Booting from SD Card ?

[smacone]

Step 5 wasn't always reliable for me. I prefer to use terminal

mount
to display all mounted partitions and then:

umount /dev/disk0s5

and one more time
mount
to make sure is gone


and use rdisk for boot1h restoration.

dd if=/usr/standalone/i386/boot1h of=/dev/rdisk0s5​

Tried it, no change

 

[smacone]

Well, at least you know the the boot1h is there.

Might as well make sure the boot0md is present as well:

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=tmp0 count=1
cmp --bytes=440 tmp0 /usr/standalone/i386/boot0md

This is what i get :

localhost:~ smacone$ sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=tmp0 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.017102 secs (29938 bytes/sec)

I dont know how to enter the second row of the command ?

 

[RehabMan]

This is what i get :

localhost:~ smacone$ sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=tmp0 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.017102 secs (29938 bytes/sec)

I dont know how to enter the second row of the command ?

Just like it is written. It compares the first 440 bytes of each file.

 

[BigDonkey]

This is diskutil list : /dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk0
1: Windows_NTFS Other 208.7 MB disk0s1
2: Windows_NTFS Media 163.1 GB disk0s2
3: Windows_NTFS 364.7 GB disk0s4
4: Apple_HFS Lion 112.2 GB disk0s5

Did you use Disk Utility for initial disk setup with a GUID option?
I've got multiple systems with Win7 and mine shows GUID_partition_scheme, unless Win8 does something that I'm not aware of?

 

[RehabMan]

Did you use Disk Utility for initial disk setup with a GUID option?
I've got multiple systems with Win7 and mine shows GUID_partition_scheme, unless Win8 does something that I'm not aware of?

He's got an MBR only setup.

 

[BigDonkey]

He's got an MBR only setup.

I think the stage 0 takes a shortcut and boots first active partition. Since disk is not a GPT it ignores the HFS+. I wonder how the MBR partition table looks like, is HFS even present there?

@smacone, can you post

sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0

 

[RehabMan]

I think the stage 0 takes a shortcut and boots first active partition. Since disk is not a GPT it ignores the HFS+. I wonder how the MBR partition table looks like, is HFS even present there?

That's not what boot0md does according to the comments and code that I'm reading. But it would be nice to know if boot0md is actually present.

According to the comments and the code I've read so far, it should in this case.
pass1: will fail because it is looking for MBR partition that is active and HFS+
pass2: iterating over all drives, looks for HFS+ partition that is bootable and boots it
* This pass should find success at the 4th partition, load boot1h, and run with it, which should then find boot
at the root of his OS X partition, and he should then be in Chimera boot loader UI...
pass3: last resort, iterating over all drives, looks for first active bootable partition and boots it
* I think he's hitting this (or he doesn't have boot0md as his boot record)

@smacone, can you post

sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0

Thanks for that! I was looking all over the manpage for Mac fdisk looking for a way to list the partitions (like Linux fdisk -l)... never thought that "no options" would give you the list!

Hopefully we can see something in his MBR partititon table...

 

[BigDonkey]

disk0s5 makes me suspicious that OS X is not present in MBR table as one of the primary partition, boot0md can't find it, disk is not GPT and we know the rest.
We'll see when smacone posts the table.

 

[Gerard71]

make a complete backup of Windows 8 on a USB disk, reformatted the hard drive and make a GUID partition windows the same size as the previous restore windows 8 and it would not be easier?

 

[RehabMan]

disk0s5 makes me suspicious that OS X is not present in MBR table as one of the primary partition, boot0md can't find it, disk is not GPT and we know the rest.
We'll see when smacone posts the table.

I thought this was just some quirk of OS X partition numbering scheme (that maybe there was free space in between), but maybe you're on to something. Where the heck is disk0s3?
I wonder if his Lion partition is not primary. boot0md definitely only looks at the primary (first 4) MBR partitions.

Would be nice to see results from Linux. I'm starting to think the only OS you should use to get the truth about disk partitions is Linux...