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Author Topic: [How To]: Installing OSX without access to a Mac  (Read 82148 times)

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kukhuvud

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #15 on: November 04, 2009, 07:30:24 PM »
I found what seems to be a good kext pack and re-followed the guide again!

I think you're spot on and that this *should* work.

Now I just need to solve my "no hpets available cpu(s) configured incorrectly" issue and I bet I can get SL installed via your method :)

Gringo Vermelho

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #16 on: November 05, 2009, 12:12:23 AM »
Try HPET.kext from netkas.

Or look in your BIOS and see if there's a HPET setting.

Dit kæmpe kukhuvud!
10.9.5 - ASUS P8Z77-V Pro - i5 3570K - GTX 660 - Chameleon 2.3 svn-r2xxx
How to...
Install Chameleon: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,649
Make your own Chameleon boot CD: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,484.msg2131.html#msg2131

thorazine74

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #17 on: November 05, 2009, 11:02:36 AM »
- if you look at the dd statement for boot0 it has bs=400 count=1, by only writing 400 bytes you don't blow away the partition table.  I don't know for sure how much you can write before it goes boom but 400 works with RC3.

Good work! I guess I read it too quick to understand all of it clearly.

Regarding how much you can write I researched a bit and it seems chameleon's boot0 code ends up at 01AF:



I looked at a standard FAT32 mbr of a single partition USB and it looks its empty up to 01B7:



So I think it could be safe to write boot0 up to 01AF (bs=430 I think, unsure if counts from 0 or 1) and the whole boot0 will be there without touching the partition table.

Alterntively you may want to look at using grub4dos+grubinst and chainbooting chameleon from there to avoid any headaches with dd and writing stuff to the mbr.

- the fat32 partition only loads the kernel and kexts, the rd=disk?s3 then mounts the retail DVD and runs the installer from there.  Further testing seems to indicate that all you need on the FAT32 drive is mach_kernel and /S/L/E, so you can do this with a very small pen drive.

I dont really understand this, so you boot the kernel and kexts from the fat32 drive and then change the rd to be the dvd drive? I didnt know you could access the dvd drive with a rd=diskXsX?
Mac OS X 10.5.6 Retail (Updated to 10.5.7) with Chameleon 2.0 RC1+BootIt NextGen 1.86 (MBR Single Drive)
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2 SATA HD (AppleAHCIport.kext) + 1 PATA DVD+RW (DarwinATAPort.kext)
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r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #18 on: November 06, 2009, 04:39:17 AM »
Regarding how much you can write I researched a bit and it seems chameleon's boot0 code ends up at 01AF:
(Images sniped)
I looked at a standard FAT32 mbr of a single partition USB and it looks its empty up to 01B7:

So I think it could be safe to write boot0 up to 01AF (bs=430 I think, unsure if counts from 0 or 1) and the whole boot0 will be there without touching the partition table.

Alterntively you may want to look at using grub4dos+grubinst and chainbooting chameleon from there to avoid any headaches with dd and writing stuff to the mbr.

Well you got me curious do I googled it and there are 440 bytes available for boot code according to wikipedia
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMaster_boot_record&ei=eYvzSpSgDoj8tQONmekO&usg=AFQjCNFFr83s9Y_0Uoh9khyYKhsahBCQ1g&sig2=cOMrcTOI4ypEFb4xf5OsEw so I'll update that for v.02

- the fat32 partition only loads the kernel and kexts, the rd=disk?s3 then mounts the retail DVD and runs the installer from there.  Further testing seems to indicate that all you need on the FAT32 drive is mach_kernel and /S/L/E, so you can do this with a very small pen drive

I dont really understand this, so you boot the kernel and kexts from the fat32 drive and then change the rd to be the dvd drive? I didnt know you could access the dvd drive with a rd=diskXsX?

I was unclear there rd=disk?s3 IS the DVD, the kernel (that Chameleon just loaded) mounts it and runs just like it would have if the DVD had been booted on a real Mac.
Most (all?) modern operating systems from the System z to the one running the PC your reading this on allow for boot parameters to tell it where the rest of the OS lives, it's really no different than what happens during a "normal" boot with chameleon.  The BIOS loads the first sector of the boot volume (boot0) and passes control to it, that code searches the partitions for, loads and passes control to the next step in the boot process (boot1h). Boot1h finds, loads and passes control to boot.  Boot builds a list of partitions for you to select where to load the kernel from, then it loads the kernel, does it's EFI magic and passes control to the kernel.  The kernel selects the root device based on it's rules, for mach that means that it will use either rd=diskXsY or uuid=12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012 from the kernel flags or some fallback logic it has.  There is nothing that says rd= or uuid= have to live on the same disk that the kernel was loaded from it's just common practice on desktop computers to do it that way.  What makes this work is that once the kernel is loaded it knows how to mount and read a hybrid DVD.  So I tell it to do exactly that.

Sorry if that was long long winded, I was just trying to show that it really isn't that perverse of a process.

I have been refining this process, I can now build a USB stick that is only about 300MB, it both boots Chameleon and is the load disk for the kernel.  Then I just pass the kernel the rd=disk?s3 flag an we're off to the races.
--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

kukhuvud

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #19 on: November 09, 2009, 07:49:12 PM »
Well you got me curious do I googled it and there are 440 bytes available for boot code according to wikipedia so I'll update that for v.02

So if I happened to redo my setup again (to include a hpet kext that I found), would you suggest 430, 440, or sticking with the original 400?

kukhuvud

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Aplolgies, but a small derail...
« Reply #20 on: November 09, 2009, 07:59:32 PM »
Also, as a n00b, I'm not certain where to find support past the process of getting SL booted, and I don't want to derail this awesome thread.

Would anyone have suggesions of forums I can peruse on finding install support?  So far I have accounts at www.infinitemac.com, www.insanelymac.com and osx86.sojugarden.com but I'm finding them of limited usefulness at this time.

FWIW, I finally got SL to boot to the point where it shows a dark grey background and a mouse pointer in the top left corner.  Eventually the pointer disapppears and the system just sits there.

r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #21 on: November 10, 2009, 01:29:02 AM »
So if I happened to redo my setup again (to include a hpet kext that I found), would you suggest 430, 440, or sticking with the original 400?

I'd recommended 440, that is the maximum code they can put in the MBR and the boot0 code has checks to make sure they don't exceed that size.
--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #22 on: November 10, 2009, 02:06:49 AM »
Also, as a n00b, .......

Me too, that's why I worked out this way to get SL installed without a Mac. I just google some keywords (device type, panic module, whatever) and "osx86" then slog through the hits.

FWIW, I finally got SL to boot to the point where it shows a dark grey background and a mouse pointer in the top left corner.  Eventually the pointer disapppears and the system just sits there.

That's so close the next thing you should see is the Language selection screen, it takes a second or two to get there on my desktop.  What are the last messages you see?

I rebooted the CD and my dmesg looked like this
DSMOS has arrived
Intel82566MM info: Link is Up 100 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX
ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin::start - waitForService(resourceMatching(AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement) timed out

I had HPET in my DSDT though, how many kexts are you loading from /Extra/Extensions?
--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

s0nykus

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #23 on: December 02, 2009, 02:39:20 AM »
Method confirmed!

I've managed to install SL on two laptops using this method, my Dell Latitude D830, and a friend's D820 as well, the other day. No Macs involved, just a WinXP PC, PMagic USB stick and SnowUSB stick, as mentioned in the tutorial.

Some the missing bits, maybe:

The SnowUSB stick (see PDF in original post) doesn't have to be that large. You don't have to copy the whole DVD to it. It's sufficient to copy mach_kernel, and /System/Library/Extensions from the SL dvd to the SnowUSB key. These won't take up more than some 250MB. Like r0me0 says, 300MB tops, with all your other files there.

In order to convert the SL .dmg to .iso (to be able to burn the dvd under windows ), I've used the dmg2iso command line utility available from:

http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/

Like in the tutorial, I've used MacDrive in order to access the resulting dvd and copy the mach_kernel and the S/L/E directory to the stick (preserve the names and the directory nesting). But MacDrive doesn't work under XP 64-bit! :( Luckily, my dusty old WinXP 32-bit laptop has come to the rescue.

Finally, following the screenshots above, I've used a 432 bytes block size:

dd if=boot0 of=/dev/sda bs=432 count=1

Anything up to 440 seems to be safe for MBR indeed, but I've looked at the "boot" file from Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658, and it was 432 bytes long, the rest being zerofilled. See screenshot in prior post, the contents of the file ends at "GPT.testing.done", and that's 432 bytes. :)


What hasn't been covered here:

All fine, I'm done installing. So WHAT'S NEXT???

When my install was ready and successful, I didn't know where or how to continue. If you have used Disk Utility to partition your hard drive (like you should), it will erase and recreate the EFI partition from the beginning of the drive, so all your boot files will be gone. And once the install is complete, you will have a 30 second reboot timer to deal with. :))

To pause the reboot timer, just open any of the utilities from the toolbar, a Terminal console might be pretty useful. If your files are gone from the EFI partition, you can now format it again to HFS+ using the command:

diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" "EFI" /dev/disk0s1

This will format your EFI partition as HFS+, and name the partition "EFI". After formatting, your Snow Leopard will automount the EFI partition to /Volumes/EFI/ . Now you can start again, and copy all the files necessary for booting your system to the EFI partition, just like you first did with the 200MB partition in the tutorial.

Once again, you'll copy Chameleon, put your boot file in the root dir (/Volumes/EFI/), then copy your /Extra/Extensions/ there with all the kexts you have hunted down from the interwebs for your particular system. Your com.apple.Boot.plist, smbios.plist and DSDT.aml will go in the /Volumes/EFI/Extra/ directory.

Then you'll make the EFI partition bootable again with:

cd /Volumes/EFI/Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658-bin/i386/
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk0s1

What's different this time, you can (and should) use fdsik to write boot0 to the MBR of your hard drive:

fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk0

Before you reboot, you should build a kext cache file too.
But first, you will need to "repair" permissions on your EFI partition using a quick-n-dirty:

chown -R 0:0 /Volumes/EFI/
chmod -R 755 /Volumes/EFI/

And now, you will build your first Extensions.mkext (one large file with all the kexts compiled into it, much like a "driver pack") on your EFI drive. Okay, it's not *that* large, mine has about 30-40MB. And the command is:

kextcache -v 2 -t -m /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions.mkext /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions/ /System/Library/Extensions/

You might see a couple of warnings about missing dependencies, don't worry about them right now. If it complains about the wrong permissions on the other hand, make sure you've fixed them with the quick'n dirty above.

Once all this is in place, you're finally ready to reboot and enjoy your kernel panic freshly installed Snow Leopard. But if you are like me, you'll first make a small USB rescue stick (yes, I've got 4 sticks, w00t!) even a small 128MB is enough. Format the stick to HFS+ (without journaling) with Disk Utility (or command line if you're brave), and replicate everything you've just put on your EFI boot partition to the USB key. Make it bootable in the same way. Use this highly resorceful blog for reference if you want (see chapter 7 there for creating a bootable USB key):

http://aserebln.blogspot.com/

Got your stick? Okay, now you are indeed safe to reboot. Oh, and by the way, have you edited your com.apple.Boot.plist and your smbios.plist for all the right settings? You'll learn into it, just use some google intelligence. :)

If you get a kernel panic after rebooting (and there's a good chance that you'll get quite a few while experimenting), select your Snow partition, and hit space while in Chameleon, and try booting by entering the -v -f flags (verbose, ignore kext caches), or with the -v -x flags (verbose, safe mode, minimal set of drivers) at the boot prompt. Adding Wait=Yes, "Quiet Boot"=No and "Legacy Logo"=No may also help to see where it crashes. You can add all these parameters and more (in key+string format, lose the quatation marks) to your com.apple.Boot.plist file. Google up some examples!

I've seen many forums posts with users complaining like "I've got the apple logo / the spinning rainbow wheel, and then the whole darn thing freezes and it stops working". This kind of input will definitely NOT help in identifying your problem. Use the verbosity options above, instead, and get some real output. ;)

So this is where your quest starts. You'll probably have to add or lose some kexts to make things work like they should. Add or remove them one by one, and see what happens after each step. Don't forget to restore permissions and rebuild your Extensions.mkext after each and every change. I know it is painful and slow, but still, change just one thing at the time only. Otherwise you won't know which change resulted in what effect. Live and learn, it's fun after all! ;)

Bottom line: after a 2-3 weeks of digging, I've got a beautifully working h*ckintosh on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop. It triple boots (whoa, baby!) Snow Leopard 10.6.2, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. A few weeks ago I didn't even know what to do with that large .dmg file I've downloaded. The learning curve's been pretty steep though, I must admit, but it was fun.


P.S: Triple boot tutorial explained here (but get your SL working first, the better):

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=165899

My install order was SL / Linux / Win7, but the order doesn't really matter that much if you know what you're doing.
You will need gptsync to explain a dumb operating system (guess which one :P) where to load, get it from:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=177505&pid=1214512&mode=threaded


Finally, a great big thanks to r0m30 here, for this tutorial that got me started off, I'm so glad I've found this post!

Also many thanks to the great folks on this forum, the Chameleon team, Voodoo Labs, insanelymac.com, infinitemac.com, AsereBLN (who never looked into my DSDT eventually :(), Kabyl, zhell, mackerintel, and of course netkas The Man, for making all this possible. And many thanks to all of you guys out there, for putting together this great community. Keep on rockin'! ;)
« Last Edit: December 02, 2009, 02:56:34 AM by s0nykus »
Dell Latitude D830
BIOS A14
Core2 Duo T9500 Penryn 2.6GHz
Intel PM965, 82801HBM (ICH8-ME)
4GB Hyundai PC2-5300 nVidia Quadro NVS 140M Broadcom BCM5755M Gbit (32bit drv) Wi-Fi Intel 4965 AGN (no drv) USB Wi-Fi Canyon CNP-WF518 (32bit drv) Triple boot SL 10.6.2/Ubuntu 9.10/Win7 x64

r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #24 on: December 02, 2009, 08:01:42 PM »
Method confirmed!

Great, glad it helped.

Some the missing bits, maybe:

Almost a certainty!

The SnowUSB stick (see PDF in original post) doesn't have to be that large. You don't have to copy the whole DVD to it.

I mentioned this in one of the comments, I'm working on an updated version that only has instructions to copy SLE & the kernel.

In order to convert the SL .dmg to .iso (to be able to burn the dvd under windows ), I've used the dmg2iso command line utility

I was assuming that the SL DVD was purchased,  my bad  ;D

Finally, following the screenshots above, I've used a 432 bytes block size:

dd if=boot0 of=/dev/sda bs=432 count=1

Anything up to 440 seems to be safe for MBR indeed ...

Yep, I'm going to use 440 in the updated doc so that it should work with all future versions of Chameleon,

What hasn't been covered here:

All fine, I'm done installing. So WHAT'S NEXT???

When my install was ready and successful, I didn't know where or how to continue. .......

I didn't intend for this to be the end-all tutorial, just an adjunct for those of us who didn't have access to a Mac get that first OSX install.  There are plenty of guides out there that cover what to do after you have your fresh install.

If you have used Disk Utility to partition your hard drive (like you should), it will erase and recreate the EFI partition from the beginning of the drive, so all your boot files will be gone. And once the install is complete, you will have a 30 second reboot timer to deal with. :))

To pause the reboot timer, just open any of the utilities from the toolbar, a Terminal console might be pretty useful. If your files are gone from the EFI partition, you can now format it again to HFS+ using the command:

diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" "EFI" /dev/disk0s1

This will format your EFI partition as HFS+, and name the partition "EFI". After formatting, your Snow Leopard will automount the EFI partition to /Volumes/EFI/ . Now you can start again, and copy all the files necessary for booting your system to the EFI partition, just like you first did with the 200MB partition in the tutorial.

Once again, you'll copy Chameleon, put your boot file in the root dir (/Volumes/EFI/), then copy your /Extra/Extensions/ there with all the kexts you have hunted down from the interwebs for your particular system. Your com.apple.Boot.plist, smbios.plist and DSDT.aml will go in the /Volumes/EFI/Extra/ directory.

Then you'll make the EFI partition bootable again with:

cd /Volumes/EFI/Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658-bin/i386/
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk0s1

What's different this time, you can (and should) use fdsik to write boot0 to the MBR of your hard drive:

fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk0

I'd done the install so many times that I forgot about this glitch,  I actually created a small Chameleon partition right after the EFI partition instead of using the EFI partition.  This get's around the reinstall and prevents you from getting getting blown away if some ever helpful OS/utility notices that your EFI partition is "corrupt" (The standard is for EFI to be FAT32) and reformating the EFI Partition.  In the days of terabyte disks a 500mb helper partition isn't a big deal.

Before you reboot, you should build a kext cache file too.
But first, you will need to "repair" permissions on your EFI partition using a quick-n-dirty:

chown -R 0:0 /Volumes/EFI/
chmod -R 755 /Volumes/EFI/

And now, you will build your first Extensions.mkext (one large file with all the kexts compiled into it, much like a "driver pack") on your EFI drive. Okay, it's not *that* large, mine has about 30-40MB. And the command is:

kextcache -v 2 -t -m /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions.mkext /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions/ /System/Library/Extensions/

You might see a couple of warnings about missing dependencies, don't worry about them right now. If it complains about the wrong permissions on the other hand, make sure you've fixed them with the quick'n dirty above.

Once all this is in place, you're finally ready to reboot and enjoy your kernel panic freshly installed Snow Leopard. But if you are like me, you'll first make a small USB rescue stick (yes, I've got 4 sticks, w00t!) even a small 128MB is enough. Format the stick to HFS+ (without journaling) with Disk Utility (or command line if you're brave), and replicate everything you've just put on your EFI boot partition to the USB key. Make it bootable in the same way. Use this highly resorceful blog for reference if you want (see chapter 7 there for creating a bootable USB key):

http://aserebln.blogspot.com/

Got your stick? Okay, now you are indeed safe to reboot. Oh, and by the way, have you edited your com.apple.Boot.plist and your smbios.plist for all the right settings? You'll learn into it, just use some google intelligence. :)

If you get a kernel panic after rebooting (and there's a good chance that you'll get quite a few while experimenting), select your Snow partition, and hit space while in Chameleon, and try booting by entering the -v -f flags (verbose, ignore kext caches), or with the -v -x flags (verbose, safe mode, minimal set of drivers) at the boot prompt. Adding Wait=Yes, "Quiet Boot"=No and "Legacy Logo"=No may also help to see where it crashes. You can add all these parameters and more (in key+string format, lose the quatation marks) to your com.apple.Boot.plist file. Google up some examples!

I've seen many forums posts with users complaining like "I've got the apple logo / the spinning rainbow wheel, and then the whole darn thing freezes and it stops working". This kind of input will definitely NOT help in identifying your problem. Use the verbosity options above, instead, and get some real output. ;)

So this is where your quest starts. You'll probably have to add or lose some kexts to make things work like they should. Add or remove them one by one, and see what happens after each step. Don't forget to restore permissions and rebuild your Extensions.mkext after each and every change. I know it is painful and slow, but still, change just one thing at the time only. Otherwise you won't know which change resulted in what effect. Live and learn, it's fun after all! ;)

Bottom line: after a 2-3 weeks of digging, I've got a beautifully working h*ckintosh on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop. It triple boots (whoa, baby!) Snow Leopard 10.6.2, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. A few weeks ago I didn't even know what to do with that large .dmg file I've downloaded. The learning curve's been pretty steep though, I must admit, but it was fun.

All good info, I haven't had much luck with Extensions.mkext here, if you leave the "-f" in the kernel flags you don't have to have it but you boot up is certainly slower.  It also seems that if you take the "-f" out Chameleon will load your EE kexts and then the standard kext cache from the boot volume. 

Also many thanks to the great folks on this forum, the Chameleon team, Voodoo Labs, insanelymac.com, infinitemac.com, AsereBLN (who never looked into my DSDT eventually :(), Kabyl, zhell, mackerintel, and of course netkas The Man, for making all this possible. And many thanks to all of you guys out there, for putting together this great community. Keep on rockin'! ;)

Absolutely!!
--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

macaday

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #25 on: December 04, 2009, 05:12:56 PM »
Hi guys.  This is the best article that I found so far.  I followed the original PDF and got most of it working.  But when I try to boot up into Chameleon off the HFS+ partition it flashes several errors quickly.  There is something about a ram disk and then it says that it gives "error parsing plist file" then it just reboots.  I have tried editing the com.apple.Boot.plist file several times but that has not handled it.  I read through what everyone else is saying, but none of it appears to apply to my problem. 

Any thoughts?  Sorry I am also very new to this mac thing.  So I might have missed some obvious thing. Thanks again for all the help.
a macaday keeps the doctor away!

r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #26 on: December 04, 2009, 06:52:09 PM »
when I try to boot up into Chameleon off the HFS+ partition it flashes several errors quickly.  There is something about a ram disk and then it says that it gives "error parsing plist file" then it just reboots. 
Have no idea about the ram disk part, this method doesn't use one.....

First, can you see com.apple.Boot.plist in the /Extra directory of your EFI partition? If you can then where are you editing your com.apple.Boot.plist?  If you are doing it under windows you need to rerun the dos2unix command on it, Chameleon doesn't seem to like windows line endings at all.  I'd do this anyway just to be safe.

Second, did you use bs=400 on the boot0 dd command from the original PDF or bs=440 as discussed in the thread?  If you used 400 redo it with 440 so you get better error reporting.  The 400 leaves out several bytes from the lit pool so you don't always get good error messages. Again, I'd do this anyway just to be safe.

Lastly, are you getting a "boot1: error" message?  If yes, you may need to patch boot1h to get around a bug in you BIOS.  See http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,854.0.html for details.  I didn't need this on my HP mini but I did on my HP desktop.

Hope this helps.

--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

macaday

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #27 on: December 04, 2009, 07:20:54 PM »
Thanks.  I boot up with the parted usb image. I then mounted the EFI partition and edited the plist file with vi. 

I first loaded the boot0 with bs=400 and then as I read the discussion I then tried bs=440. The error message doesn't say boot1 or anything, just "error parsing plist file" it doesn't say which one or anything.  There are a few messages before I was able to see by hitting the pause button while booting, but it went buy too fast.

Is there any way of turning on any logging?  I was going through the chameleon site, but couldn't figure it out.

Thanks again for the fast response.
a macaday keeps the doctor away!

CSUFSteve

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #28 on: December 05, 2009, 03:30:10 AM »
First off, I'm a Hackintosh n00b and your guide is *exactly* what I've been looking for! I do have friends with a Mac and could have used Lifehacker's guide (since that's my exact mobo), but dammit the whole point is to not have a Mac! And I was getting frustrated trying to do things through a combo of Windows and Ubuntu Live. So I am really really excited to see this thread.

I will probably go through your PDF exactly, first. Not sure but I might be OK with keeping Chameleon ("C") on the USB and just booting from it, but my scenario is Ubuntu in partition 3 of hdd0 (W7 on the 1st two), which doesn't get seen by anybody right now. hdd0 is a hardware-RAID mirror pair. Snow will be on its own drive, unmirrored. So I'm hoping C will be able to see all 3 partitions.

Yep, I'm going to use 440 in the updated doc so that it should work with all future versions of Chameleon,

I'm not in the least bit being critical here, but just wondering when you might have this ready? In the meantime, I'll be careful about matching up changes in this thread with the original document.  I'm thrilled to have found this thread, so sincerest thanks, and am starting.... NOW!

--Steve

r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #29 on: December 05, 2009, 06:28:11 AM »
Thanks.  I boot up with the parted usb image. I then mounted the EFI partition and edited the plist file with vi. 
I'd still run dos2unix on it just to be sure.

The error message doesn't say boot1 or anything, just "error parsing plist file"

A quick grep of the source says this:
libsaio/stringTable.c:        error ("Error parsing plist file\n");
boot2/Makefile:LIBDEP= $(SYMDIR)/libsaio.a $(SYMDIR)/libsa.a

So it looks like the error is coming from boot, that's the good news that means your BIOS doesn't have the bug that I pointed out in the previous post.  The bad news is that it means you probably fat fingered your boot.plist.  You're going to need to look closely and see whats wrong, a missing bracket or slash to terminate a key maybe? If you post it I'll take a look and see if I can spot it.


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