate volume or external disk" method. Obviously I'm just guessing, but perhaps the "Installing on the EFI System Partition" method might be what I'm after... or is it.

randomm

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Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
« Reply #22 on: July 12, 2009, 07:23:07 PM »
Installing refit on the system partition didn't do the trick either. I followed these instructions: http://www.felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2006/09/19/installing-refit-on-the-hidden-efi-system-partition/

Mounted the messed up macbook via firewire to another one and followed the instructions to the letter, question mark issue persists...

randomm

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Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
« Reply #23 on: July 13, 2009, 10:19:51 PM »
Okay, just in case this is useful for someone else in the future, I managed to fix this just with fdisk. It turned out that either there was no boot record whatsoever, or no partition marked active. Setting the booting drive via nice GUI tools that come with the OS X installation media were no good, but with running this I'm back to normal:

use Terminal on the installation DVD / media and ...

fdisk /dev/disk0 (should list partitions on the disk, unfortunately I got a lot of zeros)
fdisk -u /dev/disk0 (creates the new MBR record, apparently :))
fdisk -e /dev/disk0 (or whatever the drive is that you're wanting to play with)

Mine complained: "could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory"... I ignored this as I was partly following instructions on this page: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9173024

I knew that my disk only had one visible partition (except for the EFI one), so what I then did was:

fdisk: 1> flag 2
Partition 2 marked active.
fdisk:*1> quit
Writing current MBR to disk.

... that's it... rebooting machine as normal.

Please note that this may not work in your case and at any rate remember that using fdisk can erase ALL your data on the drive you're operating on so count me lucky as I didn't really know what I was doing!
« Last Edit: July 13, 2009, 10:23:46 PM by randomm »

74205NX

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Boot Camp on Macbook Pro After Accidental Chameleon Install
« Reply #24 on: July 17, 2009, 03:53:16 AM »
Hey All,

First of all, I'd like to say thanks for the great Chameleon software. Im triple booting XP, Debian, and OS X on my Asus eee 1000HE, and I couldn't be happier.

However happy I may be now, I hit a few snags along the way, and chameleon wouldn't install on many of my flash drives (e.g, Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB) and while trying to figure out what would work and what wouldn't, I ran the cameleon installer 20+ times (from my Macbook Pro), and one time I accidentally ran the install onto my OSX partition on the Macbook Pro. Well, I was a bit frightened, but a reboot let me back into OS X no problems at all, but later when I tried using boot camp to boot into Windows XP it wouldn't work at all. Sad, I know, and fairly expected, I know.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks. ;)

EDIT: I'm aware of the standard solution relying on refit, but I'd like to avoid that if at all possible. I'm also about to upgrade the Hard drive in my MBP tomorrow, so I'll be using Carbon Copy Cloner, maybe if I dont copy over the extra partition? (Beyond the OS X and the WinXP Partitions)
« Last Edit: July 17, 2009, 03:58:05 AM by 74205NX »

NC10_Mac

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Re: Boot Camp on Macbook Pro After Accidental Chameleon Install
« Reply #25 on: July 17, 2009, 06:56:58 PM »
Hi!

I made the same mistake a couple of days ago. I solved the problem while I used a boodloader called rEFIt on my Mac. With rEFIt I received back access to my Vista partition.

You can install rEFIt on CD first if you would like to test the boodloader before installing it on your Mac. You can find rEFIt here: http://refit.sourceforge.net/

Hope that helps!

Yoshi

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Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
« Reply #26 on: August 02, 2009, 08:11:02 PM »
I have the same problem, and I tried to install Refit with a USB stick from the Leopard install DVD Terminal, but at the moment to  run enable.sh, the terminal tell me: command not found You must run enable.sh on an inter-based Macintosh.
And I have an Intel-based Macintosh !!

How can I install it ?

btd457

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Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
« Reply #27 on: October 18, 2009, 07:29:17 AM »
Chameleon screwed up my mac too, took about 8 hours to repair (requires an external hard drive):

1. Take your OS X cd and put it into your mac.
2. Power up and hold down the "c" key.
3. When the apple appears, release the c key.
4. When the install screen appears go to utilities (located on the bar on the top of the screen) and select the "disk utilites".
5. Click on your mac hard drive and click on the "repair" tab.
6. Click on your hard drive as the source and an external hard drive as the destination, this will back up your files on an external hard drive, and click the option below, I believe it's "restore".
7. Click on your mac hard drive and click erase, and erase your hard drive.
8. Go to the utilities option and click "start up disk".
9. Select your OS X disk.
10. Restart and reinstall your OS X disk.

Hope that helps!!!

dkedinger

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Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
« Reply #28 on: November 06, 2009, 06:29:08 PM »
rEFIt worked perfect for me! I imaged rEFIt to USB and then loaded up partitioning tool. Ran it's suggestion and then it booted fine!

Thanks...I definitely feel like an idiot. I only noticed the error after. I was thinking the installer was to setup a usb stick or dvd with the necessary boot files. You live you learn...I have learned alot after hacking three machines...read everything. Successfully done a Dell Mini 9, Dell Mini 10v, and Dell Studio 14z.

aschar

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Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
« Reply #29 on: January 02, 2010, 12:15:16 AM »
Another Method to fix this is the following:
1. Boot your OSX Install DVD on your Mac
2. go to disk utility (its under Tools)
3. select your osx HDD (which cannot boot) and select  "partition" and resize your Volume just a little bit (move the lower right corner), that will rewrite your mbr (your data will not be erased on a standard guid partition scheme)
4. reboot 
« Last Edit: January 02, 2010, 06:53:37 AM by aschar »