Why show unbootable drives on menu: also never see bootable CD/DVD on menu

[imacken]

1) All my Windows partitions show up on the main menu even though only one is bootable.
In contrast, only my bootable Mac partition shows.
Can this be changed so that only bootable partition show up?

2) Bootable CD/DVDs never show up on the menu.  I have not been able to ever boot from a CD/DVD via Chameleon.  Also, I can't see how to use the 'special' F5 or F10 function as mentioned in the 'help'.  At boot promp, if I press those keys, I just get Mac OS booting up, no rescanning of optical drives.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks.

[zef]

You need to boot from CD/DVD to able to boot retail DVDs with the media swap method, you need to enable the "Rescan" option in the boot.plist.

My next article will be a step by step guide about this topic. It's very easy to create a Chameleon boot image - the method is even more simple compared creating 'boot-132' isos.

[imacken]

Hi Zef.
Good to hear from you.
You didn't ever get back to me on http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,605.15.html.
With this thread, I'm afraid like a lot of other people I'm totally confused about the whole themes and boot.plist thing.
1) I keep reading about boot.plist files in a Chameleon folder. I don't have any Chameleon folder, and only have 1 boot.plist file and that is in System/Preferences (or something like that).
2) I also keep reading about the famous 'extras' folder, but there is nothing in mine except an 'extensions' sub folder.
3) I can't see how to invoke the F5 or F10 options.
4) what about my first question (above) regarding why non-bootable Windows partitions show up on the main menu, but Mac ones don't?
5) Is there a total idiot's guide to installing themes somewhere.  Any guides I've read just refer to folders that I don't seem to have. (See 1 above.)
Thanks again.

[zef]

Hi Zef.
Good to hear from you.
You didn't ever get back to me on http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,605.15.html.
With this thread, I'm afraid like a lot of other people I'm totally confused about the whole themes and boot.plist thing.
1) I keep reading about boot.plist files in a Chameleon folder. I don't have any Chameleon folder, and only have 1 boot.plist file and that is in System/Preferences (or something like that).
2) I also keep reading about the famous 'extras' folder, but there is nothing in mine except an 'extensions' sub folder.
3) I can't see how to invoke the F5 or F10 options.
4) what about my first question (above) regarding why non-bootable Windows partitions show up on the main menu, but Mac ones don't?
5) Is there a total idiot's guide to installing themes somewhere.  Any guides I've read just refer to folders that I don't seem to have. (See 1 above.)
Thanks again.

Hi imacken!

See my answers below:

1-2. What you're looking for is the com.apple.Boot.plist found on your boot partition's Extra folder. This folder will be preferred by Chameleon when boots himself. If you don't have boot.plist there, just copy your other boot.plist and make changes from now on in this location (/Extra).

3. You need to enable "Rescan" mode and also need to boot from CD, otherwise you won't see the optical drive recognized in BIOS land. At the moment Chameleon is heavily depends on BIOS to perform disk I/O operations.

4. We can't read NTFS and linux ext. partitions at filesystem level, so what we can do is to chainload their boot sector - this is the foreign boot method in Chameleon. We can't decide if such 'foreign' partition has a system or not - at least not at the moment. However we've implemented a nice way to detect OS X installations on HFS partitions so we can hide system-less HFS partitions. There were discussions about adding boot.plist options to hide certain foreign partitions.

5. The theme files should go under /Extra/Themes/<theme name> folder. Also you need to specify it in the /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist using the "Theme" string key with the value of <theme name>. Regarding the documentation, it should be finished already but it's still beyond us Anyway, i'd recommend to inspect the source files, you'll learn how does it work. A good starting point could be i386/boot2/boot.c.

[imacken]

Hi Zef.
Good to hear from you.
You didn't ever get back to me on http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,605.15.html.
With this thread, I'm afraid like a lot of other people I'm totally confused about the whole themes and boot.plist thing.
1) I keep reading about boot.plist files in a Chameleon folder. I don't have any Chameleon folder, and only have 1 boot.plist file and that is in System/Preferences (or something like that).
2) I also keep reading about the famous 'extras' folder, but there is nothing in mine except an 'extensions' sub folder.
3) I can't see how to invoke the F5 or F10 options.
4) what about my first question (above) regarding why non-bootable Windows partitions show up on the main menu, but Mac ones don't?
5) Is there a total idiot's guide to installing themes somewhere.  Any guides I've read just refer to folders that I don't seem to have. (See 1 above.)
Thanks again.

Hi imacken!

See my answers below:

1-2. What you're looking for is the com.apple.Boot.plist found on your boot partition's Extra folder. This folder will be preferred by Chameleon when boots himself. If you don't have boot.plist there, just copy your other boot.plist and make changes from now on in this location (/Extra).

3. You need to enable "Rescan" mode and also need to boot from CD, otherwise you won't see the optical drive recognized in BIOS land. At the moment Chameleon is heavily depends on BIOS to perform disk I/O operations.

4. We can't read NTFS and linux ext. partitions at filesystem level, so what we can do is to chainload their boot sector - this is the foreign boot method in Chameleon. We can't decide if such 'foreign' partition has a system or not - at least not at the moment. However we've implemented a nice way to detect OS X installations on HFS partitions so we can hide system-less HFS partitions. There were discussions about adding boot.plist options to hide certain foreign partitions.

5. The theme files should go under /Extra/Themes/<theme name> folder. Also you need to specify it in the /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist using the "Theme" string key with the value of <theme name>. Regarding the documentation, it should be finished already but it's still beyond us Anyway, i'd recommend to inspect the source files, you'll learn how does it work. A good starting point could be i386/boot2/boot.c.

Thanks a lot.
1) 2) and 5) are now sorted and I've got some nice themes to try out.
4) I understand, and the boot.plist option to hide partitions would be good.
3) I'm not sure about 3)!  Do you mean that 'rescan' mode should go in the boot.plist?  Do you mean that Chameleon will not show CD/DVDs on the menu?
Sorry to be unclear.

[eyvind]

For 3), what Zef means is the the CD/DVDs will only show up on the boot menu if Chameleon is installed to (and running from) a CD/DVD. The purpose of this is that you can boot up chameleon, then when it is at the boot menu, you eject the chameleon CD, and put in a retail disk. This is basically the same thing as BOOT-132. By being dependant on BIOS I/O operations, he means that the BIOS (basic-input-output-system, which is the first "program" loaded at the moment you press the power button on your computer) doesn't support CD read operations at such an early stage in the boot process. If I'm wrong, correct me Zef

[AniV]

Hi,

My system: an EeePC 1000H with an external USB DVD drive.
I've built a Boot132-like CD with Chameleon 2.0 RC1 and after some struggle with the DSDT loading, I've managed
to boot the 'OsX Install DVD'.
Unfortunately with RC2 the DVD rescan doesn't seem to work anymore.
My system's BIOS does not have AHCI SATA option. Could that be the cause?
Anyone having similar problems?
Sadly, at this moment, I must say that RC2 is not an upgrade option for me :=(. Cheers.

[imacken]

How do you actually implement the 'rescan' option?  Where is it input?

[zef]

How do you actually implement the 'rescan' option?  Where is it input?

Just add this key to your boot filesystem's /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist.

... Will post the guide tomorrow.

[imacken]

Thanks Zef, I'm sure we're all looking forward to the guide as there are some basic things that need to be cleared up.
Did you see my last post on http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,605.30.html