Weird boot behavior? Check your EFI partition!

[Bit Shoveler]

I just spent 8 hours chasing my tail on a failure to boot Mavericks with (what I thought was) a new installation of Chimera 2.2.1. This machine has seen a number of updates from the 10.5.X days, so it shouldn't be surprising that I had some cruft in the EFI partition of the boot drive. This cruft included a much older version of Chameleon in the EFI partition! No wonder Mavericks wouldn't boot.

So if you're an old-time Hackintosher like me, and your new bootloader, boot plist, or extension combination isn't doing what you think it should, check whether the EFI partition has been used for older boot configurations - and clean them up!

 

[cosmicvoyager]

"check whether the EFI partition has been used for older boot configurations - and clean them up!"

How does one do that?

 

[jwk]

A very good question cosmicvoyager, please elaborate Bit Shoveler....