Issues Booting OSX86 by itself with no other OS

[OSX86tester]

OK im sure this question was asked in the past. Ok I just VNC'd to my mac and under startup disk its selected under network. I dont see any HD's listed. Is there a way to make it use the OSX hd?. if so would someone be so kind to point me in the right direction. Thanks . I inspected a G4 running osx and under startup displays Tigfer 10.3.9 folder so, obviously theres something missing on my installation, that was never corrected.

[Guest BuildSmart]

The drive isn't going to show up in the control panel.

 

Not booting may have to do with the partition scheme used to partition the drive being the Apple scheme so a repartition may be in order.

 

You can also edit the com.apple.Boot.plist file and add the "Timeout" entry mentioned in the wiki to see if it attempt the boot but fails.

 

Boot from the DVD and see if it allows you to boot the drive.

[OSX86tester]

ok is there a command in the terminal I can type??. The way i usually boot to osx is using a live cd running the partition utilities and hit select partition and boot it and it boots. the way I installed oSx was the boot dvd it found a unformatted partition so I set that to OSx journal extended. its the only partition set active. I read on Wiki if a partition has mac HFS by itself it will not boot. I think that is the case.

 

Im sure there is a way to correct this without re-installing correct?

[OSX86tester]

If you notice my boot drive is not mounted! also under volumes there is no mount point!!!

 

Next image you will notice OSX install DVD has an mount point

 

 

Im pretty sure that will fix everything if the mount point is corrected startup disk will display my HD vs network startup

 

 

*UPdate* After screwing around one thing I did not notice under Partition scheme . The OSX86 is MBR there are 2 other choices Guid Partition Partition Table

and Apple Partition map. my question is should i be using GUID. it mentions its for intel based macs. Please advise.

[OSX86tester]

can anyone tell me what partition scheme your using?. On the old JAs 10.4.6 i experience a MBR scheme. set it to GUID still not budging this sucks!

[Rammjet]

Your boot drive is mounted. It would be greyed out if it weren't mounted.

 

"/" is a mount point. That is the mount point of the booted drive (ie - the system drive). It signifies the "root" drive. In other words, it is the root or starting point for everything.

 

And stop looking at the Startup Disk preference panel. A hackintosh will not show up there because it doesn't have the same firmware as a real Mac. The preference panel is looking to the EFI software to tell it what to boot and a hackintosh has BIOS.

 

Are you sure that the OSX partition is set "active"?

 

You are booting a PC with a PC's BIOS that just happens to have OSX on it. You want to have MBR partitions.

[OSX86tester]

Are you sure that the OSX partition is set "active"?

 

*Yes according to SPFDISK and everyother live boot util denotes this active*

 

Ive also deleted the other partitions so now I just have one with osx on it

 

You are booting a PC with a PC's BIOS that just happens to have OSX on it. You want to have MBR partitions.

 

 

That is correct, it is listed as mbr in osx. Now WTF is going wrong i can only get osx to run off a live cd otherwise just a nice black screen. with a blinking * _ *

[Naim Slim]

Don't know if this'll help, but what if you hit F8 when the computer boots?

 

Ideally you should be presented with a boot menu. If so, can you choose your partition in the list?

[OSX86tester]

only time darwin loads is when im on the UBCD and i tell it to boot to that partition but its annoying having to rely on a Stupid Boot cd just to make osx boot. LOL kinda makes osx on a stand alone hd pointless. I have a gut feeling I might have to wipe everything just to make this {censored} work. kinda sad you would think there would be a sudo command or something. funny thing is im not even dualbooting! i wonder if installing bootcamp would make any sort of difference??? so nobody has a screenshot of their startup folder. Im just curious.

[Rammjet]

ok is there a command in the terminal I can type??. The way i usually boot to osx is using a live cd running the partition utilities and hit select partition and boot it and it boots. the way I installed oSx was the boot dvd it found a unformatted partition so I set that to OSx journal extended. its the only partition set active. I read on Wiki if a partition has mac HFS by itself it will not boot. I think that is the case.

 

Im sure there is a way to correct this without re-installing correct?

 

1) Try this:

 

In OSX, go to Terminal and type:

 

sudo fdisk -u /dev/rdisk0

(give password)

 

Reboot

 

2) If that doesn't work, then please repost a pic of Disk Utility showing your partitions

 

3) Here is a picture of my Startup Disk preference pane. As I said before, OSX reads EFI to find the available disks and since our PC's have BIOS and not EFI, it doesn't find anything to list.

 

[OSX86tester]

actually I tried your command with having the osx install disc bash does not recognize sudo commands but fdisk @ the terminal did now. I also tried the method in osx which sudo works and it does prompt me for a password. funny thing is OSX will boot if i have a disk in the drive such as osx boot dvd or a ubcd. My dell laptop has a bios not efi, since it was made in like 2001 or 2002 1.6Ghz c840 . i will attach pics of my box and the various disk utility windowsdisk_util_device_info.tiffdisk_util_drive_info.tiffdisk_util_drive.tiffdisk_util_part_options.tiffdisk_util_partition.tiffchain0.zip

disk_utility_1.tiff

[Rammjet]

OK, you need to edit the com.apple.Boot.plist in the directory /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.

 

Change the entry that says:

 

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string></string>

 

So that is says this:

 

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>rd=disk0s3</string>

 

You can edit the file by dragging it to the Desktop and editing it with TextEdit, dragging it back, answering the 2 resulting dialogs and then followed by repairing permissions on the OSX partition.

 

Or you can do it via Terminal with this command:

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

[OSX86tester]

ok did the bootplist part. This might sound dumb but when you say repairing the permissions which Part should i be highlighting the OSX86 or above that 74.5GB ???

[Rammjet]

Click on the partition "OSX-86" and then click on Repair Permissions.

[OSX86tester]

ok and what does permissions do exactly? it mentioned something about

users differ on /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

should be 0 owner is 501

 

Group differs on /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

should be 80 group is 20

 

Owner and Group are corrected on /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

 

permissions corrected on /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

[OSX86tester]

ok im home rammjet no luck still same issue. whats on the dvd thats not on the hd that would cause it not to boot on its own???

 

if i have the dvd in for 5 seconds it accesses the dvd and then it asks about press f8 for options i take out the dvd and bam it boots to osx. now there has to be some missing files do i need to install darwin? something that tells darwin to run or something otherwise its looking at a blank black screen with a blinking underscore

[Rammjet]

There is something wrong with the boot records on the disk which contains your partition. They still list your partition as being 3rd on the disk even though you have deleted partitions 1 and 2 and they are now part of free space. You can see that your partition is listed as 3rd in 2 places in the following image - at the top, it lists "disk0s3" and at the bottom, is lists the partition number as "3".

 

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?act...ost&id=4485

 

The "fdisk" command should have restored the Darwin bootloader and the boot.plist edit should have forced it to boot the 3rd partition. But I'm guessing that the bad boot records are confusing the hell out of the bootloader so it never even gets to the boot.plist to force it to boot the 3rd partition.

 

The bootloader on the DVD finds that "active" partition and boots it.

[Mebster]

If you're looking to install OSX without any other OSs (i.e. have it as your only operating system on your pc) then I’ve heard you can use a Live CD. There are many other there. Gparted live cd is one. With that you can format the disk to the appropriate type. I've never needed to use a Live CD as i dual boot Win & OSX.

 

One other option i just thought of is to install Windows using FAT format (yes FAT - not NTFS). OSX is able to read/write to FAT (from what I remember). So after you install Windows then insert the OSX DVD and highlight the Windows partition and erase it. Normally with a NTFS partition this isn't possible.

Might be worth a try as you're looking into Live CDs.

 

Hope this helps

[OSX86tester]

@ rammjet there is nothing I can do basically?.

 

@ aceplayer I am using a live cd as mentioned above the very first post. I dont plan on installing another os first if I can get osx to boot on its own then ill mess with winblows. I already have enough servers and pc's runnin winblows. I dont need Fat though its a suggestion, thanks but "no thanks" Im trying to test this as a stand alone os with no Fat ntfs bolox.

[Mebster]

@ rammjet there is nothing I can do basically?.

 

@ aceplayer I am using a live cd as mentioned above the very first post. I dont plan on installing another os first if I can get osx to boot on its own then ill mess with winblows. I already have enough servers and pc's runnin winblows. I dont need Fat though its a suggestion, thanks but "no thanks" Im trying to test this as a stand alone os with no Fat ntfs bolox.

I think you've misunderstood what I was saying about FAT. Currently if you were to try and install OSX on a blank hard drive, you would not be able to select any partition or create any (I think it's possible but don't know how). Now one way to be able select a partition to format it in HFS+ is to use a live CD. With it you can format your hard drive in "some way" so that OSX later is able to read and write to it so that you can then format it in HFS+.

 

Now if you were to have windows installed and you input the OSX DVD you would see the Windows NTFS partition but not be able to format it as OSX is not able to write to NTFS. On the other hand if you were to install Windows in FAT (instead of NTFS), when you then inserted OSX you would be able to select the Windows FAT partition and format it in HFS+ erasing the whole of your windows and leaving just OSX.

So you would be left with just OSX - not FAT (i.e. windows formats)

 

Anyway like I said you can try the Live CD method.

[OSX86tester]

this still has nothing to do with my problem booting to osx. I dont need to format anything. lol as the screens posted above im on OSX86 and its cool. the live cd does f***all my issue is not formatting its having it boot just like u would press the power button and then winxp starts to appear. Thats what im trying to do with osx.