Mac OS X on x86 Hardware 2008–2024 Technical Archive
InfiniteMac OSx86 › Snow Leopard 10.6 › What's wrong with my boot.plist
12,184 reads · 2010-09-20 – 2010-09-21
Dossier Snow Leopard 10.6 DSDT Voodoo / XNU Kernel NVIDIA GeForce

What's wrong with my boot.plist

CPU is i7 980X Graphics card is nVidia Fermi After I installed Snow Leopard 10.6.3, bootloader (PC EFI) keeps restarting my computer after I click the hard drive with the Apple icon where the OS is installed. Could my 12 GB of RAM be the…

Primary Author
@georgegeorge Published 2010-09-20
Collection
Snow Leopard 10.6
Archival Footprint
12,184 historical reads · 1 curated field notes (from 3 dispatches) · 2010-09-20 – 2010-09-21
Credited Voices (3)
@georgegeorge@Nameci@Taisto

CPU is i7 980X
Graphics card is nVidia Fermi

After I installed Snow Leopard 10.6.3, bootloader (PC EFI) keeps restarting my computer after I click the hard drive with the Apple icon where the OS is installed.

Could my 12 GB of RAM be the issue? I hear Snow Leopard will restart if there are more than 4 GB of RAM.

So I altered the com.apple.Boot.plist file in Library\Preferences\SystemConfiguration with Notepad:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>-v -f -x cpus=1 busratio=25 maxmem=4096</string>
<string>rd=disk0s2</string>
<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1280x1024x32</string>
<key>Boot Graphics</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>Quiet Boot</key>
<string>No</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>5</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Even though all the boot flags go through and screen resolution changes with "1280x1024x32", when I add maxmem=4096, the bootloader still shows "12279MB memory" on the upper left corner and computer restarts again. Why is the maxmem=4096 string not working? With Windows msconfig I am able to reduce the amount of RAM available to 4GB, so I know my RAM's not at fault.

boot.plist is the only file I modified. Are there any other files that need modifying to boot Snow Leopard? Perhaps mach_kernel or smbios.plist? I read something about a DSDT file but I don't understand what it is nor where to find it.

Synthesized Community Field Notes

1 technical responses curated from 3 original dispatches

Field Note #1 @Taisto 2010-09-21

Try what Nameci suggested.

But on the other hand - were you able to boot this install earlier ? Cause to be honest i don't think this is a problem related to the memory. Does it reboot instantly after you hit enter ? With no info/text on the screen ?

Corroborated & Participated: @Nameci
Sources & Contributor Provenance (3 credited usernames · Thread #6598)
UsernameDossier ContributionDispatchesActive Window
@georgegeorgePrimary Author12010-09-20
@NameciContributor12010-09-21
@TaistoContributor12010-09-21