Author Topic: [SOLVED]Should I install to EFI partition? / Default Drive issue (boot.plist)  (Read 4358 times)

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LJSeinfeld

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Or is it better to install it into my acutual OS X partition?  Or does it not matter?

Doing a semi-fresh re-install (TimeMachine backup) and wondering what would be the best way to go.

Thanks!

LJS
« Last Edit: June 11, 2009, 05:04:36 PM by LJSeinfeld »
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rocksteady

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Re: If I have an EFI partition, should I install Chameleon in it?
« Reply #1 on: June 10, 2009, 08:55:59 AM »
There's no hard+fast "best" way

It's up to you + your needs really. If you don't feel like using the EFI partition (which you'll have to manually mount every time you want to make changes), then install into your OS partition.
Stop bitching, start coding or documenting or both..

P5Q-EM : Q6600 : 8GB RAM : 8800GT : SATA Drives

zhell

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Re: If I have an EFI partition, should I install Chameleon in it?
« Reply #2 on: June 10, 2009, 01:55:09 PM »
Currently, the EFI partition approach is a "hack" in my humble opinion because it requires you to violate the GPT standard by re-formatting it as HFS+.
You can get almost all the benefits having a separate "boot" volume which only contains Chameleon.
See also http://www.projectosx.com/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=354&view=findpost&p=1234
Once your setup is completely stable, you can easily hide this partition by adding the following to the file "/etc/fstab" (must be created by you)
Code: [Select]
UUID=<UUID of boot volume>  none     hfs    rw,noautoAnd when 10.5.8 comes out and you need to tweak it frequently, you just remove that line temporarily until it's stable again.
With EFI, this requires more effort.

LJSeinfeld

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Re: If I have an EFI partition, should I install Chameleon in it?
« Reply #3 on: June 11, 2009, 07:15:56 AM »

Thanks to everyone for the input!

I've decided to go ahead and make an additional boot partition called "BootDisk" that I have installed Chameleon into.  All seems to be working reasonably well, with the exception being that I cannot for the life of me get Chameleon to recognize my OS X installation as the default partition to boot if you let it time out. 

My Drives are:

Code: [Select]
Last login: Wed Jun 10 17:48:50 on console
hackintosh:~ dave$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *55.9 Gi    disk0
   1:               Windows_NTFS                         55.9 Gi    disk0s1
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *232.9 Gi   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS BootDisk                896.0 Mi   disk1s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Leopard                 80.0 Gi    disk1s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS LeoTest                 21.9 Gi    disk1s4
   5:                  Apple_HFS LeoStore                129.6 Gi   disk1s5
hackintosh:~ dave$

The NTFS drive is an XP install that is on a separate physical drive (IDE controller, other drive is on the SATA controller).

My Extra folder resides at the root of BootDisk,
Code: [Select]
hackintosh:~ dave$ ls -l /Volumes/BootDisk/
total 552
drwxr-xr-x  7 dave  staff     238 Jun 10 17:39 Extra
drwxrwxr-t  3 dave  staff     102 Jun 10 14:17 Library
-rw-r--r--@ 1 dave  staff  279168 Jun 10 14:17 boot
drwxr-xr-x  4 dave  staff     136 Apr  1 09:17 usr
hackintosh:~ dave$

And com.apple.boot.plist is inside of the extra folder.  It looksl like this...
  • Before I added this boot.plist, it always defaulted to the NFTS XP drive.
  • I originally told it to boot 1,3 and it tried to boot up on the BootDisk drive.
  • I changed it to 1,4 thinking maybe it was counting the 0 partition as 1... still tries to boot BootDisk.

Any ideas as to why that is?  I realize I've split off of my original topic a bit.. so mods feel free to move, split, etc. as you see fit.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!


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zhell

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Re: If I have an EFI partition, should I install Chameleon in it?
« Reply #4 on: June 11, 2009, 11:59:00 AM »
Try hd(0,3)
The disk you are booting should be zero.
It has nothing to do with which disk is disk0 in OS X once it's booted unfortunately.
If you attach a usb stick and boot that one, it will be disk0.
Hence this BIOS drive numbering is extremely unpredictable.
Also depends on BIOS manufacturer, version, etc.
Best to use UUIDs everywhere, but it's not yet possible in Chameleon 2.
« Last Edit: June 11, 2009, 12:07:29 PM by zhell »

LJSeinfeld

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Re: If I have an EFI partition, should I install Chameleon in it?
« Reply #5 on: June 11, 2009, 04:54:02 PM »
Try hd(0,3)
The disk you are booting should be zero.
It has nothing to do with which disk is disk0 in OS X once it's booted unfortunately.
If you attach a usb stick and boot that one, it will be disk0.
Hence this BIOS drive numbering is extremely unpredictable.
Also depends on BIOS manufacturer, version, etc.
Best to use UUIDs everywhere, but it's not yet possible in Chameleon 2.

Sure enough, that did it.  Awesome.

Thanks zhell!
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zhell

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No problem.
And next time we're talking UUID vs. BIOS crap, you will know which side you're on :-)