Boot0 and Un-mountable OS X drive, a new phenomenon

[blair1618]

My hackintosh has been running steady for about 2 months with 10.8. My machine has OS X, Windows 7, and Linux Mint all on separate HDDs, all booting through chimera. Yesterday I booted Windows and it performed a disk check on startup. On reboot immediately after, chimera never showed up and instead I saw only the text:

"boot0:GPT boot0:done".

Huh. Well, I grabbed my trusty Unibeast USB stick and tried to boot into chimera from that. No luck, I only get the exact same message. Maybe my Unibeast drive has been made un-bootable somehow? I can boot into it from a working Mac, so that couldn't be it. I even tried booting from a Mac install DVD and I get the same message.

I'm starting to think about recovery and re-install at this point, so I boot into Linux Mint (which still has GRUB working, incidentally) and open up my Mac OS X drive. It won't mount. Huh. Linux Disk Utility says that the file system on the primary Mac partition is "not clean", it can't read the superblock.

I've been reading similar forum posts for about a day now, including the "Official boot0 guide", but none of these seem to address the problem I'm having because: 1. These all discuss error messages involving "boot0:error" or "boot0:test" and I get neither of these, and 2. These all involve booting into a Unibeast drive (or equivalent), which my machine seems unable to do.

Since it seems to be relevant for these issues, the hard drives I use are:
WD Caviar Blue 500GB: Mac OS X
Seagate Barracuda 1TB: Windows 7
WD Caviar Blue 250GB: Linux Mint

I will keep trying anything I can think of, but I would like to ask you all:
1. How should I proceed to get Chimera and OS X working again?
2. Does my Mac OS X Volume need to be reformatted? (I'd really rather not, I don't have backups of everything)
3. Do you have any idea how this happened? (I'd like to avoid it in the future, clearly)

Thanks

PS: I have a vague theory that Windows tried to "repair" the boot sector on my OS X drive, making it both un-bootable and un-mountable. But this wouldn't really explain why I can't boot into other OS X volumes...

 

[blair1618]

Update:

I've now tried resetting the CMOS on my motherboard (because who knows, maybe it was a problem with the DMI pool) to no avail. Eventually I tried the solution in the official boot0 guide, re-writing boot1h with dd from my linux disk, but as I expected that had no effect either.

I've moved on to changing the "bootable" flags on the partitions of my OS X disk using gparted. They could conceivably have been changed when windows performed its disk check, but I don't know what they were when the drive was working...

 

[blair1618]

Final Update:

I now believe that the root cause of all the problems I've had with my machine is the Paragon HFS+ 9 driver software that I've been using in Windows. Others on this forum and elsewhere have found that these drivers can cause dangerous errors in HFS volumes, and this is the simplest, most plausible explanation of the failures of both my OS X drive (which has required two re-installations now) and my Unibeast drive. I've now removed the Paragon drivers and instead I'm using Apple's read-only HFS+ drivers for boot camp.

tl;dr DO NOT use Paragon HFS+9 drivers, they can ruin your machine.

 

[radarlove86]

I'm having a similar problem. I had 10.8.2 and Win8 booting fine from Chimera from separate SSDs for a while now. I usually use ML, so when I booted into Win8 it had some updates to install. After it performed the updates and restarted I can't boot to Chimera either from the SSD or from my Unibeast flash disk. When I try to use the SSD with ML on it I get:

boot0:GPT
boot0:test
boot0:test
boot0:done

When I try to boot to the flash disk, it looks like it might be displaying the same thing for a second but then all that is left is a blinking cursor. I have to hard restart back to the BIOS after such events.

Windows update said something about repairing disks so I imagine it did something to my ML boot drive. I had just started using Paragon HFS+ 10 to access my HFS drives in Windows for a week or so. Win8 can now access my 1 TB storage HFS drive I've been using for a Time Machine and storing media but it says my ML boot drive is "corrupted and unreadable."

I'll try some stuff with the BIOS and see if that helps.

 

[radarlove86]

To answer my own question, I realized that my Unibeast flash disk was failing because my ML SSD was 'corrupted' by whatever Windows (or maybe Paragon) did to it. So I erased it in Windows, booted to my Unibeast drive, did a Time Machine restore, ran Multibeast and poof! we're back up and running.

I guess time will tell what exactly messed my machine up. I read Paragon may cause some problems so we'll have to wait and see.