Block Size Problem?

[Worn]

Long time Macintosh user. My first exposure to Hackintosh. The machine in question was built for me by someone else. It came with Windows 8.1 and OS X 10.9.2 on separate drives, the largest of which is 1 TB.

I have since added other, larger drives (2, 3, 4 TB) internally. The build also has a hot swap enclosure built in.

Two of the other internal volumes were made bootable by starting as clones of the original 1 TB OS X drive. (I always have multiple bootable OS X drives on my Macs.) At one time or another, they all booted the machine.. Now, none does.

The error is:
boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: error

The first drive (Port 0) is the original OS X drive. DiskWarrior says the boot blocks need repair but I have not done that as I suspect that some dual boot magic takes place there. So, aside from using disk utilities to look (back when I could boot), I have not let any utility "repair"anything.

As I mentioned, there is a hot swap unit. It has three bays. The problems began when I fiddled with the SATA "hot plug" settings in an effort to get OS X to recognize the hot swap function and place an eject icon next to drives in the hot swap bays as viewed in Finder. (Never got that to work.)

As a strictly Mac user (until now), I found it strange that changing a BIOS setting caused it to not boot but changing that same setting back did not fix it.

On the theory that the drive selector function is crashing, I wanted to run the post-install utility MultiBeast to see if it fixed the drive selector. Unfortunately, I get the same error shown above when trying to boot to the USB installation drive. ([F-12] and choosing it directly)

I'm confused in that it appears to be a block size issue, judging by the error, but the drives did at one time boot. And I don't see how block size should affect the original smaller drives. Also, at one point I disconnected all but the original 2 drives and still got the error.

I'm using a GigaByte GA-Z87X-UD5H motherboard, chosen for all its SATA connections. I'm also using one port of a SATA adapter card for one more drive and intending to connect eSATA RAID units if I can ever get the rest of the drives sorted out.

I elected to have someone else build this box for me which, in retrospect, was an error as I didn't learn the details I obviously need to know to live with this machine.

So, I have a 1 TB OS X drive as the first of multiple SATA drives. The OS was good at one point so I have (or had) a good install. The boot loader worked. I could use it to select which drive to boot from. Now the boot process never gets that far.

FWIW, before it stopped working altogether, one drive, when selected to boot in the selector app, just refreshed the screen indicating, I suppose, that something was not right with the drive.
I was surprised that, although the boot selector app won't run, using [F-12] to select a boot drive still won't boot to those drives, especially the USB installer drive.

Would someone please point me in the right direction here?

How do I make the Port 0 drive boot again? Are there things on that first SATA drive that all other bootable drives depend on?

Will fixing that first drive likely solve the boot ability of the other drives?

TIA

 

[RehabMan]

Long time Macintosh user. My first exposure to Hackintosh. The machine in question was built for me by someone else. It came with Windows 8.1 and OS X 10.9.2 on separate drives, the largest of which is 1 TB.

I have since added other, larger drives (2, 3, 4 TB) internally. The build also has a hot swap enclosure built in.

Two of the other internal volumes were made bootable by starting as clones of the original 1 TB OS X drive. (I always have multiple bootable OS X drives on my Macs.) At one time or another, they all booted the machine.. Now, none does.

The error is:
boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: error

...

TIA

http://www.tonymacx86.com/25-boot0-error-official-guide.html

 

[Worn]

http://www.tonymacx86.com/25-boot0-error-official-guide.html

Yes, I KNOW I can start over. That's what I'm trying to avoid by asking here. The drive in question (Primarily the original OS X drive) has hundreds of GB of migrated data and all my latest email, etc. that I would like to rescue. I still have the data that were migrated to the drive but it worked for several days and it contains new mail and such that I do not want to lose.

Is there some utility I can run to fix the boot loader without starting from scratch?

 

[RehabMan]

Yes, I KNOW I can start over. That's what I'm trying to avoid by asking here. The drive in question (Primarily the original OS X drive) has hundreds of GB of migrated data and all my latest email, etc. that I would like to rescue. I still have the data that were migrated to the drive but it worked for several days and it contains new mail and such that I do not want to lose.

Is there some utility I can run to fix the boot loader without starting from scratch?

Does not involve starting over. It is poorly written, but if you read between the lines, steps 1-3 in the boot0 guide are 'review'... sort of a "here's how you got here". Start with step 4.

The boot0 error results when boot0 (stage0 legacy bootloader, installed to the MBR) cannot find boot1 (stage1 legacy bootloader, installed to PBR). The usual case of boot0 not being able to find a suitable PBR is because the drive is a 4k drive and, because of an OS X bug, the boot1h file was not written to the PBR during bootloader installation. That's what you need to resolve.

 

[Worn]

...
The boot0 error results when boot0 (stage0 legacy bootloader, installed to the MBR) cannot find boot1 (stage1 legacy bootloader, installed to PBR). The usual case of boot0 not being able to find a suitable PBR is because the drive is a 4k drive and, because of an OS X bug, the boot1h file was not written to the PBR during bootloader installation.

Really? Because it worked for a while before it didn't.

So, how did it become corrupted? And on more than one of the bootable volumes? Very strange.

At this point, I have used dd to copy boot1h to a couple of drives and now the boot loader has a chance to work before the system crashes. That's progress.

 

[RehabMan]

Really? Because it worked for a while before it didn't.

So, how did it become corrupted? And on more than one of the bootable volumes? Very strange.

Yes, it is strange, but corruption does happen...

At this point, I have used dd to copy boot1h to a couple of drives and now the boot loader has a chance to work before the system crashes. That's progress.

Yes... progress... if you're not getting a boot0 error, you're beyond that specific problem.