Answering some of my own questions in my previous post,

1) The FireWire GUID error (in iGenius) was solved by removing AppleFWAudio.kext and IOFireWire* kexts from /System/Library/Extensions and deleting /System/Library/Extensions.mkext and rebooting with -v -f option.

2) No need to touch the EFI System Partition.

3) iPortable can be restored to a GPT Partition.

4) Clonezilla (in my opinion) is good for cloning only whole disks, it is not good for cloning individual partitions. For cloning HFS+ Clonezilla relies on Partclone (http://partclone.org/) to do the job. So maybe partclone alone can be used to clone the partition. Try http://partedmagic.com/ .

5) After restoring the iPortable volarchive I only had to reinstall Chameleon's MBR boot code (440 bytes).

My Ideas :

I think it is always better to rely on the native image format for Mac (dmg). There are tools like HFSExplorer and DMGExtractor (both java cross-platform apps) to do the job, from http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/index2.html . HFSExplorer allows one to view HFS/HFS+ filesystems from a dmg file (including zlib,bzip2 and other compressed ones), from a raw dump (dd copy) of a HFS+ partition or even a partition itself (in both Windows and Linux). DMGExtractor converts compressed or uncompressed dmg files to raw image format which can be written to a partition or disk using dd tool.

I have tested these tools in both Windows (mine is Win 7 Pro x64) and Linux (Fedora 12 x64). For Linux users using OpenJDK, which comes natively wwith many linux distros, these tools will not work. They need to download the JRE version from Sun's website.

BTW I have downloaded iPortable Snow but couldn't get it to get past the "Creating your account" screen at all (mach_kernel with arch=i386 and -v ). The screen just freezes but the mouse cursor still moves. I waited for about an hour before pressing the power button (force shutdown). If I restart I get a bule screen with a cursor problem.


I tried almost all the ways you described like :-

touch /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone (in single user mode - restarting after the screen freeze)

platform=X86PC or PciRoot=0 or PciRoot=1


I also get a few errors everytime I boot iPortable (not necessarily in the same order) :-

launchctl : Convert to launchd /etc/mach_init.d/dashboard/advisoryd.plist

FakeSMC : key info not found MSDS, length - 6

ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin::start - wait For Service (resourcematching (AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement) timed out

system shutdown false


I had absolutely no problem in User Registration in iGenius 10.5.6 . I am unable to even see the desktop of iPortable Snow. Please help me.

Few other problems and doubts I still have :

1) Shutdown/Restart problem. It occurs randomly, not always.

2) What is DSDT?

I found out the cause of the problem of "Rebuild this volume" error when iPortable is restored. It is due to the fact thet HFS+ filesystems use a block size of 4096 bytes while the partitioning programs use a block size of 512 bytes. This error will not occur if the the size of the destination partition in bytes is a multiple of 4096, or the number of 512 byte sectors in the destination is a multiple of 8 (4096/512 = 8).

For Example : 7 GB partition => 7*1024*1024*1024 bytes = 7516192768 bytes => 7516192768/4096 = 1835008 (therefore multiple of 4096)
or 7516192768 bytes => 7516192768/512 = 14680064 sectors of 512 bytes each => 14680064/8 = 1835008 (therefore multiple of 8)

No error will occur when restoring iPortable to the above mentioned partition. But

7.6 GB Partition => 8160437862.4 bytes => not a multiple of 4096 => the error will occur.

For GPT partitioning I use GPT fdisk by Rod Smith - http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/ .

Finally I used DSDT Patcher GUI to create dsdt.aml file in my iGenius Mac. Can I copy the same file to iPortable Snow or do I need to create a new dsdt.aml file in iPortable Snow? Thank you.