Huge Mess :(

[ileikcaek]

Hello Everyone!

 

I have made a big mess of things and I don't think it can possibly get any worse!

 

I wanted to try OpenSuSE today on a separate hard disk, but I left my Mac OS X Hard Disk connected during the OpenSuSE install and it added grub to the MBR of the OS X hard drive. I now cannot boot to Mac OS X and Chameleon will not load.

 

I took it one step further and I knew I shouldn't have really. To try and repair my OS X hard drive I overwrote the MBR - that did not work as all I got was a flashing underscore when trying to boot the OS X hard drive.

 

I then booted into the OpenSuSE live CD and used ms-sys in terminal but that didn't work as now my OS X disk just says "BOOTMGR Missing - press CTRL + ALT + DEL to reboot"

 

I know I have made a massive n00b mistake - I can see that my OS X partition is still intact I just cannot boot from it due to a messed up MBR.

 

I ask - is there a method/tool I can use to get the correct MBR so chameleon/Mac OS X will work once more?

 

I would hate to have to re-install Mac OS X as it has taken around a year to get a stable working install.

 

Best Regards,

 

Rick

[Foxic]

Boot into OS X using a boot disk such as [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] or Nawcom, it may take a few tries to find one that works with your hardware configuration.

 

Once into OS X reinstall chameleon and any kexts you need in E/E.

[itsjared]

I agree, [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] should do a pretty good job, it's easy too. Just download the img and burn it to a disc. Burn it slowly though.

[ileikcaek]

What I have done... I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leo onto the other hard drive and reinstalled chameleon on the broken install. chameleon now shows up, but booting OS X just hangs (due to AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext) and it says the kernel version is 10.2.0 when it is OS X 10.6.7 so should br 10.7.0.

 

I had no need for the power management disabler before due to having a DSDT. something has gotten totally borked. I will have to take another look tomorrow - I have spent about 8 hours today on this..

 

I am also trying to recover my exFAT partition containing my docs, music, windows applications (dueto having an SSD for windows), games, pictures etc that windows is only recognizing as RAW now - that got wrecked today also..

[itsjared]

Not a great day huh?

[verdant]

What I have done... I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leo onto the other hard drive and reinstalled chameleon on the broken install. chameleon now shows up, but booting OS X just hangs (due to AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext) and it says the kernel version is 10.2.0 when it is OS X 10.6.7 so should br 10.7.0.

 

I had no need for the power management disabler before due to having a DSDT. something has gotten totally borked. I will have to take another look tomorrow - I have spent about 8 hours today on this..

 

I am also trying to recover my exFAT partition containing my docs, music, windows applications (dueto having an SSD for windows), games, pictures etc that windows is only recognizing as RAW now - that got wrecked today also..

 

Try PartedMagic......

[ileikcaek]

Not a great day huh?

Not the best, quite the headache! All I wanted to do at the start of the day was try the new Gnome 3 in Open SuSE!!

 

Try PartedMagic......

 

Thank you, I will take a look at this tomorrow

[mulcyber]

What I have done... I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leo onto the other hard drive and reinstalled chameleon on the broken install. chameleon now shows up, but booting OS X just hangs (due to AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext) and it says the kernel version is 10.2.0 when it is OS X 10.6.7 so should br 10.7.0.

 

I had no need for the power management disabler before due to having a DSDT. something has gotten totally borked. I will have to take another look tomorrow - I have spent about 8 hours today on this..

 

I am also trying to recover my exFAT partition containing my docs, music, windows applications (dueto having an SSD for windows), games, pictures etc that windows is only recognizing as RAW now - that got wrecked today also..

 

I've been dual booting for 20 years. During that time I've become skilled, in part due to realizing especially, that a computer expert must make backups. Smart newbies are people without enough humility; who haven't learned to make backups. It took me only about 8 years to find this out. This leads into ... I made a backup with Carbon Copy Cleaner (CCC) using the backup everything, complete clone method.

 

Much like you I installed Ubuntu to the second hard drive shared with SL. Grub must be installed to the root = /, of the linux partition. This is how Chameleon will be able to see it and then boot it. I knew this, but didn't discover the "advanced" part of the menu which lets you choose to install to the root partition, not the MBR.

 

So it overwrote the MBR of my first drive which was Windows. XP and 7. That's easy enough to fix with the free downloadable Vista and Windows 7 Repair isos.

 

But now I couldn't boot SL. So like you, I installed SL again but on the same drive as the original install. Maybe your way is better though. Free Gparted deletes partitions and resizes them. CCC is an OS X app so needs to be run from a SL partition to restore the backup to the original Mac drive.

 

http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php?topic=649.0

I think you probably erred in the way you re-installed Chameleon. Gringo wrote,

 

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

 

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.

 

Install boot0 to the MBR:

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

[Read all of his directions. ]

 

This is how to manually install Chameleon. I think you need to put your stuff from the non-working SL partition into the 200mb hidden EFI partition. And the other stuff quoted above, then make it active. Your new SL isn't going to have the stuff it took you a year to make stable, /Extensions, com.apple.Boot.plist, DSDT.aml etc.

 

Your second SL install only needs to last long enough to fix the first SL install.

Try safe mode, -x , if you have trouble booting into the new install. If you use -s, single user mode, the onscreen directions tell you how to obtain write access to delete pernicious kexts. I use [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] and 10.6.3 retail because it tends to be simpler. Your backup copy of DSDT.aml should probably work on the new SL install.

 

I'm not sure you lost your exfat partition, as in overwritten. Where was your data partition, on the drive that you installed the new SL to? TestDisk is free for partition recovery and works for hfs+, also Photorec. But one wants to avoid writing to a drive that needs to have data recovery. But writing to the 200mb hidden EFI partition I think should be safe. R-Studio (or EASEUS) is recommended for Windows partition recovery (and MBR backups).

 

In the Bios, one can change the boot order of the hard drives. Some Bios have a key like F12 which allows one to select the drive to boot from. One can change the boot order precedence to USB or CD in Bios also. Does your SSD show up after diskutil list ? http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/01/twe...-chameleon.html

 

This gives similar instructions to Gringo's, but has some pictures. I figured you might want a backup authority. Your "boot" file should still be on the root of the older SL. You might have to turn on ShowAllFiles to see it. You can copy that file to EFI. Gringo has a link to download a newer version of Chameleon than is in tonymac's howto. All the boot files are in the i386 folder after Cham is extracted from the download. The instructions say to delete your Chameleon stuff from the SL partition after installing the same stuff to EFI. I would backup those files before finishing with that step.

[ileikcaek]

Thank you so much for your reply mulcyber, hugely helpful and good information there!

 

Sorry I didn't clarify, but I have always used the Chameleon RC5 unofficial package installer http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=231075

 

When booted into the new OS X install I downloaded that and installed it to the damaged mac partition. I thought it was working yesterday but today it just says "boot0 done" or something along those lines.

 

The good thing is I noticed I have a copy of my important data on the damaged OS X install and I am in the process of copying it off of that now to the temporary OS X install.

[mulcyber]

Thank you so much for your reply mulcyber, hugely helpful and good information there!

 

Sorry I didn't clarify, but I have always used the Chameleon RC5 unofficial package installer http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=231075

 

When booted into the new OS X install I downloaded that and installed it to the damaged mac partition. I thought it was working yesterday but today it just says "boot0 done" or something along those lines.

 

The good thing is I noticed I have a copy of my important data on the damaged OS X install and I am in the process of copying it off of that now to the temporary OS X install.

 

That is a good link, I learned what I know about Chameleon by reading posts made by Gringo and blackosx.

They helped solve my last Chameleon problem at, http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/board,1.0.html

 

This is supposed to work if you install to the EFI partition, besides being a backup.

Perhaps you should use an fdisk that writes the full 512 bytes since you don't want

anything else in your MBR, instead of the fdisk440 which is important when SL

and Windows are on the same drive.

 

I asked about your SSD drive because I'm not sure that all of these partition utilities

recognize that device as a drive. Since the original OS X is on the first drive, that

would mean that your EFI partition would be rdisk0s1, MBR = rdisk0, EFI is

reported as disk0s1. If your SSD is hooked up, it could change the number of the disk.

 

And in some of the older guides, I don't see this step to register EFI's DSDT.aml,

1. Open /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist in TextEdit or Property List Editor.
   
2. Add the DSDT=hd(0,1)/DSDT.aml flag to your as seen in the pictures below.
   
3. Save com.apple.boot.plist
   

Since your old OS X is still there, I think it means that OpenSuse only wrote to the MBR on your first drive.

That won't change the partition structure/map like shrinking a volume might on that drive.

Also if you are booting from different drives, you may have to turn off the computer first, and then boot

from the other drive. Good that you can recover your data partition. I use a USB stick for just data.

From Terminal, sudo ls -la <enter> will show hidden files, and perhaps some boot files will be hidden.

[ileikcaek]

Thank you again mulcyber

 

I must have added to the confusion mentioning about my SSD. the SSD contains only windows 7 being just 64GB. I then have the second hard drive containing Snow Leopard and a partition containing my data.

 

The Snow Leopard drive is set to boot first in bios, I then select windows or OS X from Chameleon if I want it.

 

When installing OpenSuSE I had the windows SSD disconnected (due to having only two SATA cables. I had to use one for my spare hard drive which I was to install OpenSUSE to. so my Mac OS X/data hard drive was connected also, SUSE decided to write to that hard drives MBR rendering it useless to an extent.

 

Where I am at so far:

- Data partiton working again and I have all my files/docs back.

- Old Mac OS X install does not boot (in safe mode or normal mode) - it companies about a bunch of kexts then panics on AppleIntelPowerManagement.kext it didn't before - something has gotten very messed for that to happen.

- I have a fresh install fully updated to 10.6.7 on my spare hard drive with all of my kexts in place. I then used Migration Assitant to pull all my apps and other files from the old install and it is working for the most part.

 

What I will likely do now is erase my old install, format it to HFS+ Journaled, then CCC the fresh install to the new partition in it's place

 

I just wish GRUB was easier to deal with for GRUB newbies. if it writes to the MBR there should also be an easy solution for removing it if something goes wrong also.

 

I still hope to have a working install of OpenSUSE eventually. so I will definitely make sure the SUSE hard drive is the only one connected when installing so GRUB doesn't get installed to my other drives.

 

Thanks again,

 

Rick

[mulcyber]

Thank you again mulcyber

 

I must have added to the confusion mentioning about my SSD. the SSD contains only windows 7 being just 64GB. I then have the second hard drive containing Snow Leopard and a partition containing my data.

 

The Snow Leopard drive is set to boot first in bios, I then select windows or OS X from Chameleon if I want it.

 

When installing OpenSuSE I had the windows SSD disconnected (due to having only two SATA cables. I had to use one for my spare hard drive which I was to install OpenSUSE to. so my Mac OS X/data hard drive was connected also, SUSE decided to write to that hard drives MBR rendering it useless to an extent.

 

Where I am at so far:

- Data partiton working again and I have all my files/docs back.

- Old Mac OS X install does not boot (in safe mode or normal mode) - it companies about a bunch of kexts then panics on AppleIntelPowerManagement.kext it didn't before - something has gotten very messed for that to happen.

- I have a fresh install fully updated to 10.6.7 on my spare hard drive with all of my kexts in place. I then used Migration Assitant to pull all my apps and other files from the old install and it is working for the most part.

 

What I will likely do now is erase my old install, format it to HFS+ Journaled, then CCC the fresh install to the new partition in it's place

 

I just wish GRUB was easier to deal with for GRUB newbies. if it writes to the MBR there should also be an easy solution for removing it if something goes wrong also.

 

I still hope to have a working install of OpenSUSE eventually. so I will definitely make sure the SUSE hard drive is the only one connected when installing so GRUB doesn't get installed to my other drives.

 

Thanks again,

 

Rick

 

http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Unlimited-Ser...e/dp/B000234LBE

This cable cost $2.20 and it can't be much more at amazon.uk. This one has a

power plug. They are 20" long so check it it will reach. They also make right-angle

sata cables for a cramped space (power supply) in differently colored cables.

 

Your plan to clone your new SL to the new partition should work.

Gparted will set up an EFI partition when you format the drive to HFS+ but I don't think journaled.

I think new SL Disk Utility might do it better, format old SL partition with it, because

one can choose HFS+ journaled. I'm not sure it matters, because cloning may take care of it.

 

Windows installs to the MBR there is no other option. SL and Chameleon install at least one file

(boot0) there is no other option. You can install the other two Cham files to the

hidden EFI partition. So Linux is the only OS which gives a choice between

installing the boot files to the MBR or to the linux root partition. Linux to MBR is the default

just like the other OS. The dual-boot howtos that I've read say to install linux to the root partition,

not the MBR, because both Windows and SL can boot linux if it is installed to that location.

Perhaps you were unlucky and used a dud dual-boot guide.

 

I'm pretty sure that OpenSuse's grub provides boot options for Windows, SL and

OpenSuse, people use grub for all three, it just doesn't have a nice GUI, and it

doesn't have Chameleon's com.apple.Boot.plist advantages.

 

You can re-install grub to the linux partition root, / . None of the OS save the old MBR when they install.

The user does that by making a backup of the MBR first. When you install Windows first and SL second,

Chameleon overwrites the Windows owned MBR. Then one has to use a Windows

Recovery disk to rewrite Windows back to the MBR. To rewrite Chameleon to the MBR:

7. Type cd i386

8. Type: sudo fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk0

 

Make sure the right disk is written to.

Also both the new install and the cloned install will have the same UUID I think.

You may have to unhook the drive to test the newly cloned SL. I'm not sure both

partitions will work if they are both hooked up at the same time. You many have to

delete one, or reinstall onto the partition you are going to clone from to create a new UUID.

[HappyHackintosh]

Here's a simple fix that frequently works if the OSX partition is in tact. It's GENERALLY THE FIRST THING TO TRY. THE OPs HAVE GIVEN YOU MANY GREAT OTHER WAYS.

 

 

If you can get to OSX-using a bootloader[ e.g. [url=&quot;http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/&quot;]#####[/url]] on a CDROM or otherwise get into OSX:

First- In terminal type

diskutil list .............. this will give you the name of the drive with OSX on it.

That name will be disk# ........where # is the number of OSX drive.

 

Next- In terminal type

sudo fdisk -u /dev/disk# .......where # is the number of OSX drive.

This fdisk function will repair the MBR without deleting your OSX partition.

 

 

FYI: You can also use Window's diskpart function to fix things and you can use the fdisk function of Linux [e.g.Ubuntu] to fix things too. The advantages of using the LINUX fdisk function-

Don't need to get into a OSX environment.

Can fix things such as partition I.D.[OSX terminal's fdisk doesn't support that].

Moreover:

You don't need to install Ubuntu. You can download ISO file, burn that to bootable CDROM.

Then you can use CDROM to startup a live but uninstalled version of Ubuntu ["TRY UBUNTU" option]

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There is a lot of great info on the above search "fdisk" "fix mbr" "ubuntu fdisk" "fix OSX MBR unbuntu fdisk" etc.