Voodooprojects

Chameleon => General Discussion => Topic started by: Canonbeck on April 07, 2009, 10:06:33 AM

Title: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: Canonbeck on April 07, 2009, 10:06:33 AM
My bro was trying to install osx on his netbook and managed to install chameleon efi on my mac! Now I get the flashing question mark on boot. I've tried reblessing the system folder, repairing the disk via disk utilities and resetting the pram but it still won't start. I've no idea what installing chameleon has actually done to my mac - can anyone help me put it right?
Cheers


Moderator Edit: Changed the title a bit. Looks like this bad idea is getting popular  :o.
Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: MACita on April 07, 2009, 01:22:31 PM
 ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

1. dont drink alot when u test chameleon  ;D ;D ;D

ok stop joking...

Try REFIT!

google refit
Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: sunyooh on April 08, 2009, 05:35:30 PM
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

1. dont drink alot when u test chameleon  ;D ;D ;D

ok stop joking...

Try REFIT!

google refit
:) :) :)
Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: foltster on April 09, 2009, 05:22:55 PM
There must be some way to restore the original boot record.  I also mistakenly ran this setup on my macbook pro and now it will not boot.

Any ideas?

Im trying the REFIT solution now but would like to properly fix this if possible...

Thanks!
Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: CyberGreg on April 09, 2009, 09:42:51 PM
Boot with your Leopard DVD, choose Start up disk from the Utilities menu and pick your hard drive. Reboot

Good luck
 8)
Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: foltster on April 09, 2009, 09:56:23 PM
No dice on that one, still get the flashing question mark on boot. 

Does anyone know which files I would need to replace from another leopard install to get this working again?
Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: CyberGreg on April 09, 2009, 11:30:01 PM
Open a terminal window and type "man bless" without the quotes. Then follow the instructions

edit actually on that process of picking your startup disk, it would be implied that you first pick say the DVD click ok and then reslect you hard drive
Title: Please help! Installed accidentally on Macbook Pro now it won't boot.
Post by: snocat on May 09, 2009, 07:57:51 AM
This is even worse, I was trying to fix hackintosh by following some instruction and accidentatly installed chameleon on a real mac. Now my real mac can't boot. Is there a way to reverse chameleon? I can boot up to terminal from boot disk, but i can't seem to figure out how to reverse the damage. With restoring EFI?

Any ideas? Or it would be great if someone can tell me what Chameleon changes on a computer, so i can use terminal to revert the changes, if possible.
Title: Re: Chameleon on a Real Mac
Post by: gmacman on May 11, 2009, 07:00:36 PM
Ouch.  Hopefully someone can give you a better answer.  But I would be very worried about any method someone suggests since it would be hard to make sure you really cleaned everything out (with documentation for hacking stuff like Chameleon being sketchy at the least it).

Having real macs myself, I'd prefer to make sure it was truly clean of any Hackintosh stuff.  And the cleanest solution I can think of would be to boot from your leopard dvd and then copy your existing hard drive to a backup drive.  Then reinstall leopard completely (including repartitioning the drive) and then use Migration Assistant to reload your personal files, apps, settings, etc. from the backup drive.

Granted this is a long process but it would insure that Chameleon is removed completely.
Title: Please help! Installed accidentally on Macbook Pro now it won't boot.
Post by: entropy1980 on May 20, 2009, 06:52:54 PM
So I accidentally installed Chameleon on my Macbook Pro. Now the machine won't boot. I tried clearing PRAM, and even a clean install. No matter what it just comes up with a Folder with a ?. Can anybody help me out?
Title: Re: Please help! Installed accidentally on Macbook Pro now it won't boot.
Post by: HMiller on May 21, 2009, 04:59:47 AM

Ouch...have you tried repartitioning in Disk Utilty (booted from OSX DVD)?

Title: Re: Please help! Chameleon was installed on my mac and now it won't boot
Post by: Diver on May 23, 2009, 11:00:54 AM
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

1. dont drink alot when u test chameleon  ;D ;D ;D

ok stop joking...

Try REFIT!

google refit

After 18 straight sleepless hours, I registered just to say THANK YOU for mentioning REFIT.
Wish I had read this sooner.

Who ever installs chameleon on an iMac and faces boot issues, give REFIT a try first. It will probably save you from the agony.
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: rawr on June 10, 2009, 06:46:44 PM
hey, i've got same problem like you.

if i will insert my leopard disk, i can't repair my bootfiles. Now i tried rEFIt, installed on an usb-stick. my mac will boot up, so i can see the surface from refit, but whats next?

If I select my hard-disk, nothing will happen. if i use the leopard disk, nothing happend ... :(

help please
Title: Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
Post by: nogo on July 08, 2009, 05:29:48 AM
Hello,


I was creating a bootable MSI OSX thumb drive when I accidentally put the
Chameleon loader onto my Mac Pro hard drive.

I know, I know... OSX86 is still a little fresh to me. Be gentle.

So, now I cannot boot into my Mac Pro, using my main drive.

I need to know how to uninstall the file('s) that were placed on
the Mac Pro hard drive.

I have my Apple disk in the Mac Pro now, so I can use terminal... I just
need to know what code to run.

While I do have a back-up drive, it was not exactly up to date. So, I am praying
that there is a way to reverse what I did.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Title: Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
Post by: Terc on July 08, 2009, 03:32:22 PM
Wow... LOTS of people are doing this.
Seems that no one reads installers and simply clicks Next Next Next Ne... oh, Finish.
Title: Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
Post by: nano2nd on July 08, 2009, 05:36:40 PM
My wife would have killed me if I'd done that to her MacBook last time I created a new system disk via USB!

I'm sure there's a slick technical way to resolve this but I'm in a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut mood today. You could always boot the Mac Pro using your Leopard DVD and make a fresh install to another HDD that is formatted with a GUID partition. Then use migration assistant to get your stuff moved over. But this is probably the lamest way to do it.
Title: Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
Post by: zhell on July 08, 2009, 07:38:42 PM
How about running a search first?
http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,20.msg194.html
Title: Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
Post by: Terc on July 08, 2009, 08:33:31 PM
zhell, I wanted to play with him for a bit before sending him over to that thread.

Oh well, I'll just wait for the next one.

By the way, where'd the binary only download go?  The link seems to be broken.
Title: Semi-Emergency [Chameleon 2.0 /Mac Pro].
Post by: nogo on July 08, 2009, 10:55:54 PM
I can laugh at myself.

I will also allow others to poke fun at me, especially in this situation...but...

How dare you ask me to use the "search" function !!!


Actually, I don't play well with forum search engines... Just one of those things.

Luckily, you guys were here to help. I really do appreciate it.

It has been a while since I did a clean install, etc. So maybe this was just the
thing to get me back in step. Good thing it was only a "semi", and not "full blown" emergency.


I'll try REFIT, once I get done with formatting a spare drive.


Also, it may be a good idea to create a program called "UnFuckIt". It could undo the
things people like me have done. You could charge for it. You would be able to retire early   ;)


One last thing... Chameleon 1.0.11 works great with the MSI OSX install. 2.0 gets stuck [will not work]. That may be why I made this large mistake. Logic seems to have 20/20 vision in these situations. Either way, great work guys ! If you need help breaking anything, let me know   ;D
Title: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
Post by: randomm on July 10, 2009, 06:20:36 PM
Yes, I know... I really shouldn't have, but for some reason I installed Chameleon RC1 on my macbook (really should read what something does before installing) and now the machine does not boot. I get a flashing question mark on top of a folder icon when trying to boot the machine.

Running Disk Utility with an installer DVD and verifying the disk shows no errors, nor does the "repair disk" help.

You can believe I'm sorry to take anybody's time with this problem, just hoping that someone in the know might be able to tell me where to go looking next, or what to do...

many many thanks!
Title: Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
Post by: nogo on July 11, 2009, 01:03:57 AM
http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,544.0.html


Had the same problem this week.


REFIT did not work for me. I had to use a spare drive and Carbon Copy my"screwed up" drive to it.

It boots fine now. This is a very time consuming fix. It was relatively easy using my Mac pro but you might have some difficulty using a laptop. If you have a large enough external drive, you can CC your HDD there, format your Macbook drive, then transfer it back to the Macbook drive.

I'm sure there is an easier way to fix this but the people on this forum don't really care. I understand their position but with this many people making a simple mistake, it only makes sense to include an "un-install" utility.

I guess what troubles me most is the fact that no one could tell me how to undo what had been done. This is computer science, not pharmacology, the way it works should not be such a mystery.

I'll try to help the best I can, so just post as many details as possible.
Title: Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
Post by: randomm on July 12, 2009, 06:03:23 PM
eEFIt didn't solve this issue, at least not with using the regular "Installing on a separate volume or external disk" method. Obviously I'm just guessing, but perhaps the "Installing on the EFI System Partition" method might be what I'm after... or is it.
Title: Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
Post by: randomm on July 12, 2009, 07:23:07 PM
Installing refit on the system partition didn't do the trick either. I followed these instructions: http://www.felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2006/09/19/installing-refit-on-the-hidden-efi-system-partition/

Mounted the messed up macbook via firewire to another one and followed the instructions to the letter, question mark issue persists...
Title: Re: Did I mess up my Macbook's boot sector?
Post by: randomm on July 13, 2009, 10:19:51 PM
Okay, just in case this is useful for someone else in the future, I managed to fix this just with fdisk. It turned out that either there was no boot record whatsoever, or no partition marked active. Setting the booting drive via nice GUI tools that come with the OS X installation media were no good, but with running this I'm back to normal:

use Terminal on the installation DVD / media and ...

fdisk /dev/disk0 (should list partitions on the disk, unfortunately I got a lot of zeros)
fdisk -u /dev/disk0 (creates the new MBR record, apparently :))
fdisk -e /dev/disk0 (or whatever the drive is that you're wanting to play with)

Mine complained: "could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory"... I ignored this as I was partly following instructions on this page: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9173024

I knew that my disk only had one visible partition (except for the EFI one), so what I then did was:

fdisk: 1> flag 2
Partition 2 marked active.
fdisk:*1> quit
Writing current MBR to disk.

... that's it... rebooting machine as normal.

Please note that this may not work in your case and at any rate remember that using fdisk can erase ALL your data on the drive you're operating on so count me lucky as I didn't really know what I was doing!
Title: Boot Camp on Macbook Pro After Accidental Chameleon Install
Post by: 74205NX on July 17, 2009, 03:53:16 AM
Hey All,

First of all, I'd like to say thanks for the great Chameleon software. Im triple booting XP, Debian, and OS X on my Asus eee 1000HE, and I couldn't be happier.

However happy I may be now, I hit a few snags along the way, and chameleon wouldn't install on many of my flash drives (e.g, Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB) and while trying to figure out what would work and what wouldn't, I ran the cameleon installer 20+ times (from my Macbook Pro), and one time I accidentally ran the install onto my OSX partition on the Macbook Pro. Well, I was a bit frightened, but a reboot let me back into OS X no problems at all, but later when I tried using boot camp to boot into Windows XP it wouldn't work at all. Sad, I know, and fairly expected, I know.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks. ;)

EDIT: I'm aware of the standard solution relying on refit, but I'd like to avoid that if at all possible. I'm also about to upgrade the Hard drive in my MBP tomorrow, so I'll be using Carbon Copy Cloner, maybe if I dont copy over the extra partition? (Beyond the OS X and the WinXP Partitions)
Title: Re: Boot Camp on Macbook Pro After Accidental Chameleon Install
Post by: NC10_Mac on July 17, 2009, 06:56:58 PM
Hi!

I made the same mistake a couple of days ago. I solved the problem while I used a boodloader called rEFIt on my Mac. With rEFIt I received back access to my Vista partition.

You can install rEFIt on CD first if you would like to test the boodloader before installing it on your Mac. You can find rEFIt here: http://refit.sourceforge.net/

Hope that helps!
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: Yoshi on August 02, 2009, 08:11:02 PM
I have the same problem, and I tried to install Refit with a USB stick from the Leopard install DVD Terminal, but at the moment to  run enable.sh, the terminal tell me: command not found You must run enable.sh on an inter-based Macintosh.
And I have an Intel-based Macintosh !!

How can I install it ?
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: btd457 on October 18, 2009, 07:29:17 AM
Chameleon screwed up my mac too, took about 8 hours to repair (requires an external hard drive):

1. Take your OS X cd and put it into your mac.
2. Power up and hold down the "c" key.
3. When the apple appears, release the c key.
4. When the install screen appears go to utilities (located on the bar on the top of the screen) and select the "disk utilites".
5. Click on your mac hard drive and click on the "repair" tab.
6. Click on your hard drive as the source and an external hard drive as the destination, this will back up your files on an external hard drive, and click the option below, I believe it's "restore".
7. Click on your mac hard drive and click erase, and erase your hard drive.
8. Go to the utilities option and click "start up disk".
9. Select your OS X disk.
10. Restart and reinstall your OS X disk.

Hope that helps!!!
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: dkedinger on November 06, 2009, 06:29:08 PM
rEFIt worked perfect for me! I imaged rEFIt to USB and then loaded up partitioning tool. Ran it's suggestion and then it booted fine!

Thanks...I definitely feel like an idiot. I only noticed the error after. I was thinking the installer was to setup a usb stick or dvd with the necessary boot files. You live you learn...I have learned alot after hacking three machines...read everything. Successfully done a Dell Mini 9, Dell Mini 10v, and Dell Studio 14z.
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: aschar on January 02, 2010, 12:15:16 AM
Another Method to fix this is the following:
1. Boot your OSX Install DVD on your Mac
2. go to disk utility (its under Tools)
3. select your osx HDD (which cannot boot) and select  "partition" and resize your Volume just a little bit (move the lower right corner), that will rewrite your mbr (your data will not be erased on a standard guid partition scheme)
4. reboot 
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: nettoks on January 30, 2010, 02:11:21 PM
How about if the "affected" mac that have had the Chameleon v2 rc4 installed still is running and just havent rebooted yet since the "accident"?

Are there anyway of un-installing then? Anf if how?

Thanks, pete

ps.
I consider myself somewhat driven in modding computers, consoles etc. and have done so in many years. Have several lenovo netbooks running OS X for the kids and so on.
So the fact that I actually fell into this trap tells me that not all the documentation is quite good enough.

I had watched a few guides where tha RC1 was beeing used, and since there was NO documentation along with the RC4 I assumed that it worked in the same way (choosing desitation media during install) but no... so now I am in the same situation as a few other people. Not critisizing the great work that people do, but many things in the process of creating a hackintosh are taken for granted by the ones who make the guides. And especially the fact that you SHOULD NOT INSTALL THE CHAMELEON ON A GENUINE MAC" is not that apparent anywhere, except after you have done it.  ;)

Just my 5 cents of "tips" to the developers
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: rocksteady on January 30, 2010, 03:09:19 PM
Hi Pete

Documentation is still under heavy development, hence the couple of stickies in the forum. You're welcome to help us if you feel like doing so.

I don't understand why a Mac (not hack) user would want to experiment/cannibalise his Mac with a bootloader that's meant to be used w/ hacks. There's a red warning about this, both in the FAQ (http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,754.msg3288.html#msg3288) + @ the blog (http://chameleon.osx86.hu/articles/chameleon-20-rc4-is-out) where every subsequent release is announced.
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: Terk on January 13, 2011, 10:56:13 PM
Fixing Real Mac installed with Chameleon with refit
1. Download and burn Refit (refit.source forge.net) onto blank DVD.
2. Insert DVD into DVD drive
3. When booting Mac, hold option key and select Refit.
4. Click the disk utility button.
5. When it asks to click Y or N, click Y.
6. On main refit menu, arrow key to Mac icon
7. Click icon and wait for 3-5 min.
8. Reboot Mac, while booting hold option.
9. Select Macintosh HD when asks for which system to boot.
10. Once desktop loads, delete all traces of chameleon. (the .chameleon file, the chameleon.pkg, and all else related. These are hidden files so you will need to know how to view hidden files.)

This is the process I used to fix it, hope it helps. Cheers!
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: badboy711 on January 30, 2011, 11:46:10 AM
Thanks
Title: Re: Bad Idea: Chameleon was installed on my real Mac and now it won't boot
Post by: jontresko on April 18, 2011, 11:28:03 AM
None of this has worked for me. Even after following your steps with refit, hen selecting Mac from refit, it goes back to the kernal panic screen on startup "You must restart...."

Not sure where to go from here. Don't have the restore disk, so I'm trying to download it now. Relly would rather not have to do a reinstall if I don't have to...