Newbie help with Chameleon 2.0rc1, EFI partition, Kexts, EFI strings, etc

[yozzozo]

Hi,

 

I'm currently freshly up and running with a Windows 7 RC / Mac OS X 10.5.6 (retail vanilla) dual boot scenario.

I'm using Chameleon 2.0rc1 as my main bootloader, installed to my Acer Aspire 5920G laptop's HDD (MBR partitioned).

 

My HDD is partitioned like so:

#1: Windows 7 boot partition with BOOTMGR

#2: Windows 7 system root (main partition)

#3: Chameleon (for boot switching and loading Mac OS X)

#4: Mac OS X, retail vanilla install.

 

Chameleon is installed to partition #3, and works beautifully.

 

I'm attempting to have my system set up in a way that the OS X partition never gets touched (for kexts), and all my custom kexts are put in the EFI partition where Chameleon resides.

 

I *think* this is working right now (can't really tell if the kexts I have in Extra/Extensions have actually loaded or not), but I also put NVinject.kext in there (which has previously worked fine when located in /System/Library/Extensions) and it doesn't seem to want to load.

I'm getting "VGA: family specific matching failed" or similar in my system boot log (dmesg). And it's clear that it is not being hardware accelerated. I have a GeForce 8600M GT 256MB.

 

I've also heard about "EFI Strings" that you can put in your com.apple.Boot.plist located in the EFI partition alongside the kext extensions. How do you generate these strings, and is it true that if you have one you don't need a kext injector (for example, if I had a VGA EFI String, I wouldn't need NVinject)?

 

Also: are kexts located next to Chameleon in the EFI partition loaded before stuff in /System/Library/Extensions?

Do they override the ones located in /System/Library/Extensions if there is a duplicate copy in both places?

Say you have a modified AppleHDA.kext, and you want the version in the EFI partition to override the one that came in the retail Leopard DVD install... can we do this?

Or am I approaching all of this the wrong way... can anyone that knows about this stuff please let me know?

 

Thanks!