Author Topic: Chameleon bootloader hangs at startup - drive failure  (Read 3150 times)

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ken_truesdale

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Chameleon bootloader hangs at startup - drive failure
« on: July 30, 2013, 06:57:01 PM »
I'm not fully working yet, but I think I have my problem figured out.  I thought I'd share what I have found so far in case anyone else comes across the issue.  (Or if somebody already has and wants to chime in with more info than I have figured out so far!)

I have a working Hacintosh that's been running well now for 4 or so years.  It's a Dell E520 and yes, it is getting a little too old to keep using, and yes, I haven't upgraded the OS because I'd like to upgrade the hardware.  But hey, it works, and Apple still hasn't come out with a midline desktop computer.

Today, after uninstalling some software, I rebooted.  (I don't need to do that very often which is nice, so the last reboot was a few weeks ago.)  Strangely, Mac Update started and said that it was updating my computer - I had seen it on the screen earlier today, but I had clicked "Not Now" and it had gone away.  But I knew that the update was just a Security Update that had been bugging me for the last couple weeks so I let it go.

The computer wouldn't come back up.  The BIOS ran fine and Chameleon gave me a "boot done" and then froze immediately on the  "\" "|" "/" "-".  Hitting power button to shut it off and then again to turn it on gave the same results.  Eventually I discovered that disabling one of the 3 hard drives did the trick.  Fortunately it is not the system disk.  It is my Time Machine disk.

Apparently, Seagate drives have a known firmware bug (http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/) that causes the drive to shutdown.  In some cases, it fails to report to the BIOS at all ("BSY" error) and in other cases, it reports to the BIOS as a 0 byte size drive ("LBA" error).  I believe I am seeing the latter and that Chameleon gets stuck when running through the disks and finding a drive that is zero bytes.

If the drive is under warranty, you can have Seagate fix it.  If it isn't, like mine, you can try the fix yourself (https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/).  And I may do that.  But for now, I wanted to post that what appeared to me at first to be a Hacintosh-related error on a Mac update turned out to be complete coincidence and it was actually a hard drive firmware bug that confused Chameleon.