Darwin/OSX on BIOS hardware uses a series of bootfiles which are explained on PureDarwin's boot page.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
boot | (sometimes referred to as "boot2") HFS+ startup file, lives in the HFS+ file system structure (not a regular file). (Could also be used as a regular file; using a special version of boot1h that would no longer need it to be HFS+ the startup file.) |
boot0 | Master Boot Record (MBR), lives in the first 440 bytes of the disk (not identical to the MBR from other OSes) |
boot1h | stage 1 booter (bootsector) for HFS+ partitions, lives in the first 512 bytes of the partition |
boot1u | |
boot1u0 | |
cdboot | booter for CD-ROMs (only works with valid Extensions.mkext due to a bug) |
chain0 |
fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/diskX # install boot0 to the MBR, X is the disk number dd if=boot1h of=/dev/diskXsY # X is disk number, Y is the number of the HFS partition. cp boot /Volumes/XXX # boot file must be at the root of the partition (''/'') fdisk -e /dev/diskX # edit the disk, X is the disk number flag 2 # flag the second partition HFS, first partition being EFI write # write the changes to disk exit # leave fdisk.