Boot Error!

Having completed my buddy Dan’s mighty Customac Pro, I decided to turn my attentions to my smaller but still wonderful Customac Mini and show it a little tender loving care in the form of a brand new hard-drive. The problem was that my little ersatz Mac did not accept my gift in the spirit in which it was offered.

My little computer was outgrowing the 500GB hard drive that I had originally installed what with all of the movies I was cramming into the Plex Media Server on board and the higher megapixel pictures that I was shooting. It was getting cramped so I decided to splurge and get a brand new Toshiba 1TB.

The Plex Media server works beautifully in conjunction with the Roku’s Plex channel or application. I RIPPED the DVDs I own, and now they are available to stream on my Televisions, computers, tablets or iPods.

The hard-drive arrived in the mail, and I figured it would take about fifteen minutes to install it, and maybe another hour to install the Mac OS. I wanted to do a fresh install of the Operating System rather than cloning the old drive. Having just completed Dan’s monster, I figured it would be easy.

It wasn’t.

The OS installed all right. It seemed to go smoothly without a hitch, and it initially booted all right from the freshly installed operating system from my brand new hard-drive. It all went south when I tried to migrate email and network settings from the old drive using Apple’s Migration assistant. I rebooted and got the disconcerting and not-at-all Apple-like error warning pictured at the top of the post.

Crap!

I figured I corrupted some file or possibly the bootloader on the drive so I wasted a lot of time running diagnostic tests on the drive itself, re-formatting it, reinstalling the OS, cloning the old drive to the new, but nothing worked. I still got the ERROR.

I tore the machine down making sure that plugs were plugged into their proper places. I put the old hard-drive in, and it booted up without a problem. I put my new hard-drive into my old G5 PowerMac which is our main production machine and figured it would stay there acting as storage for art files and photographs. I’d have to content myself with the old hard-drive, and maybe I’d look at an external hard-drive down the road.

Then I read something.

In a recent article about an alternative bootloader to Chimera at the fantastic TonyMacx86 website the words No boot0 error with 4K Advanced Format drives screamed out at me. What’s a 4K Advanced Format drive? Was this the problem I was experiencing with the new hard-drive? I did a search and found a couple of solutions. TonyMacx86 offers a guide, but better yet is the article and video by Bob Roche at Roche Technology. Roche specializes in building all sorts of computer rigs particularly Hackintoshes, and he is an incredible resource. Thanks, Bob!

The articles in the hyperlinks above go into a lot more detail than I will about 4K Advanced Format drives. Essentially as mechanical hard-drives get larger and larger, drives had to made to hold the data more efficiently. Old drives are broken up into 512 byte sectors, but manufacturers of these new drives increased the size of these sectors to 4096 bytes, or 4KB thus the name 4K Advanced Format drives. Apparently this is not an issue with Solid State Drives or SSD’s. That’s why I didn’t have a problem with the CustoMac Pro I built for Dan. His boot dive is a 120GB SSD, but I went with a thriftier and roomier mechanical drive. The Advanced formatting gives the Chimera bootloader (the hack or workaround that helps boot non-Apple hardware into the Apple OS) a hard time. You wind up with the error at the top of the page.

If you’re having this issue, I strongly suggest you watch Bob Roche’s video several times. Take notes! With that said, it’s not that difficult a fix. It involves rebooting into your USB drive with UniBeast and the Mavericks installation software on it. Once there, you will see the Mavericks installation window. From the menu at the top, you will find the terminal where you will enter code which Bob Roche explicitly spells out.

dd if=/Volumes/UniBeastDriveNameHere/usr/standalone/i386/boot1h of=/dev/disk’X’s2

UniBeastDriveName is whatever you named your flash drive that you used to install Mavericks. Mine was called USB. Disk ‘X’ in my case was disk0. Type carefully, press enter, and the code you see beneath the command in my screenshot should appear. Success! Reboot and you should be happily booting into the Apple OS . I was, and now I’m enjoying my 1TB drive on my Hackintosh.

I’m not exactly sure what changes the terminal command did, but it worked quickly and now Chimera is playing nice with the larger sectors on the new hard-drive. My pile of PC parts is a Mac once again.