Mac Pro - Error parsing plist file

[brunosky]

Hello,
Thanks to all of you for this great forum.
I have a Mac Pro 1,1, and I've done everything in order to upgrade this wonderful machine: recently I bought and installed 2 Intel X5355, upgraded the RAM to 16 GB, installed a SSD, upgraded the EFI and SMC firmware (now 2,1 and 1.15f3).
I'm booting in 64 bit mode using Chameleon bootloader, and following the Jabbawok's method I'm enjoying Mountain Lion.
Everything is working great, apart from the initial error message telling:
Error parsing plist file
Errors encountered while starting up the computer. Pausing 5 seconds
This 5 seconds pause will not change my life, but I would like to prevent it.
Uncle Ben (Jabbawok) has already tried to help me: I've tried also with his Extra folder, after making the necessary changes (SMserial in smbios.plist and Default Partition in org.chameleon.Boot.plist), but that error message is still present.
Any idea?

[Gringo Vermelho]

With a little luck maybe it's just file corruption. Re-do your Boot.plist manually, use the attached one as a starting point, it's a blank one from my Hack. /Edit I forgot to to rename it to org.Chameleon.Boot.plist for you.

Note that whatever you drop in /Extra doesn't require any particular permissions or ownership set, Chameleon will work with whatever is there.

You could also trash it altogether and edit your com.apple.Boot.plist in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. Chameleon parses this one too. Not sure if this gets reset when updating though...I don't think it does.

It's nice to hear from someone who's reaping the benefits of using Chameleon on a real Mac for a change. Usually when someone posts about this it's because they installed Chameleon without knowing why they were doing it and then broke everything.

[brunosky]

Gringo Vermelho, U R great: thanks a lot!
 
No need to edit manually the org.chameleon.Boot.plist file in the Extra folder.
The problem was with the com.apple.Boot.plist file in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.
I opened it with TextEdit and found that the odd content was:
bplist00“
VKernel\Kernel Flags[mach_kernelP
!-

.
I saw that in that folder there is also a file named com.apple.Boot.plist~orig.
Anyway, I deleted the com.apple.Boot.plist file, and now the error message doesn't appear anymore.
I presume there is no need to replace it with a new one: am I right?
You are saving 5 seconds of my life every time I boot my loved Mac Pro 1,1, now 2,1. :-)
I'm really interested in Chameleon, but at the moment what I know about it is very near to 0.
Can you suggest me the best way to learn more?
Thanks again!

[Gringo Vermelho]

Nice, well done.

You can keep the clean boot.plist I posted in /Library/Preferences/System/Configuration if you like, this is the default state of that file after a fresh install of OS X. I wonder what process botched up this file on your system in the first place. I've never seen that happen before.

To learn more about Chameleon you can browse the source code
http://forge.voodooprojects.org/p/chameleon/source/tree/HEAD/trunk
And we have some stickied posts w/ documentation here:
http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/board,1.0.html

Be careful though, most of what Chameleon does pertains to installing and running OS X on a PC, many things will be useless on your Mac or perhaps even downright harmful.

To see what Chameleon is doing while it's booting up your Mac, follow the link in my signature and download the Chameleon install files posted in my guide. Find bdmesg inside the archive and place it on your desktop. Run Terminal.app, type
cp ~/Desktop/bdmesg /usr/bin
and reboot. Now fire up Terminal and type bdmesg.

[brunosky]

Thanks a lot!
You are very kind: it was really a pleasure to find out this forum.
 

[Gringo Vermelho]

You're welcome, feel free to stop by anytime, it's always interesting to hear from someone who's successfully using Chameleon on a real Mac.

 

[alexnovelli]

The problem was with the com.apple.Boot.plist file in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.
I opened it with TextEdit and found that the odd content was:
bplist00“
VKernel\Kernel Flags[mach_kernelP
!-

.
I saw that in that folder there is also a file named com.apple.Boot.plist~orig.
Anyway, I deleted the com.apple.Boot.plist file, and now the error message doesn't appear anymore.

Thanks both of you! Same problem here with this file. Just delete and voalá! 5 seconds more happy!