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Author Topic: chameleon hangs - no error message  (Read 15236 times)

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breizhilien

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chameleon hangs - no error message
« on: May 06, 2009, 02:21:50 PM »
Whenever I connect my 1Gb samsung spinpoint F1 disk (MBR scheme) chameleon hangs:
black screen with GUI or
"Darwin/X86 boot V5.0-132 – Chameleon V2.0 r431
Build date: 2009-04-01 15:17:35
4096 MB Memory
VESA V3.0 14MB (NVIDIA)
/"
if I boot without GUI.

I have tried 2 different installs with the same result:
the first one on the samsung disk alone on a 1Gb HFS+ partition.
the second with 2 disks, with chameleon on a maxtor disk (GPT scheme) on the hidden EFI partition. On this same configuration if I remove the samsung disk, chameleon works perfectly!

My disk config:
samsung sata 1Tb (MBR) -> Part1:Principal (80Mb Ntfs primary) -> windows XP, Part2: boot (1Gb HFS+) for chameleon, Part3: data_ntfs (80Gb Ntfs Primary), Part4: Data (Extended, 700Gb FAT32 Logical)
maxtor sata 250Gb (GPT) -> Part1: leopard installed on a single HFS+ partition + chameleon on the hidden 200Mb EFI partition

My spec:
Gigabyte P35-DS3L rev2, bios F7 (AHCI enabled in bios),4GB
Asus EN 8600 GT Magic 512 MB

Is there a disk/partition size limit (This samsung drive is big: 1Tb)?
Does Chameleon supports Logical partitions?
Does Chameleon supports Primary partitions without any OS installed on?


finger

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #1 on: May 26, 2009, 08:17:09 PM »
I have the very same problem with my two 1TB Hitachi drives.
I had a softraid mirror with win xp on both of them. Then I installed a hackintosh w/chameleon efi on the first one and wanted to transfer my data from WinXP partition on the second one. This didn't work. Mac OS boots perfectly with only the first drive attached but boot process hangs with a black screen if I attach both drives. :(
This really seems to be a bug in Chameleon.

Zark!

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #2 on: May 27, 2009, 06:11:01 AM »
I have a Maxtor 80 Gb, a Maxtor 120 and a Seagate 1000Gb. I tried installing Chameleon on each seperately to try and verify my own bug as a bug, but it runs fine on all three of them.

finger

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #3 on: May 28, 2009, 12:06:32 AM »
Maybe it's a combination of filesystems that makes chameleon go astray.
With both of my drives I have HFS+, NTFS and FAT32 at the same time.

thorazine74

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2009, 10:29:26 AM »
I doubt its the mix of filesystems, I got chameleon2 working (on a single drive) with FAT32, HFS+, NTFS, and EXT3.
Just a guess but maybe the problem is having 2 chameleon installations at the same time, maybe it gets confused which boot file to pick?
After all, isnt supposed you can boot from both drives with a single chameleon installation? (minus XP limitation of course)?
Mac OS X 10.5.6 Retail (Updated to 10.5.7) with Chameleon 2.0 RC1+BootIt NextGen 1.86 (MBR Single Drive)
Gigabyte 73PVM-S2H + C2D + 2 Gb
2 SATA HD (AppleAHCIport.kext) + 1 PATA DVD+RW (DarwinATAPort.kext)
Realtek ALC889 (VoodooHDA.kext)
Geforce 8600GTS (EFI String) PS/2 M & KB: VoodooPS2.kext

finger

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2009, 04:16:56 PM »
In my case I have only one chameleon installation on the first drive, second one has a pure WinXP loader.
Finally I've managed to transfer the data by hot-plugging the second drive's SATA cable while OS X was already running.

Master Chief

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #6 on: September 26, 2009, 06:45:54 PM »
I cannot boot from one of my USB sticks when my SAMSUNG HD103SJ is connected to any of the SATA ports.  See also: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,804.msg3502.html#msg3502

The weird things is that I installed Snow Leopard on the SAMSUNG HD103SJ, from that USB stick, yesterday.  And it works fine with Chameleon v1.0.11 with a patched boot file on it, but I can no longer boot from the USB stick, or any other hard drive with Chameleon v2 RC3 installed on it.
« Last Edit: September 28, 2009, 01:51:23 PM by Master Chief »

Arbor

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #7 on: October 01, 2009, 08:50:21 AM »
Add one more hard drive to the list that stalls Chameleon...

Anytime I plug in my 640GB Seagate ST3640323AS (firmware is updated and in good shape per diagnostics), it'll stall Chameleon 2.0 of any flavor (RC1 - RC3), or also Netkas' PC EFI 10.3. 
The bootloader will not even make it to the GUI, but instead gets stuck at the spinning cursor immediately before (take your pick of the following characters \ | / -- ).

It doesn't matter if I'm trying to run Chameleon from a USB stick, AHCI SATA HDD, or Optical drive (also sata).

If I yank out the ST3640323AS, then all is fine.

Interestingly, that same incompatible drive is perfectly fine (it actually has been serving as my Time Machine Backup over the past ~year or so) on my current stable setup running Chameleon 1.0.12 + PC EFI V9 to boot Leopard 10.5.8 from a 2-disk raid0 setup (two Seagate ST32050410AS). 

I have a fourth drive (ST3320620AS) that I've been using as a controlled environment to try Snow Leopard, running Chameleon 2 RC3, actually with Netkas' PC EFI 10.3, and custom DSDT.aml.  Works great with any combination of drives plugged in, as long as the aforementioned incompatible 640GB drive is yanked out.

(I'm not partial to Seagate drives, by the way, they just happen to sale when I'm looking to buy)

---
Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6, F8 Bios (latest non-beta bios)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
Vanilla Kernel
Nvidia GT120

zef

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #8 on: October 01, 2009, 03:49:40 PM »
Add one more hard drive to the list that stalls Chameleon...

Anytime I plug in my 640GB Seagate ST3640323AS (firmware is updated and in good shape per diagnostics), it'll stall Chameleon 2.0 of any flavor (RC1 - RC3), or also Netkas' PC EFI 10.3. 
The bootloader will not even make it to the GUI, but instead gets stuck at the spinning cursor immediately before (take your pick of the following characters \ | / -- ).

It doesn't matter if I'm trying to run Chameleon from a USB stick, AHCI SATA HDD, or Optical drive (also sata).

If I yank out the ST3640323AS, then all is fine.

I think this issue must be a partition table/filesystem related one.
Can you provide more info about the contents of that drive?
ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 | i5-2500k | 16GB RAM | GTX560 | Keyboard | Mouse | Devilsound DAC

Master Chief

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #9 on: October 01, 2009, 04:51:23 PM »
@Zef: Can we re-initialize the MBR somehow, without losing any data, and re-install the boot files again?

Here's the output of diskutil list:
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI                                   209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Snow Leopard           999.9 GB   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI                                  209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Backup Disk             999.9 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                                  209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS disk_0                    319.7 GB   disk2s2
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk3
   1:                        EFI                                  209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Snow LeopardOld      319.7 GB   disk3s2


/dev/disk0 is the problematic drive.  Let me know what I can do to help!
« Last Edit: October 02, 2009, 03:34:52 PM by Master Chief »

Arbor

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #10 on: October 02, 2009, 03:04:31 AM »
I think this issue must be a partition table/filesystem related one.
Can you provide more info about the contents of that drive?
The drive is formatted with one partition, Mac OS Extended Journaled, GUID Partition Table, just like the rest.  Completely dedicated to Time Machine.  Details below (drive in question is disk0 labeled Backup)...
 
Here's what diskutil info says:

   Device Identifier:        disk0
   Device Node:              /dev/disk0
   Part Of Whole:            disk0
   Device / Media Name:      ST3640323AS Media

   Volume Name:             
   Mount Point:             

   Partition Type:           GUID_partition_scheme
   Bootable:                 Not bootable
   Media Type:               Generic
   Protocol:                 SATA
   SMART Status:             Verified

   Total Size:               596.2 Gi (640135028736 B) (1250263728 512-byte blocks)
   Free Space:               0.0 B (0 B) (0 512-byte blocks)

   Read Only:                No
   Ejectable:                Yes
   Whole:                    Yes
   Internal:                 No
   OS 9 Drivers:             No
   Low Level Format:         Not Supported

and diskutil list:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     GUID_partition_scheme                        *596.2 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Backup                  595.9 Gi   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *232.9 Gi   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk1s1
   2:                 Apple_RAID                         232.6 Gi   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OSX                128.0 Mi   disk1s3
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *232.9 Gi   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk2s1
   2:                 Apple_RAID                         232.6 Gi   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OSX                128.0 Mi   disk2s3
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Leopard Raid0          *465.1 Gi   disk3

I was noticing the "Bootable" and "Internal" flags were both set to no, but then again, that's the same for all of the other disks as well (except for the Raid0 set disk3)

« Last Edit: October 02, 2009, 03:10:10 AM by Arbor »

Master Chief

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #11 on: October 02, 2009, 03:40:10 PM »
We're in the same boat.  I hope that they can provide tips and/or tools to debug this.

Arbor

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #12 on: October 04, 2009, 12:59:06 AM »
Aha! 
Zef was right!  It was a partition table issue.  diskutil info showed that I had a good, verified GUID Partition Table  disk, but gpt showed something different between two separate EFI partitions (disk0 was the bad one that stalled Chameleon, disk1 was the good disk that did not at all interfere with Chameleon).  See terminal screen dump below:

bash-3.2# gpt show disk0s1
   start    size  index  contents
       0       1         MBR
       1  409599         
bash-3.2# gpt show disk1s1
   start    size  index  contents
       0  409600

I must have moved this screwed up disk from one system to another and lost track of how I had it partitioned using fdisk, diskutil, and dd.  I tried to trash then recreate the EFI partition without MBR through numerous methods (including an open utility called testdisk), but that didn't work.  I ultimately just ended up wiping/repartitioning that disk (it was just a Time Machine backup volume anyway) and that fixed everything.  Chameleon is booting smoothly with all disks again now.  Hope your situation turns out to be just as trivial, Master Chief!

Thus, this is not necessarily a bug in Chameleon, but it would be a nice luxury if Chameleon could detect that something was wonky with the drive's partition table or FS and display a nastygram rather than just freezing.

Master Chief

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #13 on: October 04, 2009, 06:51:53 AM »
Here's what I got doing that:

gpt show disk0s1
   start    size  index  contents
       0       1         MBR
       1  409599         

gpt show disk1s1
   start    size  index  contents
       0       1         MBR
       1  409599         

gpt show disk2s1
   start    size  index  contents
       0       1         MBR
       1  409599         

sudo gpt show disk3s1
   start    size  index  contents
       0       1         MBR
       1  409599
« Last Edit: October 04, 2009, 09:14:27 PM by Master Chief »

abend

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Re: chameleon hangs - no error message
« Reply #14 on: December 05, 2009, 06:52:06 AM »
I think I have the same problem, look here for a partial workaround  . . .
http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,901.0.html

abend