Failed Mountain Lion Install - Now cannot boot into back up Lion drive

[chass]

First off, I am running:

CORE I3 540 3.06G
GIGABYTE GA-H55M-S2V
MSI N8400GS-D512H

and used UniBeast 1.5.2 and the draft guide to perform the upgrade from 10.7.4.

I back up my drives nightly using SuperDuper, and had backed up the Main OS drive just prior to the install.

Everything seemed to be going just fine up until trying to boot into the freshly (and successfully by all measures) finished Mountain Lion install. My machine then hung at the white back ground grey Apple Logo screen.

At that point I rebooted and used the Chimera bootloader to boot into my backup OS drive. It did so successfully, and then I used SuperDuper to copy the backup OS 10.7.4 instance back onto the main OS drive. I was intending to reset the whole install and then to recreate my UniBeast USB drive to ensure that it didn't have any issues with the UniBeast created USB.

However, at this point I was unable to load back into the OS drive. After the "Loading Operating System..." ran for a few seconds I got a "Boot0: Error". Never having seen this before, I tried to use my UniBeast bootloader to boot back into the Backup OS Drive. This attempt resulted in a hang at the white back ground grey Apple Logo screen.

After myriad combinations of using UniBeast, rBoot 1.1 and rBoot 1.2, I finally tried booting in verbose.

Everything was flying along smoothly until it hanged at [PCI Configuration Begin].

What in the world happened here? Why was I able to boot into the backup drive once and only once? Why couldn't I boot back into the SuperDuper recreated Main OS drive?

At this point I'll be happy just to be able to boot back into what I assume should still be a functioning 10.7.4 install- I didn't change anything on this drive. (I should also point out that I didn't perform any other steps not written here, such as alter Bios settings or the like)

I guess it's just hackintosh karma coming around to balance things out, as for the past 3 years I've had nothing but clean, relatively painless installs and upgrades.

Any advice or pointers to helpful guides would be greatly appreciated. I've search and read a good deal these past 2 days to try and get things sorted, but I haven't found anything that would seem to be able to fix the issue.

Thank you!

 

[beansandrice]

What boot flags have you tried?

Are you still at the boot0 error, even with the Unibeast USB?

 

[chass]

The only flag I've used so far is -v.

As I've been lucky in my prior installs, I've never had to use any boot flags prior to yesterday, so I was trying to avoid overly applying them without knowing what I'm doing.

I only get the boot0 when trying to boot using the ML OS'ed drive. When I use UniBeast to try and boot into the L OS'd drive, it hangs at [PCI Configuration Begin].

Should I try GraphicsEnabler=No?

 

[cseistrup]

I would double check your BIOS settings, then boot again with unibeast. Then you need to rerun Multi beast. I don't think SuperDuper clones the hidden Chimera partition.

 

[chass]

The idea that SuperDuper doesn't clone the Chimera code makes sense.

I haven't been able to boot into my backup drive using UniBeast, however. It just hangs at the [PCI Configuration Begin] when trying to boot the backup.

I would assume that I was previously able to boot into the Backup using the chimera code (I hit the spacebar during the blue bar countdown and then chose my backup) still on the primary drive, but now since I am getting the Boot0: error when Chimera tries to load, I no longer have that as an option. But since I have never run Multibeast against the backup, my DSDT hasn't been applied and thus the graphics card is causing me to hang?

Does that make sense? And if so, how should I go about getting around it, such taht I can boot into my backup drive and run Mulitbeast against it to ensure a smooth boot?

I want to return my machine to it's 'normal' state of 2 healthy and bootable OS's drives before I take my 2nd stab at installing ML.

I have double (and triple) checked my Bios btw.

Thanks very much for the help and advice!

 

[chass]

Double post, sorry.

 

[chass]

This morning I had some time to do a little more research, and based on having seen in verbose mode that the hand for my backup Lion install hangs as [PCI configuration begin], I tried using first the npci=0x3000 and then the npci=0x2000 boot flags, unfortunately both to no avail.

Can anyone point me to any other potentially useful bootflags or triage steps?

Thanks!

 

[chass]

Ok, amazingly, booting with -F just got me into my backup OS! <phew!>

So, now the $10,000,000 question- how do I go about ensuring that I can boot back into both my backup and main drives again? Is it as simple as running Multibeast on both instances to fix what must be a corrupt kext cache?