Boot Hang with Backup Drive Attached

[shawn_]

My system has a 120GB SSD as the boot drive, a 2TB drive for data and another 2TB drive for a Time Machine Backup. Everything was running fine for a few days after I installed Lion including using the latest Chimera 1.4.1 on the boot drive ... then I did something dumb ... I accidentally installed Chimera on the Backup drive! Now whenever I boot up my system with the Backup drive attached my system hangs before the Chimera GUI loads with a / or | character on the screen and nothing else. If I pull the Backup drive the system boots fine and I can plug it back in after OS X boots to the GUI and the drive is detected fine. From what I understand this problem is common for people trying to boot off of a drive with a partition greater than 1TB. In my case the system is booting off the 120GB SSD which I confirmed in the bios and by hitting f12 during the bois POST and selecting the SSD manually. So ... I tried to fix the problem by deleting all the files installed by Chimera (/boot, /usr/, /Library) and by trying to overwrite the MBR using fdisk -f boot1h -u /dev/disk2 and by deleting the EFI partition. None of which worked. Can anybody help me?

My diskutil list ouput is below ...
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *128.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS OSX 99.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_HFS Installer2 9.4 GB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS XData 2.0 TB disk1s2
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: Apple_HFS Backup 2.0 TB disk2s2

 

[shawn_]

Looks like my problem is related to this bug
http://forge.voodooprojects.org/p/chameleon/issues/129/
I have a 4k sector drive.

So my question is now simply how to I uninstall Chimera/Chameleon from a drive completely? Is there a way to do it without loosing my data? or will I just have to erase it completely?

 

[aicragleon]

I have a similar problem. I had a dual boot Windows 7 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on separate SSDs working perfectly and using easybcd to choose which drive to boot. Now I added another SSD with Lion and installed chimera on that as well. Now, when I choose the MAC part of easybcd, I get a Chain Boot Error. I am suspecting it is because I have 2 drives with chimera. I can boot to any drive if it is the first choice in the bios and I am now using this method of boot options in bios, but it is not convenient and the wife does not want this either. Please let us know how to uninstall chimera. Thanks all. And I would rather not reinstall since this is an SSD and I do not want to put any unnecessary writes on it. If this is the only way of getting rid of Chimera then it definitely needs an update since all I have read is to just overwrite the old chameleon/chimera with the new one, but this is not what is needed by many people I have come across in my search of uninstalling chimera.