Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Just so you know, and while I will never profess to being anywhere near an expert on these subjects, I have been "around the block" a few times within these forums and have never heard of Chameleon booting on an hfs+ guid partition on a real Mac before. Since Hennesie2000 has mentioned it earlier today as a possibility, I have been attempting to replicate it and it doesn't work for me. Would be a nice trick however I do not think I will spend any further time on it as I am not feeling a dire need to want to get it all on one hard drive anyway.

From what I've read this is the unavoidable fact: Chameleon WILL NOT run from a GPT disk on a true Mac. I had given up on the idea until Hennessie2000 mentioned somehow getting it to work. As previously stated, I have a working Mavericks partition sitting on an MBR drive with Chameleon. I would like to get this setup working on a GPT drive to hopefully clear up the ACL permissions issues and get it to stop showing me 2 Windows drives at boot selector.(I have a Windows 7 install on another drive.)
 
From what I've read this is the unavoidable fact: Chameleon WILL NOT run from a GPT disk on a true Mac. I had given up on the idea until Hennessie2000 mentioned somehow getting it to work. As previously stated, I have a working Mavericks partition sitting on an MBR drive with Chameleon. I would like to get this setup working on a GPT drive to hopefully clear up the ACL permissions issues and get it to stop showing me 2 Windows drives at boot selector.(I have a Windows 7 install on another drive.)

If you do not have any drives or anything connected to your Mac Pro's SATA ports on the logic board (which Clover cannot read for some reason) then using it (Clover) would be a viable option for you. I also had trouble using Clover Configurator in getting it to correctly ID my Mac Pro away from the default iMac 8,1. It also will require the installation of the VoodooHDA.kext which is not a huge deal and a Mavericks compatible version has been released. Anyway I could walk you through that if you would like.
 
Last edited:
While little idiosyncrasies like that might be the difference...it really shouldn't matter. If I were to want to install and boot with Clover again, adding a partition within terminal works every time so I doubt it.

I am not the only one to get it working I beleive. I am pretty sure Snowshiro has done it the same way. I will do a screen recording of my entire process for getting Mavericks installed starting while booted in EFI mode on 10.7.5.
 
Last edited:
From what I've read this is the unavoidable fact: Chameleon WILL NOT run from a GPT disk on a true Mac. I had given up on the idea until Hennessie2000 mentioned somehow getting it to work. As previously stated, I have a working Mavericks partition sitting on an MBR drive with Chameleon. I would like to get this setup working on a GPT drive to hopefully clear up the ACL permissions issues and get it to stop showing me 2 Windows drives at boot selector.(I have a Windows 7 install on another drive.).

Did you construct your Windows 7 system with or without bootcamp ?
 
Last edited:
Did you construct your Windows 7 system with or without bootcamp ?

Honestly, it's been so long since I setup Win7 that I can't remember if I upgraded in place from XP or did a fresh install. Seeing as Apple doesn't support Win7 64 on 06/07 Mac Pros I haven't bothered with Boot Camp Assistant since my WinXP days. I can tell you that the disk is a hybrid and, if you're curious, I did enable AHCI in Windows using the MBR patcher in Terminal.
 
Honestly, it's been so long since I setup Win7 that I can't remember if I upgraded in place from XP or did a fresh install. Seeing as Apple doesn't support Win7 64 on 06/07 Mac Pros I haven't bothered with Boot Camp Assistant since my WinXP days. I can tell you that the disk is a hybrid and, if you're curious, I did enable AHCI in Windows using the MBR patcher in Terminal.

No worries...after I asked, I put my Windows 7 64 bit in a hard drive bracket and slid it to view it boot so I could get a visual of your set up. I thought maybe mine/it would behave differently considering I used the creating one's own modified Windows 7 64 bit install disk method but it did not make a difference.
 
I am not the only one to get it working I beleive. I am pretty sure Snowshiro has done it the same way. I will do a screen recording of my entire process for getting Mavericks installed starting while booted in EFI mode on 10.7.5.

I tried what you suggested and it was a no go. Chameleon would not boot.
 
Well this is awkward... Previously when trying to get Chameleon to work off a GPT drive I had been installing it while running Mavericks. Each time it failed. Swapped out my Mavericks disk for my Lion disk and tried installing Chameleon from there. I'll be damned but it's working. Formatted a spare drive with 1 GB partition for Chameleon and left the rest to a second partition. I've successfully used this drive to then boot Lion with 64 bit kernel. Am now going to restore my current Mavericks install to the new GPT Chameleon drive. Will report back with results.

P.S. Does anyone know if it is possible to rename the Chameleon booter to something more sensible than 'EFI Boot' in the boot selector screen? I tried adding a rename partition flag to the org.chameleon.Boot.plist but to no avail.
 
Another Good Ol' Mac Saved!

I followed the guides and info posted here and now my MacPro 1.1 is running Mavericks. I have a flashed 5770 card and everything is work perfectly. I used a $9 eBay SSD for the boot loader and I installed Maverick on a new 256Gb SSD using my MacBook Pro. Mavericks on the SSD launches apps really quickly and I'm very happy with the performance I'm seeing.

A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL THE GREAT BRAINS AT WORK ON THIS PROJECT!!!!

I have one question:
Does any one have a good procedure for booting back into Lion using the 32bit EFI? (I know it is very easy to boot into Lion using the Chameleon 64bit EFI boot loader.)
 
Using gptsync I was able to create a hybrid MBR but it isn't the greatest tool and screwed up the partition. I need to play with gdisk more because it gives a lot more control over the process of creating the hybrid MBR.

When trying to get windows installed this time it gave me an error about there being too many partitions of this type... didn't specify which type and the issue might be that unlike my current install I only have 3 partitions (chameleon, mavericks, windows) this one had 4 (boot, mavericks installer, mavericks, windows). It wasn't complaining about the GPT so it's a step in the right direction.

-Thanks for keeping the conversation going and the help coming-

Here's an update:

I went back and set the partition active with the method you suggested.
I did not have Windows in, however.

I installed Windows on its own partition on a separate drive (this is the second time, I also had an already installed Windows drive at the beginning of this endeavour). All my windows installations go through without a hiccup and windows runs perfectly when I select it at startup by holding the option key down.

I then restarted, went into the recovery drive and tried to re-set the Mavericks partition as active. This time, I got some sort of an error saying something along the line of "couldn't write to disk (or partition?) exclusively.

When I tried to go back and restart, the boot loader starts Windows -AGAIN!-
So after attempting to reset the active partition to Mavericks, I then tried again and this time my boot loader hung past the first screen.

Normally it shows a few lines of text, then it goes to a blank screen with cursor rotating over an underscore sign; at this point, after one turn or so, I am usually served with a message saying that I have 5 seconds to select boot, I hit enter, pick Mavericks and I'm on my way.
When it hangs, the rotating cursor stops and it just does not move anymore.

I tried to re-bless the chameleon's drive, fiddled with it, nothing, still hanging; I reinstalled everything and I still got nothing; I did a double-PRAM reset and I got it past the point where it gets stuck and it booted again.

All this tinkering has taken place without the Windows drive installed in the computer.

I am beside myself as now I have tried a few different things and none of them seems to allow me to do something that -I think- should be extremely straight forward.

Just to be precise, I am not attempting to boot Windows from Chameleon boot loader, it is IT that defaults that way.

Once again, I appreciate all the suggestions and help, if anyone has any insight on this, I am willing to try.

BTW, my chameleon was installed from Lion and into a GUID partition. I had no issues with doing that.

ONE LAST THING:
If I want to set the default startup disk in the Chameleon.Boot.plist to the correct one (it is 0,2): I did a diskutil list and my Mavericks partition is listed as disk0s3, so do I change the 0,2 to 0,3?
Thanks.

----------

I followed the guides and info posted here and now my MacPro 1.1 is running Mavericks. I have a flashed 5770 card and everything is work perfectly. I used a $9 eBay SSD for the boot loader and I installed Maverick on a new 256Gb SSD using my MacBook Pro. Mavericks on the SSD launches apps really quickly and I'm very happy with the performance I'm seeing.

A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL THE GREAT BRAINS AT WORK ON THIS PROJECT!!!!

I have one question:
Does any one have a good procedure for booting back into Lion using the 32bit EFI? (I know it is very easy to boot into Lion using the Chameleon 64bit EFI boot loader.)

Maybe I'm not understanding your situation but can't you hold down option and then select the Lion partition?
 
Well this is awkward... Previously when trying to get Chameleon to work off a GPT drive I had been installing it while running Mavericks. Each time it failed. Swapped out my Mavericks disk for my Lion disk and tried installing Chameleon from there. I'll be damned but it's working. Formatted a spare drive with 1 GB partition for Chameleon and left the rest to a second partition. I've successfully used this drive to then boot Lion with 64 bit kernel. Am now going to restore my current Mavericks install to the new GPT Chameleon drive. Will report back with results.

P.S. Does anyone know if it is possible to rename the Chameleon booter to something more sensible than 'EFI Boot' in the boot selector screen? I tried adding a rename partition flag to the org.chameleon.Boot.plist but to no avail.

Good news. I will retrace my steps and give it another go…..
 
Well this is awkward... Previously when trying to get Chameleon to work off a GPT drive I had been installing it while running Mavericks. Each time it failed. Swapped out my Mavericks disk for my Lion disk and tried installing Chameleon from there. I'll be damned but it's working. Formatted a spare drive with 1 GB partition for Chameleon and left the rest to a second partition. I've successfully used this drive to then boot Lion with 64 bit kernel. Am now going to restore my current Mavericks install to the new GPT Chameleon drive. Will report back with results.

P.S. Does anyone know if it is possible to rename the Chameleon booter to something more sensible than 'EFI Boot' in the boot selector screen? I tried adding a rename partition flag to the org.chameleon.Boot.plist but to no avail.

I am almost done making a video of the whole process including the Mavericks install. I'll post it in a bit. Provided my hair looks ok.
 
I found this regarding boot on PureDarwin


Wrong system booted by default

Problem: On a system with multiple OSes, boot wants to boot the wrong (non-PureDarwin) one by default. This happens when a non-HFS+ partition (e.g., FAT32 or NTFS) has the bootable ("active") flag and comes before the HFS+ partition that contains PureDarwin.

Solution: Modify boot so that it uses the first HFS+ partition instead of the first partition with the bootable ("active") flag:

In boot-132/i386/lib/libsaio/sys.c, comment the following line:

for ( bvr = chain; bvr; bvr = bvr->next )
{
if ( bvr->flags & kBVFlagNativeBoot ) bvr1 = bvr;
// if ( bvr->flags & kBVFlagPrimary ) bvr2 = bvr;
}
can this be added to the chameleon.boot.plist?
Or something like this?
 
Last edited:
I found this regarding boot on PureDarwin


Wrong system booted by default

Problem: On a system with multiple OSes, boot wants to boot the wrong (non-PureDarwin) one by default. This happens when a non-HFS+ partition (e.g., FAT32 or NTFS) has the bootable ("active") flag and comes before the HFS+ partition that contains PureDarwin.

Solution: Modify boot so that it uses the first HFS+ partition instead of the first partition with the bootable ("active") flag:

In boot-132/i386/lib/libsaio/sys.c, comment the following line:

for ( bvr = chain; bvr; bvr = bvr->next )
{
if ( bvr->flags & kBVFlagNativeBoot ) bvr1 = bvr;
// if ( bvr->flags & kBVFlagPrimary ) bvr2 = bvr;
}
can this be added to the chameleon.boot.plist?
Or something like this?

Is this on a hybrid GPT/MBR?

----------

I have one question:
Does any one have a good procedure for booting back into Lion using the 32bit EFI? (I know it is very easy to boot into Lion using the Chameleon 64bit EFI boot loader.)

The easiest way is to just reset the PRAM. That will reset the Startup Disk selection and put the machine back into EFI boot mode. Lion will take a little longer to startup but it will. When you want to go back to Chameleon just run the bless command again and reboot.

sudo bless -folder /Volumes/Boot -file /Volumes/Boot/boot -setBoot -legacy
 
Is this on a hybrid GPT/MBR?

----------



The easiest way is to just reset the PRAM. That will reset the Startup Disk selection and put the machine back into EFI boot mode. Lion will take a little longer to startup but it will. When you want to go back to Chameleon just run the bless command again and reboot.

sudo bless -folder /Volumes/Boot -file /Volumes/Boot/boot -setBoot -legacy

It's a GPT, (GUID) partition

EDIT: do you mean my situation or the one I found?
 
ONE LAST THING:
If I want to set the default startup disk in the Chameleon.Boot.plist to the correct one (it is 0,2): I did a diskutil list and my Mavericks partition is listed as disk0s3, so do I change the 0,2 to 0,3?
Thanks.

You don't need to use the disk identifier. You can just put

<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>Mavericks</string>

where Mavericks would be what ever your volume name that you want to be the default is. So if you wanted to by default boot to a volume named OSX. You would put:

<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>OSX</string>
 
You don't need to use the disk identifier. You can just put

<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>Mavericks</string>

where Mavericks would be what ever your volume name that you want to be the default is. So if you wanted to by default boot to a volume named OSX. You would put:

<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>OSX</string>

Tried with name (it is Mavericks) and I also read that you can hide partitions from chameleon, so I added the strings to hid the windows drive, but it still booted windows.
 
Tried with name (it is Mavericks) and I also read that you can hide partitions from chameleon, so I added the strings to hid the windows drive, but it still booted windows.

The issue is the Windows MBR is taking over before chameleon can boot. So modifying the changes to org.chameleon.boot.plist won't make any difference. I think you need to remove the active flag from the windows MBR all together.
 
The issue is the Windows MBR is taking over before chameleon can boot. So modifying the changes to org.chameleon.boot.plist won't make any difference. I think you need to remove the active flag from the windows MBR all together.

Thank you again!

I searched and found how to "inactivate" the windows partition.

I did it through disk part

After I started up, held "option" down, picked EFI and VOILA'!

I got my 3 bootable partitions (Mavericks, Lion and Windows).

I am again typing from Mavericks

I am going to reboot twice to see if Windows works fine and Lion boots alright.
 
Thank you again!

I searched and found how to "inactivate" the windows partition.

I did it through disk part

After I started up, held "option" down, picked EFI and VOILA'!

I got my 3 bootable partitions (Mavericks, Lion and Windows).

I am again typing from Mavericks

I am going to reboot twice to see if Windows works fine and Lion boots alright.

Good to hear!

I have learned a lot over the past few days regarding MBR's, GPT's, and Hybrid setups. It all can be really confusing.
 
Good to hear!

I have learned a lot over the past few days regarding MBR's, GPT's, and Hybrid setups. It all can be really confusing.

Here's where I'm at:

1) Hold option at chime

2) Select EFI
-->Select Mavericks --->Boot = Success!!!
-->Select Windows --->Boot = Success!!!

3) Select Lion (after chime) --->Boot = Success!!!

NOTE: Selecting windows from the boot menu gives out a frozen underscore with dashed vertical line on top. This sits there for a bit (like 30 seconds or even more?), but then it all works fine.

NOTE 2: Windows partition is no longer visible under the boot options after the chime, only available through chameleon boot.

I am going to try one last thing: set Mavericks as boot disk and see if it all goes through with no problems.

I have another question:
Is it possible to hide the black screen boot menu and simply use a key to recall it when/if necessary?

Hennesie, thank you so much again!
 
Here's where I'm at:

1) Hold option at chime

2) Select EFI
-->Select Mavericks --->Boot = Success!!!
-->Select Windows --->Boot = Success!!!

3) Select Lion (after chime) --->Boot = Success!!!

NOTE: Selecting windows from the boot menu gives out a frozen underscore with dashed vertical line on top. This sits there for a bit (like 30 seconds or even more?), but then it all works fine.

NOTE 2: Windows partition is no longer visible under the boot options after the chime, only available through chameleon boot.

I am going to try one last thing: set Mavericks as boot disk and see if it all goes through with no problems.

I have another question:
Is it possible to hide the black screen boot menu and simply use a key to recall it when/if necessary?

Hennesie, thank you so much again!

You wont see Windows when you hold down option because it is no longer marked as bootable.

As far as the black screen you can use themes. Using the Chameleon Wizard modify your org.chameleon.Boot.plist to use a GUI (its in the upper left of the editing window). Then use the themes tab in the Wizard to download and apply the theme. I use "Choose Your OS Dark". The themes give the effect of holding in option. If you want it to go away quicker you can lower the timeout setting.. I think default is 5 seconds. You can make it not show at all using the silent boot key but I don't think that will work with wanting to dual boot.
 
I have another question:
Is it possible to hide the black screen boot menu and simply use a key to recall it when/if necessary?

Hennesie, thank you so much again!

I'm not sure if it is what you're looking for, but you can remove the Chameleon boot prompt message by adding:

<key>Quiet Boot</key>
<string>Yes</string>

to your org.chameleon.Boot.plist file (default setting is 'No')

Additionally, if you just wanted to make it shorter, you can do:

<key>Timeout</key>
<string>5</string>

(where '5' is the number of seconds - I've heard reports that the minimum is 1, and 0 doesn't work)

Hope this helps.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.