On numerous occassions in the last three days I’ve restored my OS but not been able to get it to boot. Here’s an easy solution. Just download this zip file (bootef.zip) and (from the readme in the zip file):

Copy the folder “bootefi” and all included files/folders to the root directory of either a USB Thumb drive, a USB hard drive, or a second internal drive. Be sure that either the Thumb drive, the USB hard drive, or the second internal drive have a volume name.

Insert the OSX Boot DVD and allow the DVD to boot up. Install OSX from the DVD. Allow the DVD to reboot. This time don’t install the OS, but click on the Utilities menu and select “Terminal”.

Then enter the following commands

sudo -s (then enter your root password)

cd /Volumes/usbvolname/bootefi

where usbvolname is the volume name of the USB Thumb drive, USB hard drive, or second internal drive where the “bootefi” folder was copied to.

./bootefi.sh installvolumename

where installvolumename is the volume name of the drive that OSX was installed to. The installvolumename should be surrounded by double quotes. Example: ./bootefi.sh “MacHD” or ./bootefi.sh “Macintosh HD”

Now simply follow the prompts and choices based on the type of bootloader install. The choices are EFI or Darwin X86 bootloader and for an EFI bootloader, mbr or guid type partition on the OSX hard drive.

At the end, the script will ask to either reboot or stay in Terminal and reboot later.

Before OSX boots up, make sure to remove the OSX install DVD, so that it won’t interfere.

Tags: boot, startup

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Fixing Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.