Cannot Bless Macintosh HD as startup.

[Rod]

Dear friends I find myself in a bit of a pickle. I have installed Mavericks on a 2012 MBP which had previously had a 750 Gb SSD installed Running Snow Leopard. The install appears to have been successful. I had erased the HD partitioned and formatted it using GUID mapping. But when the installer finished it could not restart from the Macintosh HD. When I tried to select it using Start Up Disk I got a dialogue box stating unable to start up from the Volume Macintosh HD because it has not been Blessed.
How can I bless it if I cant boot it? I'm at a loss on this one. I have searched for an answer to my particular situation without success, please help.

 

[chas_m]

Where did the Mavericks install come from?

 

[Rod]

Where did the Mavericks install come from?

Chas-m, the Mavericks installer was downloaded by the client from the App Store and a USB bootable installer created using DiskMaker 4b4 on his laptop at my advice and with my assistance because he was reluctant to upgrade at that time. During the following months his HD became corrupted (according to Disk Utility) and I advised him (as he did not have the original instal disks) that the easiest way to repair it would be to clean install Mavericks. He had performed a Time Machine backup a couple of months previous but had been unable to or unwilling to recently.
So I am pretty confident that the TM backup was OK and he is only concerned about his iPhoto library anyway. As a further precaution I backed up his iPhoto library onto another brand new 500 Gb USB HD.
So the question remains how to "Bless" the Macintosh HD given that I cannot boot from it?

 

[usagora]

"Bless" the hard drive??? That's a new one on me. What on earth does that even mean?

 

[MacInWin]

"Bless" the hard drive??? That's a new one on me. What on earth does that even mean?

"bless" is a function in OS X. If you want the full description, open Terminal and enter "man bless" and you'll get the manual for the command. From the first paragraph of the description comes this:

bless is used to modify the volume bootability characteristics of
filesystems, as well as select the active boot volume. bless has 6 modes
of execution: Folder Mode, Mount Mode, Device Mode, NetBoot Mode, Info
Mode, and Unbless Mode.

 

[MacInWin]

And for the OP, if you can boot to get into Terminal, you maybe able to figure out how to bless the drive from which you want to boot with that manual.

 

[usagora]

"bless" is a function in OS X. If you want the full description, open Terminal and enter "man bless" and you'll get the manual for the command. From the first paragraph of the description comes this:

Wow, learn something new every day...never ran into this before....

 

[MacInWin]

99.9% of the time you don't need it, ever. But it's buried in the installation process for OS X and apparently it didn't work for Rod. So he MAY be able to recover if he executes the command manually in Terminal.

 

[Rod]

I have looked up the Terminal Command for this and when I attempt to run it it says no such script exists.

 

[bobtomay]

This installation went onto the same drive that DU said is corrupt?

Was the Repair Disk run on this drive prior to reinstalling the OS?
What was the result?

Would think the issue is due to the system file it is looking for has likely been written to a bad block and is unreadable.

Especially when you consider the search results for the bless command while disregarding all of them related to installing Linux, you have:
1. Nothing related to individual Intel Macs
2. Most of them are related to PPC Macs and most of them running OS 8 or 9
3. Half of the above users admitted to having problems with the HD prior to the issue and were wondering if they needed to replace the drive
4. The other half are talking about running "clusters" of Macs where they are installing the system folder as "hidden".

Considering the above and you're not going to replace this drive, I would try:
Boot to the USB installer
Open DU and run the Repair Disk command (or re-run it) - Run it repeatedly until it says it did not repair anything.
Repartition / format the drive
Run the Verify command again - if it finds something wrong, Stop, Do not pass Go and Do not collect $200 - go buy a new drive - if the report is ok...
Then attempt reinstalling Mavericks

If the above doesn't work, then I would try the same with my Yosemite USB installer instead of my Mavericks installer to see if it may be the problem.

I've gone through all these headaches time and time again with drives that started having issues. Yes, sometimes they can be repaired and are fine for quite awhile. The headaches on the rest of them are just not worth it. Personally, and because I do everything for free basically, I will no longer work on a machine with a drive that has begun failing until that drive has been replaced.

 

[MacInWin]

bobtomay could be right. I just ran bless with no modifiers and got the help screen, so it's on my system. Which means it SHOULD be on yours, but isn't, for some reason.

 

[Rod]

OK, I have got Mavericks up and running normally had followed Bobtomay's instructions already as it turned out but, silly me had not unplugged USB drive so as Macintosh HD was not "blessed" as startup it kept booting from the USB drive. As soon as I tried rebooting with the USB disconnected it booted into Mavericks on the Macintosh HD.
So all seemed well until I tried to select Macintosh HD in Sys Prefs > Startup Drive. Still get the Macintosh HD cannot be selected as startup because it has not been blessed by Bless Tool.
So I open Terminal and type in; sudo bless -mount "/Volumes/Macintosh HD" -setBoot
What I get is "unrecognised option".
Where to from here? Am I doing something wrong?

 

[MacInWin]

From the man page, wouldn't you put the "-setboot" in front of the drive path? Maybe cradom or one of the other terminal wizards can chime in. I'm just reading the man page.

 

[Rod]

Jake, I too wondered about that as I looked at the "man" page so I did a search for the command and that was what I found. There does seem to be some discrepancy in where the commas go for a two barrel name. ie MacintoshHD versus Macintosh HD
I'm no expert on Terminal unlike others so I proceed with caution any time I fiddle with the command line.

 

[bobtomay]

So, when booted to the internal drive - it does not permit you to select the internal drive as the Startup Disk?

Based on the developers OS X man page for Mavericks here:

I have to believe your client has made some modification to the firmware on that machine that even a PRAM reset will not affect. I would, however, try the PRAM reset if you have not done so. Am thinking instead of trying to use the bless command, I might try downloading/installing the most current EFI firmware for that machine.

Reading at the bottom of the page under "Examples",
The "--setBoot" command would be for a system with OS 9 and OS X
For a volume with OS X only, you would use the "Folder Mode" command, not the "Mount Mode" command.

However, because I am not experienced modifying the firmware on Macs, and the machine is booting and running just fine with the only issue being not being able to select the Macintosh HD from the Startup Pref pane - I would leave it alone and hand it back to the client if it will not allow you to install the current EFI firmware or find out what mods the client has made.

 

[Rod]

Thanks bobtomay I will try the PRAM reset just in case it works but as you have said it's not really a fuctional problem for this client. I believe the current 750 Gb HD was installed by a technician in Singapore so little can be found out about any modifications he may have made to firmware but I suspect that may be the root cause of the issue, (excuse the pun).
Thanks for everybody's help on this. I'll let you know about the PRAM reset just FYI.
Cheers,
Rod

 

[Rod]

"Bless" the hard drive??? That's a new one on me. What on earth does that even mean?

I hope you will never need to find out. It's sure causing some headaches for me.

 

[MacInWin]

Rod, did you see this? Also, when I ran "bless -info" on my system I got this:

finderinfo[0]: 21112476 => Blessed System Folder is /System/Library/CoreServices
finderinfo[1]: 25344262 => Blessed System File is /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi
finderinfo[2]: 0 => Open-folder linked list empty
finderinfo[3]: 0 => No alternate OS blessed file/folder
finderinfo[4]: 0 => Unused field unset
finderinfo[5]: 21112476 => OS X blessed folder is /System/Library/CoreServices
64-bit VSDB volume id: 0xDED85B09FCFBB5B4

You might try that to see what results you have.

 

[MacInWin]

There is also this at Apple. It's pretty old, but maybe that would help.

 

[bobtomay]

Nice Jake...

That's the ticket - check the "bless -info" command.
Mine match exactly Jake's readout (except for the volume ID)

If it's matching lines 1,2 & 6 in Jake's post above - That should be an indication that you have a bad sector/corrupt file on the HD.

If it doesn't match, then try the Folder Mode command.
It's in the 4th post in link at Apple Jake gave above.