Chameleon on EFI and Themes?

[phr0z]

Hi there!

 

Not a mayor issue but would be sweet to get it working..

 

 

So I have 1 hdd with 3 partitions as following.

 

disk0s1 = EFI partition

disk0s2 = OSX 10.6

disk0s3 = Windows 7

 

EFI partition looks like this:

 

\boot

\Extra

\Extra\com.apple.Boot.plist

\Extra\DSDT.aml

\Extra\Extensions\

\Extra\Themes\

 

Permissions on Extension and Themes is

chown -R root:wheel

chmod -R 755

 

Permissions on com.apple.Boot.plist and DSDT.aml is

-R root:admin

-R 644

 

Theme is defined in plist like this:

<key>Theme</key>

<string>Default</string>

 

Default folder is located under Theme's with same permissions.

 

Chameleon was installed with RC2 pkg with optionals Themes and EFI HFS.

RC2 boot file replaced with RC4 r684.

 

 

And the problem is that it only loads the Default theme even though I've replaced the folder Default(Default theme) with other graphics or define another theme folder in plist.

 

Thanks!

[blackosx]

Your answer could lie in the fact that the old Chameleon installer you have used won't work correctly for 10.6 and EFI installations, you will need to do install Chameleon manually.

 

I recommend reading this post (and the whole thread) for a help session for a similar problem to yours.

And then follow these instructions to sort your problem.

[phr0z]

Awesome! Thanks

[jonnajulee]

If you are already running non-retail OS X on a GPT (or hybrid GPT/MBR aka “bootcamp”) formatted drive and want to move up to installing retail, this guide is for you.

 

All the information in this how-to was blatantly stolen from existing guides found on various forums.

Some of it is from the guide at neonkoala/insanelymac (not sure where it's originally from) some of it is from here, but most parts are from munky’s boot-132 guide at InsanelyMac.

Since we cannot link to those here and I don’t think it’s cool just to copy and paste, I have done a mashup version tracing my own steps upgrading from iPC 10.5.6 to 10.5.6 retail.

 

Background info:

 

I wanted to make my existing iPC installation boot from the EFI partition and move all my patches there.

When I got that working, I wanted to try applying the 10.5.6 combo updater on top of the iPC installation.

I knew that if it worked out, I would then be able to install and subsequently boot retail 10.5.6 using the same EFI partition.

 

Guess what - it worked. “And now, you can too!”

 

First you need to format the EFI system partition - note the command is different on Snow Leopard. If you use the 10.5.x command it will still work, but the EFI partition will become an ordinary HFS partition and will always be mounted, and that's messy.

 

Open Terminal and type sudo –s (and your password)

 

Type diskutil list to find out where your EFI partition is.

 

Normally, disk0s1 will be your EFI partition. If it is on another disk, modify the following command accordingly so you don’t accidentally the wrong partition.

 

If you don’t see an EFI partition, that means your drive is MBR formatted and that you should stop following this guide immediately.

 

10.5.x:

 

diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" "EFI" /dev/disk0s1

 

10.6.x:

 

newfs_hfs -v EFI /dev/disk0s1

 

Your EFI partition now has a filesystem and you can go ahead and install Chameleon 2.0 on it.

 

Download the Chameleon 2.0 binary package, extract the archive somewhere, and (still in Terminal) navigate to the folder named i386 (or the folder you extracted Chameleon to, for example ~/desktop/C2RC5_r631).

 

Create a mountpoint and mount the EFI partition:

 

mkdir /Volumes/EFI

mount_hfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI

 

Install boot0 to the MBR:

./fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk0

 

Install boot1h to the bootsector of the EFI partition:

dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk0s1

Then, copy the file ‘boot’ to it:

cp boot /Volumes/EFI

 

In order to prevent the File System Events Daemon (fseventsd) from logging on the EFI partition, which can cause it to become unmountable, type:

 

touch /Volumes/EFI/.fseventsd/no_log

 

The following step isn’t necessary on all systems but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Make sure the EFI partition is flagged as active.

Verify that you are still in the i386 directory - then type the fdisk command and then each line as shown. Again, if your EFI partition is not on disk0 modify as needed:

 

1) ./fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0

(Ignore any “fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory” error)

 

2) f 1

 

3) w

 

4) q

 

Now you can copy the extra, themes and extensions folders, your DSDT.aml, your com.apple.Boot.plist, your smbios.plist and of course your extensions to it.

 

If you’ve followed the guide step by step until here the EFI partition is already mounted and (skip this part if you're on 10.6.x) you can type…

 

killall Finder (note, capitalized F - also, this step is not necessary on 10.6, as the EFI partition will mount by itself when creating the mount-point)

 

…the Finder reloads and the EFI partition gets a drive icon on your desktop. If you're on 10.6.x the EFI partition will be accessible as soon as it's mounted.

 

You can now start experimenting and getting all your patches and modified kernel extensions running from the EFI partition.

 

When you are done moving stuff to it you should always un-mount it (yes, the command is umount, not unmount):

 

umount /Volumes/EFI (If this fails, do umount -f /Volumes/EFI)

 

And delete the mountpoint:

 

rm -rf /Volumes/EFI

 

I’ve already told you how to mount it again, in the beginning of the guide.

 

If you ever get “mount_hfs: Invalid argument” when trying to mount the EFI partition, do this to fix it (again assuming the EFI partition is on Disk0):

 

fsck_hfs /dev/disk0s1

 

Once you have everything working, you can create a Chameleon boot CD (there’s a guide here already) using the same files, so that you can boot the retail DVD and install retail from scratch. When running the OS X installer from the DVD simply chose to replace your existing installation. The EFI partition will remain untouched and you should be able to boot from it when the installer is done.

 

Good luck.

 

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jonnajulee