Some More Bytes

Well, actually this is not a post about how to update your netbook. It’s more about how to recover from a reboot when you shouldn’t have rebooted.

Instructions to update  are pretty clear in this post. However, avoid a reboot is not so simple as it seems. Every tutorial to update to 10.6.4 starts saying “Install 10.6.4 update, an before reboot…”. My problem is that I did it through the software updates, and it installed the actual update WHILE rebooting, so once installed and automatically rebooted, you’re sold. Probably with the combo update you are more lucky.

So basically, what you should do is:

• Install 10.6.4 update.
• Without reboot you’ll need to change some boot files on your efi partition as well as patch DSDT if you didn’t in previous updates. You can forget about the sleepenabler kext there found as you will be using the native power management kexts (see the links above).

Now you installed the update, and your computer rebooted, and Snow Leopard won’t start. How do you complete the process??

You need your USB Key/USB Hard drive you used to make the vanilla install. Remember?

• Connect your drive to you netbook, and reboot. Select the USB device as boot device in you BIOS/Start menu. Chameleon will start. If you select your main hard drive to boot from chameleon, it will not work. ou have to boot from the Install DVD image partitio that you made.
• Once the installation starts, go to the upper menu and open a Terminal from Utilities menu.
• The main hard drive (the partition where you installed Snow Leopard) should be already mounted by now at /Volumes/hackintosh (or whatever you named your partition).

To change the EFI partition boot file, you can manually mount the EFI partition in /Volumes and just copy it over, assuming you have the boot file somewhere. However, if you need to mess around with the kexts, patch the DSDT and rebuild the cache like I had to,  the safest way is to chroot the the new disk and do it using the typical update scripts.

chroot /Volumes/hackintosh

• From here, the process is as always. Go to your Vanilla folder. To patch DSDT copy the DSDT.aml file and run the update.sh script. -Run the 27ae.sh script to patch video kexts.
• To change the kexts, remove sleepenabler, add the new ones and run update.sh to copy them and rebuild the kext cache. (follow the instructions to modify the SMSBIOS in the linked post).

Now reboot, and you should be ready to go.