Hi guys, some new questions. (actually only one for now
- this is unrelated to r0m30's technique, so I post it here)
Just found out how to generate the chameleon boot cd without Mac OSx - surprisingly simple:
sorry for the noise, this is not working.[/size]
simple reason: standard cd iso9xxx does not support funky filenames. oddly enough, the cd looks fine when mounted in linux, but it is not when booted. the preboot image is mandatory.
this means com.apple.Boot.plist turns into com~~1 something, and will not be used. one could specify all chameleon options at boot prompt, but the same problem applies for kexts...
kind of defeats the whole idea.
OK, I did some tests on this subject, and I concluded that:
a) outragedtony is right about creating a Bootable CD from Windows. I tried several combinations, and Chemeleon boots, but ignores com.apple.Boot.plist and all kexts. So it's basically useless.
b) there's no way of creating an HFS Chameleon CD and the necessary preboot.dmg without using Mac OS X. (If there is, I haven't found it).
So I'm back to creating a boot USB stick that can boot the retail Mac OS X DVD using parts of r0m30's PDF recipe.
However, reading Chameleon's documentation, I came across this:
boot1h - partition booter for HFS+ that loads the stage2 booter
boot1f32 - booter for FAT32 partitions on MBR
which seems to suggest that if I used boot1f32 instead of boot1h, I could create a bootable Chameleon USB Stick using a FAT32 partition
that would be readable from Windows.
This is much better than using an HFS+ partition, because it allows me to to edit its contents (i.e. make changes to the kexts) directly from Windows without having to use PartedMagic.
So I formated my USB stick to MBR/FAT32, and I tried to install boot1f32 using this command (after I CD'd to the i386 directory of course):
dd if=boot1f32 of=/dev/rdisk3s1
However, all this did was to make the FAT32 partition unreadable. I tried this from both PartedMagic and the Mac OS X terminal, and got the same result.
I wonder if anyone can tell me what I did wrong.
P.S.
I figured out a backup plan: install the Snow Leopard bootcamp drivers on Windows. The new version 3.0 includes HFS read/write capability, so I could create an HFS Chameleon USB stick, and still be able to edit if from Windows. However, I'd prefer not to have to install the bootcamp drivers if I could avoid it with the boot1f32 trick.P.S2.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the Snow Leopard bootcamp drivers for Windows only include HFS reading capability.