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unable to boot a once bootable system (mach-o has bad magic number)


eshea
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hi there,

been running a fully functioning hackintosh for about a year and a half now, built to almost the exact same specs as the guide featured on Nofilmschool (http://nofilmschool....d-a-hackintosh/).

It's always run fine but just this morning it's started refusing to boot properly. I've always had to have the ###### disc inserted to get it to the drive selection screen (from which i can choose either macosx or windows), however, it now takes it a very long time to get to this screen, throwing up error messages along the way:

 

 

Quote:

EBIOS read error : Device timeout

Block 0x85cc Sectors 0

 

this appears about 5 times and eventually the disc selection screen appears. However selecting the Macosx partition causes a message to flash up very quickly before returning to the disc selection:

 

 

Quote:

Mach-o file has bad magic number

 

Does anyone know why this would suddenly start happening and if it can be fixed? Any help appreciated.

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Quote:

EBIOS read error : Device timeout

Block 0x85cc Sectors 0

 

this appears about 5 times and eventually the disc selection screen appears.

 

This could also mean that the disk is getting dirty, scratched or the laser lens in the DVD drive is dirty.

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hi guys, thanks for the initial responses.

 

i think it may be a problem with the computer hardware (as mentioned by Rif also). Removing all the HD's and running through my Powerbook in an external enclosure shows that everything is intact an uncorrupted. I'm no expert on this kind of thing but common sense would suggest that it's not the drives themselves (though i could be wrong).

 

After unplugging everything and plugging everything back in a few times Macosx finally booted. I'm going to make a new copy of the ###### disk now and see if that helps improve things any. Is there some way of not needing the ###### disc in the drive in the future?

 

If you can think of alternative reasons this may be happening though i'd like to hear them.

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FIXED! for the benefit of future generations who may be encountering this problem, all it took was a new boot disc. Should probably work on getting the system to not need this though.

 

Thanks for the assistance!

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Why don't you install chameleon and transfer your com.apple.boot.plist, smbios.plist and kexts from your boot disk to your HD?

That way you won't need the boot disk anymore.

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