strange error (but still boots) after cloning to new HD [solved]

[obijohn]

So I got myself an early Christmas present, a new 750GB hard drive for my hackintosh laptop. My setup is a dual-boot of Leopard and Tiger. I partitioned the new drive and then cloned the laptop's two partitions to the new drive using Carbon Copy Cloner at the block level (I had to boot into Leopard to clone the Tiger partition, and vise versa). I then re-install Chameleon as the boot-loader on the new drive, and after this everything seemed to work except for one small hiccup.

 

The first partition, Leopard, boots without errors. When I select to boot the Tiger partition from the Chameleon boot prompt, I immediately get a message that says "Error parsing plist fileDarwin/x86" and then "Pausing for 5 seconds", after which it boots into Tiger just fine with no other errors. Running dmesg doesn't show the error, it just begins with the info right after the pause as it starts the regular boot.

 

I did some searching, but every place I saw this error mentioned, the person could not boot beyond that point, either freezing there or going back to the boot menu. I can't find another situation where it went straight from there into the regular boot process, so I'm kind of stuck on how to fix this error as it adds an additional 5 or 6 seconds to the boot time. Most mention com.apple.Boot.plist as the culprit, but I've already checked the file on both partitions, and they are identical with no added options by me other than changing the timeout to 4 from 8. Why would it boot Leopard without this error but throw it when booting Tiger?

 

If it's not com.apple.Boot.plist, what other plist file could it be? Any suggestions?

 

EDIT: Solved! Turns out it WAS com.apple.Boot.plist, although the "error" was not obvious at all. See my post #4 below to fix if this happens to you.

[obijohn]

One more little clue I just found. When I boot with the -v option into the Tiger partition, it spits out a bunch of kexts it's loading and the one directly before the "error parsing" message is System.kext/Plugins/Unsupported.kext

 

I checked it's Info.plist and that seems fine. I have a second backup of my extensions folder and I copied the System.kext from the backup, but I still get the error. I repaired permissions as well, so that's not the problem either.

 

This has really got me stumped!

[obijohn]

After further investigation, it appears that Unsupported.kext is NOT the culprit. The "error parsing plist" is displayed immediately before any of the kexts are loaded, and Unsupported.kext just happens to be the last before the 5-second pause and then the boot continues.

 

The only thing different after putting in the new cloned HD is the UUID of the drive. Perhaps there's a plist somewhere that has the old UUID, which is loaded very early on in the boot process? It's not com.apple.Boot.plist, I have not EFI strings or anything like that in there. Is there another place I can look?

[obijohn]

Whew! Finally figured it out. When I compared com.apple.Boot.plist on both partitions, I thought they were identical. Turns out there was a very slight difference. Here's the version that was on my tiger partition:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>4</string>
<key>Boot Graphics</key>
<string>Yes</string>
</dict>
</plist>

 

And here's the version that was on my leopard partition (which didn't throw an error):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>4</string>
<key>Boot Graphics</key>
<string>Yes</string>
</dict>
</plist>

 

Spot the difference? In the DOCTYPE section, the leopard version has "Apple" and the tiger version had "Apple Computer". Well, when I changed it to just "Apple", the tiger partition boots without any errors now. I have NO IDEA why it didn't throw an error on the other hard drive but it did on the new one.

 

Anyway, now I can sleep peacefully before Christmas!