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[Guide] Boot from EFI partition, zero modification installs on Intel SSE2 or better...


munky
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Hi Munky, Thanks for the great bootloader!

 

Sorry if I missed this but is there a technical reason MBR can't be used or is it just the OSInstall,mpkg that won't allow MBR installation that makes MBR an issue? I ask because I have my EEE 1000H dual booting XP & OS X using MBR partitions. I originally had the stock boot-132 installed to disk0s2 and could choose between my installations during boot by up or down arrow. I replaced the original bootloader with yours (6.1) and copied all of kexts needed from initrd.img & my extras folder into the appropriate places on my Munkified EFI partition and I can boot the same way. up arrow and load XP or Down arrow and choose OS X. I reinstalled from my slightly modified 10.5.4 retail disk (only modification was to change OSInstall.mpkg to allow install on MBR partition) then updated my new install to 10.5.6 and it looks like in the logs that it is trying to load from the EFI partition but some dependencies are not correct. I don't know if it is because of MBR or if I just need to figure out which dependencies need to be met but these same kexts were used in S/L/E on my previous install that had been updated to 10.5.6. My other thought is that OS X is trying to use the newer versions instead of the older ones loaded from EFI? The kexts I am having an issue with are for Intel950 video and AppleAzaliaAudio. I do see in the logs where some of my kexts that I only have on the EFI partition are loading (SMBIOSEnabler.kext loads for example) so I don't know if it's just a kext issue where I need to use updated versions or if it just plain old won't work.

 

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

Toonces

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Thanks muchly, munky, but I have a problem. I tried to update to 10.5.5, and it finishes fine, but here's what I get:

1. It reboots from OSX, fine.

2. As it booted, it rebooted[with MACH reboot], okay no problem I guess.

3. Now, it Hangs on:

localhost mDNSResponder[23]: sandbox_init error
Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.bsd.dirhelper err=1100
Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.distributed_notifications.2 err=1100
Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.ocspd err=1100
Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.mDNSResponderHelper err=1100
Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.SystemConfiguration.configd err=1100

 

Any clues? Rig: See Mizuki in sig.

 

 

Did you ever figure out a solution to this post? I'm updating a retail install on a dell core 2 duo from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 and cant' get past this same error.

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Hi Munky,

 

is it possible to increase the size of this node to get GFX-Strings working please?

 

All of this guide is working here except EFI-strings for my graphics card and Ethernet...

 

Thx in advance and Merry Christmas! :D

 

 

 

So i quote myself...

 

 

is there any chance for this or have we wait for the new chameleon Release? 

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So i quote myself...

 

 

is there any chance for this or have we wait for the new chameleon Release?

 

Wow, your patience in waiting for a reply is incredible. You gave him 70 hours and 14 minutes over a holiday weekend before you reposted your question.

 

To answer your question though, you'll have to wait.

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Leoopardoo: I had the Partition Magic problem. If you even run the program, you are screwed. Even if you don't use any features, even if you open an close it your GUID osx drives will be toasted. Just opening Partition Magic, will kill any GUID drive.

 

I found a way to recover them. The utility is called Testdisk.

 

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

That program will recover messed up GUID HFS partition tables and it will recover messed up partition tables by Partition Magic. Hope this helps anyone out with this problem. I helped me to save a 500gb osx partition I had. This was program was my xmas miracle and I hope it helps you guys out if your are in the same mess.

 

btw and a little bit off topic, anyone know when the new chameleon is coming. Have heard it is just around the corner, but I am still anxiously waiting. Anyone here with the inner scoop?

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Leoopardoo: I had the Partition Magic problem. If you even run the program, you are screwed. Even if you don't use any features, even if you open an close it your GUID osx drives will be toasted. Just opening Partition Magic, will kill any GUID drive.

 

I found a way to recover them. The utility is called Testdisk.

 

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

That program will recover messed up GUID HFS partition tables and it will recover messed up partition tables by Partition Magic. Hope this helps anyone out with this problem. I helped me to save a 500gb osx partition I had. This was program was my xmas miracle and I hope it helps you guys out if your are in the same mess.

 

btw and a little bit off topic, anyone know when the new chameleon is coming. Have heard it is just around the corner, but I am still anxiously waiting. Anyone here with the inner scoop?

 

Yes !! I've had exactly the same problem... just run it without any modifications... At that time I have recovered all data using HFS explorer under Win and Time Machine backups. Later I found a command that might help:

 

gpt recover /dev/diskX

 

but never had a chance to try it (hopefully) since I removed anything related to PowerQuest...

 

Sorry for being off topic :P

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good work nameless2k. :D

 

(..)

I am VERY glad to hear that and can't stop reading it again and again :)

 

For those who don't know: there is a "one click" EFI autoinstallation script called EPOS I. , that automatizes Munky's approach to a certain degree. Besides custom kernel installation, the rest of the stuff is automatized.

  • automatically determining of EFI partition identifier
  • formating, mounting etc. of EFI partition
  • copying and installing all the required bootloaders to their appropriate locations
  • autoinstalling kexts
  • autogenerating of metakernel cache (.mkext)
  • copying of com.apple.Boot.plist
  • supports autoextraction mkext and com.apple.Boot.plist from Boot-132 CDs (currently need to comply with the SlimBuild-Preboot standard)
  • that means currently the Gigabyte EP35-DS3 users have a very nice live installing Leopard on their machines

I had to update to version 0.97 because I found a minor bug in the autoextraction function for the com.apple.Boot.plist (yes I know the code needs a clean up, but my time is very limited). Anyway I have corrected this issue and released a new version. It works perfectly in our testing environments.

 

Find the EPOS I. Script here in this article...

 

I really really appreciate more of your feedback.

 

 

Kudos to all of you and especially to Munky. I love this scene :)

 

P.S. I prepped a video of version 0.95 in action (takes 50seconds to perform all steps). Find the video here:

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This thread has had its fair share of success stories and thank yous but I feel obliged to thank munky for his wonderful guide and a few other people in here for their insightful answers.

 

History:

 

I started muckying around with mac os x a few weeks back, based on the fact that I wanted to pwn my iPhone so to not upgrade the baseband, trying to get it to run in VmWare. While I was successful enough to get my iPhone upgraded with my VmWare attempt, I kind of got hooked to the whole concept of trying out mac os x and started looking into OSX86.

 

Current status:

 

After a few somewhat successful installations of Kalyway (10.5.2) and iDeneb (10.5.5), and plenty of formats, I decided that I wanted to do this with as vanilla a build I can. So following munky's guide and applying a few other things I gathered mainly from this site, I now have a stable 10.5.6 vanilla kernel running on my HP m9300t. I am nowhere near finished, there is still a lot to do, like figuring out kexts/EFI strings for my ps2 keyboard, ethernet, sound and graphics, but the base is there and I could not help but feel some sort of sense of accomplishment yesterday.

 

For absolute newbies:

 

If I have anything to offer to anyone newer than me in the arena (if such a thing exists) it is the following. Most of this is pretty obvious but still, this is all I can contribute right now:

 

1) If you are going to try this on your sole machine, then you must really feel adventurous. I would never start something like this without a stable machine next to it that I can use while I am setting up osx86.

 

2) I would dedicate the machine that is going to run osx86 to getting osx86 running before doing anything else. Expect to lose whatever you have on the hard drive(s) you are installing osx86 on, possibly on all hard drives on this machine. If you make this decision early on, and know you have backed up anything of value you had on that machine, things are going to be much simpler for you.

 

3) 2 Hard Drives on the machine are quite helpful. With the price of hard drives nowadays you may save yourself countless hours spending $50 up front and buying a second hard drive (if you don't have a smaller older hard drive lying around). If your older hard drive is not a SATA drive, then you may want to spend the $50 anyways to get a SATA drive. Not a requirement, but simpler. Also newer hardware in general (but maybe not absolutely latest and greatest for support purposes) is going to make things easier. I know some of you may think 'let me get this going on my older P3 I have lying around' but then you may spend a lot longer trying to hack something into hardware it was never meant to run in, and I am not sure you would be doing MAC OS X justice by trying it on your older stuff. If off course you are already hooked into MAC OS X from another experience and just trying to make some use of that older PC, disregard this.

 

4) A utility installation of MAC OS X on a second hard drive is going to make things easier. Again not an absolute requirement, but a good choice in my mind. I have iDeneb 1.3 running on my second hard drive. Doing the utility install on a second hard drive makes things much easier (doing it in 1 hard drive may make things harder as you may enter bootloader hell). To keep the bootloaders separate I always switch the booting order of the hard drives through my BIOS, as such my bootloader on my second hard drive never affected my installation attempts on my first.

 

5) Take one step at a time. It makes things simpler. For example you may not need to get 10.5.6 running right away as it complicates matters with DSDT patching and all. If you do not get it running with the first try (and you better expect not to) there are too many parameters you need to look into. Furthermore trying to learn everything at once brings information overload. Get OS X running to verify you sorted out all the bootloader stuff and then upgrade to 10.5.6. 10.5.6 was just an example, this is an approach to take with every piece.

 

Again all of the above come from a newbie that knows very little and does not even have a fully working osx86 install. If you are a newbie like me, take it at what it is worth.

 

Finally even with the guides often going much beyond just guiding, expect to spend some time researching and learning. Don't get discouraged. Search and google is your friend. If you want everything to be spoon-fed to you then you might be successful in getting a build going now but are most definitely going to hit problems in the future. This is the rule of tinkering with computer stuff. Expect to dedicate at the very least a few afternoons on getting an osx86 machine up to the point of good usefulness and be thankful that it is not months based on the work of munky and others around here. If you want painless MAC OS X and corporate support, you may want to take a second job rather than tinker around, save up, and go buy a Mac from Apple. :(

 

Bow and exit:

 

Once again, thank you munky and all for all your work and your willingness to help.

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thanks so much for this guide munky.. an hour ago i was still installing kext's into S/L/E but now i've got a 99.9% vanilla (because of AppleHDA.kext) installation.

 

i'm only having 1 issue.. for some reason, i can't get SMBIOSEFI.kext to load of the EFI partition. All my other kexts are fine.. just this one :D

 

any one else had this problem?

 

edit: i've just put them all into the /EFI/Boot/Extensions folder and removed the mkext file. seems to have done the job :)

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Munky,

 

First of all, thanks for all your hard work in putting all this together.

 

I have one question before I do this.

 

In your instructions in the Phase 4 section there is a Step 7: rm -rf /Volumes/EFI

 

Step 7 deletes the /Volumes/EFI directory and all its contents.

 

I do not understand why you have this step, since in steps 1-5 the instructions create /Volumes/EFI and add files to the the directory. It makes no sense to me to create and add all this stuff, and then just blow it away once the stuff is there. Can you explain the purpose of Step 7 in the Phase 4 section?

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you're not removing the contents - in the previous step you unmount /dev/disk0s1 from the /Volumes/EFI folder. The next step is to remove the /Volumes/EFI mount point. Everything that you put in there stays in there. If you dont unmount it - you will delete everything inside.

 

So as long as you run the umount /Volumes/EFI before you run rm -rf /Volumes/EFI you'll be fine :D

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I tried to do a new post but can't seem to find how to do that.

I have this running on two MSI NEo P965 logic boards, very nice thanks.

If anyone has problems after the software update from apple, use the 123 boot loader disk, to startup using the leopard install CD when you have it up launch the Startup disk application and select your startup disk, if your disk does not appear DO NOT SELECT ANYTHING then hit the restart button, on my logic board this just hangs the machine, however I think the restart command is just not getting to the logic board, shutdown however works, so just hit restart and then after about 30 seconds hit the reset button, remove your leopard CD and it will startup ! well it does with me....

Two things

 

EFI disk will not mount after install it reports it is busy.... ?? Any help here ?

System Profiler ... "about this Mac" crashes the finder and system profiler it's self cannot report RAM or other information, is there any way to trick the system into thinking it is a real mac and get these working ???

 

Last thing how do you disable the self test on the MSI Logic board and boot straight into the system I do not want to choose the startup disk I want the EFI partition to hand over straight to my main disk.

 

Thanks,

 

This is great.

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I tried to do a new post but can't seem to find how to do that.

I have this running on two MSI NEo P965 logic boards, very nice thanks.

If anyone has problems after the software update from apple, use the 123 boot loader disk, to startup using the leopard install CD when you have it up launch the Startup disk application and select your startup disk, if your disk does not appear DO NOT SELECT ANYTHING then hit the restart button, on my logic board this just hangs the machine, however I think the restart command is just not getting to the logic board, shutdown however works, so just hit restart and then after about 30 seconds hit the reset button, remove your leopard CD and it will startup ! well it does with me....

does the boot 132 cd contain psystar's openhaltrestart.kext? this might fix your reboot issue...

 

System Profiler ... "about this Mac" crashes the finder and system profiler it's self cannot report RAM or other information, is there any way to trick the system into thinking it is a real mac and get these working ???

try smbiosenabler.kext by kabyl or a modded applesmbios.kext.

 

afaik the pseudo real mac thing like showing "mac pro" does not work anymore since 10.5.2.

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Please, is there a way to dualboot windows on the SAME drive? I have this currently installed along windows but to boot into mac i have to set disk0s1 active and to boot windows i have to set disk0s3 active.... EasyBCD did not work for me.

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try smbiosenabler.kext by kabyl or a modded applesmbios.kext

where can i find the latest smbiosenabler.kext file? there doesn't seem to be any source for it. I'm using SMBresolver which is working great. I found that AppleSMBIOSEFI.kext won't load from the mkext file on the EFI partition.

 

afaik the pseudo real mac thing like showing "mac pro" does not work anymore since 10.5.2.

yeah it does - i have all legit info in my system profiler. MacPro3,1 and a legit macpro serial number. CPU speed, bus speed and memory speed are also all picked up correctly.

 

Please, is there a way to dualboot windows on the SAME drive? I have this currently installed along windows but to boot into mac i have to set disk0s1 active and to boot windows i have to set disk0s3 active.... EasyBCD did not work for me.

not using this method. This method is using a vanilla leopard disc which REQUIRES you to use the GUID partition scheme. windows will not run off a GUID partitioned drive (unless you're using a real mac with bootcamp).

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@Stevekicks: I'm sorry but you're wrong. I am running Windows 7 Build 7000 on this GUID drive, and its running fine, so my question remains

 

The Answer is yes. You can even do it with MBR partitions. you need 3 partitions. The way I have mine setup is disk0s1 = Win7, disk0s2= bootloader (make this one active), disk0s3 = OSX. When the bootloader loads I hit up arrow for Win 7, down arrow for OSX. There's no reason you can't have it with different partitions and if you make your own install DVD from the original, you can have it work with MBR. http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=125739 has the basic method I followed. When I was done I switched to Munky's bootloader following the first post in this thread. Works great on my EEE 1000H dual booting Win 7 & OS X.

 

Toonces

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Sounds like you have an MBR disk, as disk0s1 is Windows 7 when on a GPT disk it is the EFI partition, always. How can you use munkys bootloader when their is no EFI partition? My problem is that when using Munkys bootloader i type 80 and it only lists hd0,2 OSX instead of hd0,2 AND hd0,3 so their is no way for me to boot into windows unless i make the windows partition active, and if i do that then i can't boot mac... (typing 81 does not help)

 

My setup is as follows:

 

disk0s1: EFI partition (modded as guide says)

disk0s2: OSX

disk0s3: Windows7

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Sorry, Yes. I am using MBR at the moment. I set my partitions manually in disk management as follows:

 

disk0s1 = 80GB Windows 7

disk0s2 = 256MB (EFI boot partition)

disk0s3 = 78GB OSX

 

Then I restored a bootable USB boot-132 image from my USB stick to disk0s2. I created the bootable image using http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=115064

 

After that, I followed Munky's guide and switched from the Boot-132 image to Munky's. I don't think the USB method was required to get things booting properly before switching to Munky's bootloader since they are both based off of Chameleon code but I had not yet tried Munky's bootloader when I started.

 

After I switched to Munky's bootloader, I rebooted and had the same 2 choices I had prior to switching. The partition was not hidden under OSX so I added /etc/fstab with a line to not mount disk0s2 and it's once again hidden. All of the kexts load as they should from the EFI partition and I pick my OS at startup. Maybe it's working because I am using MBR?

 

Do you have a boot-132 CD you can boot off of that sees all 3 partitions correctly? I don't think it matters which partitions are which as long as you have the bootloader partition as the one set as active.

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I've got a GPT,

s1 is EFI (of course^^)

s2 Vista SP1

s3 osx

s4 stuff

 

neither bootable USBstick nor Munkys gives me another choice but to boot osx, it's the only one showing up. Normal Chameleon however (without any modifications) detects Vista as well und lets me choose it... That's the reason i'm now waiting for its new release.

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I've got a GPT,

s1 is EFI (of course^^)

s2 Vista SP1

s3 osx

s4 stuff

 

neither bootable USBstick nor Munkys gives me another choice but to boot osx, it's the only one showing up. Normal Chameleon however (without any modifications) detects Vista as well und lets me choose it... That's the reason i'm now waiting for its new release.

 

It must be because I am using MBR then. Munky's bootloader shows me both Windows 7 & OSX partitions. Sorry if I led anyone astray. It's just strange since Munky's is based off of Chameleon that his wouldn't work but Chameleon does.

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Hi Munky, Thanks for the great bootloader!

 

Sorry if I missed this but is there a technical reason MBR can't be used or is it just the OSInstall,mpkg that won't allow MBR installation that makes MBR an issue? I ask because I have my EEE 1000H dual booting XP & OS X using MBR partitions. I originally had the stock boot-132 installed to disk0s2 and could choose between my installations during boot by up or down arrow. I replaced the original bootloader with yours (6.1) and copied all of kexts needed from initrd.img & my extras folder into the appropriate places on my Munkified EFI partition and I can boot the same way. up arrow and load XP or Down arrow and choose OS X. I reinstalled from my slightly modified 10.5.4 retail disk (only modification was to change OSInstall.mpkg to allow install on MBR partition) then updated my new install to 10.5.6 and it looks like in the logs that it is trying to load from the EFI partition but some dependencies are not correct. I don't know if it is because of MBR or if I just need to figure out which dependencies need to be met but these same kexts were used in S/L/E on my previous install that had been updated to 10.5.6. My other thought is that OS X is trying to use the newer versions instead of the older ones loaded from EFI? The kexts I am having an issue with are for Intel950 video and AppleAzaliaAudio. I do see in the logs where some of my kexts that I only have on the EFI partition are loading (SMBIOSEnabler.kext loads for example) so I don't know if it's just a kext issue where I need to use updated versions or if it just plain old won't work.

 

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

Toonces

I can tell you for sure, that audio (exception is 889 i believe) won't load from EFI partition. The reason behind it is dependencies....

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