Chameleon Ignoring /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist

[squiffy]

No matter what I have tried, my bootloader seems to ignore my com.apple.Boot.plist file and sits waiting at the bootloader screen for me to select which partition to boot.

Particulars:

Chameleon RC2 (r640) was installed on a single HDD with 3 partitions

1) WinXP SP3 on hd(0,1) NTFS
2) FAT32 drive on (hd(0,2) as storage for WinXP and Mac Leopard
3) OSX 10.5.8 Leopard on hd(0,3) HFS+

I have noted that ALL three drives have an /Extra folder holding a copy of "com.apple.Boot.plist", which was recently just the default copy. I have attempted to have the bootloader auto-select the WinXP partition after a 10 second delay by adding the key "Default Partition" with the string "hd(0,1)". The default plist file already has Quiet Boot "Off" and Instant Menu "Yes", but neither the instant menu NOR the countdown appears to be working.

So, it looks to me like the bootloader is ignoring the com.apple.Boot.plist file (regardless of location since ALL have been edited to ZERO effect).

Just wondering if someone out there has any suggestions.

NOTE: I have a fully functional machine and would like to solve WHY the bootloader is no longer auto-booting. I would prefer to lick this problem before moving onto updating or changing bootloaders.

It used to work quite nicely and auto-boot to OSX. Just want to know why it stopped and what I might have done to cause Chameleon to ignore the plist files.

Help me Obi-wan, you're my only hope.

[squiffy]

Follow up:

Well,

Some experiments followed this post. First, I tried deleting com.apple.Boot.plist from my OSX HFS+ partition (folder /Extra).

This has zero effect. The chameleon bootloader proceeded as before...same behaviour.

Then, I tried something from another post in this forum and deleted:

<key>Instant Menu</key>
<string>Yes</string>

And then modified Quiet Boot to "Yes"

To my surprise, the machine then proceeded to dump right to the "Default Partition" of hd(0,1), my WinXP and follow its "boot.ini" instructions (which is to countdown 10 seconds then auto-proceed to WinXP.

Switching back to either the default copy of com.apple.Boot.plist OR deleting the plist file in the /Extra folder on the OSX partition reverts back to previous behaviour.

So, I'm left thinking that BOTH syntax AND order of keys/strings is important in Chameleon.

I would appreciate any guidance here to clarify.