Tweaking Your System: Get Rid of PlatformUUID.kext

Posted by tonymacx86 on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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After establishing a working system with all components functioning, some advanced users begin to try to make their Hackintosh as 'Vanilla' as possible. This quest, an attempt to get the hard drive clean of all edited kexts is an ongoing one, especially for the new P55 boards. Besides the warm fuzzy feeling of having a cleaner more Mac-like experience, there are advantages to doing this. Theoretically you could swap out the hard drive with a real Mac, by installing Chameleon and your /Extra folder to the GUID partition format's 200mb EFI partition. This will be covered in an upcoming guide. Or you can make your system safeguarded against any potentially damaging Apple Update by removing any non-vanilla kexts. Suffice to say, a cleaner more streamlined OS X installation is attractive to most users.

So we've already begun the process of enabling all CPU functions and system components using DSDT edits. Recent tweaks of the new Chameleon 2.0 RC4 bootloader have unearthed a way to establish your system's UUID without the use of PlatformUUID.kext. Normally without this kext, you can't use Time Machine and Superduper! without getting Universal Unique Identifier disk errors. Also, every time you start iTunes it acts like you've never started it before- and gives you the EULA to agree to.

One of the latest forks of the Chameleon 2.0 RC4 bootloader by Insanelymac user rekursor establishes a hack that will let you get rid of PlatformUUID.kext once and for all.
  1. Download the edited Chameleon 2.0 RC4 source by rekursor here.
  2. Navigate to the sym folder and locate the boot file. It's 324kb.
  3. Replace the boot file at the root / of your Snow Leopard installation with this new modified one.
  4. Open Utilities/Disk Utility.
  5. Right click on your Snow Leopard installation in the left column and choose Information.
  6. Check to see what your hard drive's UUID is under Universal Unique Identifier. Mine is C0CE2600-93D7-3B41-843A-4D7C8E2C12E2. Write this number down or copy/paste it to a new text file.



  7. Open your com.apple.Boot.plist in TextEdit or Property List Editor. It should be located in /Extra.


  8. Add the SystemID key and string as shown in the above photos.
  9. Save your com.apple.Boot.plist.
  10. Remove PlatformUUID.kext from /Extra/Extensions.
  11. Rebuild your Extensions.mkext cache by dragging /Extra/Extensions to Kext Utility
  12. Reboot.
Enjoy your somewhat shorter list of extra kexts! This version of the Chameleon 2.0 RC4 incorporates some of the GraphicsEnabler features of netkas' PC-EFI 10.5 fork for more advanced cards. If you have tried RC4 without success for your graphics card, now is the time to give it another chance. For more information, check out this post. Special thanks to rekursor! Good luck!

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