Once I tried to change the default startup disk on my Mac running Snow Leopard and the following error appeared: “you can’t change the startup disk to the selected disk. Building boot caches on boot helper partition failed”.
At first I was trying to figure what’s a boot helper partition and where do I find it, but eventually I decided to take a look at com.apple.Boot.plist file, which appeared to be non-existent in it’s regular place.
So I created one by myself. In Terminal:
sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plistThere inserted the default code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://
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></string>
</dict>
</plist>
(Cmd+X to save the file).
This solved the problem for me.
Tags: mac os
Many thanks for this! No idea how I managed to nuke that file, or even why OS X couldn’t just re-create the file itself. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that I tried to install Windows 7 onto an external drive. Which by the way is still a bloody pain to do (I failed); modern technology my ass, I’ve managed to install OS X onto practically anything with writable memory since v10.0!
Thanks! I just upgraded from a 10.4.11 server to 10.6 server and used the Transfer server data option… the old server did not have the com.apple.Boot.plist file either. Must not have been needed in 10.4.11
Your fix worked great for me!