Problem getting HD booting to work

[mjgunn]

Not sure if this should be contained to the Sandy Bridge section since I'm using a computer with that, but I'm thinking this (probably) isn't a SB specific problem. Installed yesterday, followed the directions in the SB install guide. Everything is working well, except for 1 thing, I cannot get the computer to boot from the HD, I can only get it to start up with the iboot disk.

I followed what another user who said he had the same issue wrote in another thread here
viewtopic.php?f=79&t=10863&start=30

Post-Installation::
**Note**
Now at this time, I couldn't boot from HDD just yet. If you can, then ignore steps 1-7 here. If not, this is why I didn't say to eject the iBoot disk. However, you should be able to boot into the HDD just like you did in step 6 above (i.e. with the iBoot disc in the drive), minus the need for the "PciRoot" command. So go ahead and just boot into your SL drive using that method in step 6 above at this point. Here's how I fixed the problem:

1) Install a simple app called "XRay". You can find it here:
http://download.cnet.com/XRay/3000-2248_4-10079209.html

2) Next, use the "ShowAllFiles" app that you installed shortly ago choosing "Show".

3) Now open the iBoot Legacy disk and you'll see some hidden folders in there. Choose the hidden "Extras" folder and locate the "com.apple.Boot.plist" inside it. Copy that to your desktop. Go into the "Preboot.dmg" image (i.e. mount it) and locate the "com.apple.Boot.plist" just inside it. Copy it to your HDD also. Note that the two files have the same name, so you can't actually copy them to the desktop together, one will overwrite the other. Just keep a note of where the two are and, more importantly, WHICH IS WHICH. (Note: There are only 2 of these files on the disk in entirety. Once you've found 2 different files, you've found the 2 you need).

4) Take these 2 files and open them each with XRay. Authenticate by clicking the little lock. Untick the "Invisible" box, save, quit. You'll see they're no longer invisible!

5) The first one (the one not in the PreBoot.dmg) needs to be copied to (and overwrite the one in): /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
This .plist should only have a few keys inside of it. Nothing in compared with how many are in the other one. Overwrite the one currently at that location.

6) The second one (the one from the PreBoot.dmg) needs to be copied to (and overwrite the one in: /Extra. (Note: It might be a good idea at this time to open that .plist BEFORE copying it into the /Extra folder and add "busratio=X" to the "Kernel Flags" [Where "X" is the value you chose in your Pre-Installation], right after arch=i386 and maxmem=4096. Then save the file and copy it to the /Extras location.)

7) After the 2 .plist files are copied to the appropriate place on your HDD, eject the iBoot disk. Then, RESTART.

Followed that and now instead of the computer getting stuck at the gray screen with the apple logo, it goes to this screen

If I hit enter I get the error message "can't find rd(0,0)/extra/mach_kernel". I can still boot with iboot successfully but would obviously like to get HD booting working. Any ideas where I went wrong?

 

[jackson10t]

same thing happens to me. Buy hey at least you got it to work. Its really a simple enter click. Something I can live with. lol.

 

[mjgunn]

Well yeah, it's not a dire issue, but I do use a BT keyboard which doesn't work until OS X loads so I'm having to keep 2 keyboards plugged in at the moment, plus of course I have to enter the bus ratio command every boot since I can't just save it in the boot plist.

 

[mjgunn]

Well, I seem to have made the situation worse, I found someone saying they had the same problem here

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=553&start=10

And did what was suggested, deleting the extra folder and rerunning multibeast using easybeast, and now when I try to HD boot the screen powers down and my GPU fan runs at full speed and that's all that happens. Still able to boot off iboot though so just glad for that now lol

 

[mjgunn]

Jackson, the person whos guide I followed responded to me with this

@mjgunn: Oh Noes! I left out a step! I'll edit it in a bit.

After copying the 2 boot.plist files, you have to edit one of them. The one inside the extras folder has 2 references to edit. One refers to "Mach_kernel" and the other to "smbios.plist". Edit out the beginning path so that the field reads just those phrases in quotations, respectively.

What it's doing is pointing to a file on the optical disc. You need to remove those references.

Fixed it for me so you might want to give it a shot

 

[jackson10t]

Jackson, the person whos guide I followed responded to me with this

@mjgunn: Oh Noes! I left out a step! I'll edit it in a bit.

After copying the 2 boot.plist files, you have to edit one of them. The one inside the extras folder has 2 references to edit. One refers to "Mach_kernel" and the other to "smbios.plist". Edit out the beginning path so that the field reads just those phrases in quotations, respectively.

What it's doing is pointing to a file on the optical disc. You need to remove those references.

Fixed it for me so you might want to give it a shot

I dont quit understand what I have to do.