disabler.kext removed... still preventing boot ?

[C.44]

Hi, i installed this hackintosh months ago with a tutorial on here. I created a couple of partitions, installed iDeneb's 1.3 OSX 10.5.5 (iirc) and from there used the official Snow Leopard install DVD with the modded mpkg to install SL to a different partition.

 

I use Chameleon for multiboot but a while ago i did something stupid... during a boot something went wrong and i thought i'd be a smart idea to delete disabler.kext. No worries, i got a bunch of KP's and eventually i smartened up and copied the file from my other computer that is identical (yes exactly the same hardware and drive config). That worked at the time.

 

However, every time i have to reboot or power down my computer since then i know i'm in for a couple of hours of figuring out what's wrong and why i won't boot.

 

Never, i mean NEVER, does this thing just boot. There's always something wrong with the disabler.kext it seems.

 

I've tried redownloading it, getting a fresh copy from my other computer, removing the caches (mkext right ?) but nothing. I'm at a point where i just don't know what to do anymore. Reinstall is just not an option at this moment because there's valuable data in a couple of programs that are installed.

 

This time it seems like it's completely ignoring my /Snow/Extra/Extensions. I can remove just about anything from it and it'll still find EVERYTHING that was once in there. Very weird. I have renamed Disabler.kext and removed all mkexts (renamed them too). Somehow during boot it still finds it. And i've checked it's not in the /Snow/System/Library/Extensions or /Snow/Library/Extensions.

 

I just renamed the disabler back to its original Disabler.kext and renamed NullCPUPowermanagement.kext to something different. Same thing happens there, i still shows up in the last bit of the boot.

 

Speaking of that last bit of boot... it doesn't actually boot. Right now it tells me it can't find the com.apple.kext.iokit (iirc) but it most certainly is present in /Snow/System/Library/Frameworks. It's called IOKit.framework and i assume that's the right one, because it's the only thing i could find on my working system.

 

Could there be anything i'm missing ? Is there something worth trying ?

[C.44]

Still poking the system, trying to figure out what the problem might be. Then i realized that during install i had to enter a UUID for the partition that Snow was installed into. I got looked around in the files i could find (com.apple.Boot.plist and PlatformUUID.kext) and replaced the UUID with the UUID of the computer it should be booting.

 

So far i got one Kernel panic due, but couldn't recreate it, just got stuck after the IOAPIC message again. I then remembered i also had the mkext's (caches i presume) so i rename both of them. Then it gave me a KP and when i was wise enough to have it boot in verbose mode.

 

Ofcourse it panicked again and this time i saw that fsck actually made it panic. So then i thought... well i just tossed my caches, let's try -f -v instead of just the verbose mode. After that it just screamed at me that disabler.kext had some dependencies that weren't 64bit allowed (can't remember what dependencies atm but still). It stops at the IOAPIC message again.

 

Any ideas would be great

[MiniHack]

Still poking the system, trying to figure out what the problem might be. Then i realized that during install i had to enter a UUID for the partition that Snow was installed into. I got looked around in the files i could find (com.apple.Boot.plist and PlatformUUID.kext) and replaced the UUID with the UUID of the computer it should be booting.

 

So far i got one Kernel panic due, but couldn't recreate it, just got stuck after the IOAPIC message again. I then remembered i also had the mkext's (caches i presume) so i rename both of them. Then it gave me a KP and when i was wise enough to have it boot in verbose mode.

 

Ofcourse it panicked again and this time i saw that fsck actually made it panic. So then i thought... well i just tossed my caches, let's try -f -v instead of just the verbose mode. After that it just screamed at me that disabler.kext had some dependencies that weren't 64bit allowed (can't remember what dependencies atm but still). It stops at the IOAPIC message again.

 

Any ideas would be great

 

I was just mooching around and saw this post. Just a thought...if you think it is finding stuff that you had deleted is there any chance that when you installed to your machine you actually put your "extra" folder on the hidden EFI partition. If that is the case and you later forgot and have an extra folder also at your HD root, then maybe the system is finding the hidden "extra" folder and using that. In that case, do some googling on how to get the EFI partition to show up and check it out.

Second, if your system is telling you some dependencies aren't 64-bit then try booting in 32 bit mode and see if that works out for you.

Good luck.

[C.44]

I was just mooching around and saw this post. Just a thought...if you think it is finding stuff that you had deleted is there any chance that when you installed to your machine you actually put your "extra" folder on the hidden EFI partition. If that is the case and you later forgot and have an extra folder also at your HD root, then maybe the system is finding the hidden "extra" folder and using that. In that case, do some googling on how to get the EFI partition to show up and check it out.

Second, if your system is telling you some dependencies aren't 64-bit then try booting in 32 bit mode and see if that works out for you.

Good luck.

 

 

Thing is... there is no hidden EFI. I installed 2 versions of OSX. 1st the regular leopard from a hacked install disc and when that was all setup, i loaded a dmg of SL, went for the OSInstall.mpkg (iirc) and installed it on a secondary partition. That partition also holds Chameleon and the Extra folder with the extensions (and it's cache).

[geiman]

Do a couple of things for me...

 

First of all, make sure you have no hidden EFI partition; if your disk is formatted as a GPT partition style (like Macs like) and not MBR (normal setup for windows, linux, etc..) then you will have an EFI partition. It is created automatically when you format the disk. Use something like GParted from a ubuntu live cd to look at your drive; you should see your two partitions with OS X, and then a third smaller partition about 200MB in size (you may have more or less partitions, but you should have at least those).

 

Second, just to clarify, when you write /Snow/Extra/Extensions is that the actual path, or are you putting that "/Snow" on the front meaning your boot drive? A leading "/" on a path means the root of the drive, so /Extra/Extensions means there is a folder named Extra, with a subfolder named Extensions, living in the root of my hard drive. No other prefix is needed, it makes things a little confusing.

 

Now, your kexts are reappearing because they are somewhere else on your system; it can't create them so they must be there somewhere. Look in /System/Library/Extensions as well as your /Extra/Extensions (and anywhere else kexts are stored) to make sure you don't have duplicate kexts. Also look in / to see if Chameleon (or whatever you boot loader is) has a hidden folder it is loading kexts from. One version of Chameleon or PC EFI (can't remember which) I had installed at one point in time was loading kexts from a hidden folder located at /.Chameleon. To see that folder, you will need to use your -a flag in ls, ie.. "ls -lah" in terminal. If you have such a folder, check out what is inside.

 

One last thing you can try is to search your drive for whatever kext seems to be re-appearing to see where it may be coming from. For example, use find in terminal like so:

 

sudo find / -name "Disabler.kext"

 

That may take a while, but it should find any occurrence of the kext so you can see where all it is coming from.