[FIXED] Can't change startup disk due to "building boot caches failure"

[Dae]

Hi everyone,
my Mac Pro 2008 runs Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on a striped software RAID and Windows XP using Bootcamp on a separate hard drive.

Initially that separate hard drive had been split into two partitions, one for Time Machine and one for Windows. But eventually I decided to get rid of the Time Machine partition and dedicate the entire hard drive to Windows.

I've done that but there appeared a strange problem. In System Preferences my startup disk was set to Windows and now I'm unable to change it to Mac OS X anymore. (Please see the screenshot below).

Of course I can select Mac OS X while holding "Alt" on boot, but having Windows a default OS on Mac Pro is very disturbing

I have no idea what is "boot helper partition" and what's wrong with it. I'm afraid that Windows installer (I had to use it while transforming the partition) messed something up.

Any clues and advice are appreciated.

Thank you!

 

[Dae]

Found this in Console.app:

 

[Dae]

Hooray, fixed.

 

[Jory]

Similar issue

I ran into this same problem, but the provided solution (recreating the com.apple.Boot.plist) did not did not apply. The plist was right where it was supposed to be and contained the correct data.

A key difference for me is that my boot drive is actually a pair of disks mirrored by SoftRAID and I had just installed a new SSD and loaded 10.6.8 on the new drive. (The RAID mirror has 10.5.5 on it.)

Reinstalling the SoftRAID driver on the mirror solved the problem.