Installing Lion on a Dell Inspiron 1720 / 1520 [VERSION 2]

[stee01]

Followed the first post to the T.

I come to install from the usb with the flags arch=i386 -v -x

After a while I get this.

Thats where it stays. Even after several hours. Until Reboot. I'm not fluent in mac, but this looks like a hdd issue. Am I right? Any advice would be appreciated.

Muchos Thankias

Stee

 

[ellnic]

Hi Stee,

Just to clarify, is this the stage where you have put the files on the USB stick and are booting from it to install Lion? Can I ask if you are using an 8GB USB stick or external HDD? If you are using an external HDD this will not work. It must be an 8GB memory stick (or larger).

If it is a memory stick, what brand is it? Some cheap ones I have found are problematic with the Mac OS HFS+ file system. Use SanDisk to be sure.

ellnic.

 

[stee01]

Hi Stee,

Just to clarify, is this the stage where you have put the files on the USB stick and are booting from it to install Lion? Can I ask if you are using an 8GB USB stick or external HDD? ............
If it is a memory stick, what brand is it? Some cheap ones I have found are problematic with the Mac OS HFS+ file system. Use SanDisk to be sure.

ellnic.

Hi ellnic,

It's a sandisk cruzer micro u3 8gb usb drive. I have 2 8gb cruzer blades coming next week if worst comes so I should be able to rule that out.

EDIT: sorry, yes this is the point of booting from it to install lion

I have seen the installation stall at that point many times. It is typically caused by not having properly installed the 10.6.7 versions of AppleACPIPlatform.kext and the IOPCIFamily.kext. Make sure the roll-back version of those kexts are in the S/L/E folder on your flash drive.

As per the instructions, I copied the modified kext from the "modified applacpiplatform and iopcifamily kext" zip into S/L/E on the installer partition of the USB. Are they not the 10.6.7 ones?

 

[stee01]

sorry my bad.

The system in my profile is my main machine. That runs Lion perfectly.

My laptop however is a Dell Inspiron 1720, Core2Duo T7500, 8600M GT with 2GB RAM. Virtually spec for spec the same as the ops (I think ellnic has 4gb and slightly bigger hdds). This is the machine Im trying to get Lion running on.

 

[ellnic]

Ellnic - Your temps are shockingly high. You might want to check that you do not have a build-up of dust between your fan and heat sink.

There is no dust build up as I stripped the whole machine down when I had the T9500 escapade, so it can't be that. The machine is spottless inside

If it is not a physical problem, then you should consider what may be going on with your fan controller. My temps are typically in the high 30s or low 40s when idle and peak at 50 when my CPU is at 100%. Granted, I only have the T7100 so it probably produces less heat than your monster CPU. Still, you may want to try SMC Fan Controller and see if you can reduce your temps by manually controlling your fans.

SMC Fan Controller does not work for me, I think it needs a real Mac. Does it work for you? I checked on Intel's site and both our CPU's are 35Watt with a Max temp of 100c but I agree that something is wrong with my setup. Kext, DSDT, Plist or otherwise.

Next, why do you use Multi-Beast? Is it better than Chameleon? I have always had good results with Chameleon so I have never considered switching. I respect your opinion and if you think I should try out Multi-Beast, I will give it a try.

Multibeast is an installer programme made by Tony and MacMan. It's not a replacement for Chameleon, but it can install kexts and other things for you and is certainly a very handy utility. It was originally made for Gigabyte P55 users to do a one touch post install as it puts everything one needs into place, but now includes other stuff as well - Check it out: http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/02/ ... ation.html

Lastly, with your FakeSMC plug-ins, I could never get the SuperIO plug-in to work. It makes my system crash.

No problems so far... will report if anything changes. (Have run it for 24 hrs so far).

Next, I use the IntelThermal plug-in and maybe that could help you with your temperatures.

I do not currently use this - it sounds like it's definately worth a try. Do you have a copy or a link to it?

Lastly, my only crash today occurred when I was running Parallels. I am anxious to hear how well VMWare Fusion works for you.

Well so far so good with VMWare. Still no crashes on this end since uninstalling Parallels! I am using VMWare 4.0.1 which seems quite good (once you disable the annoying menu that sits up the top near the coolbook icon). It doesn't seem as snappy as Parallels, but it doesn't suffer from sound distortion like Parallels did. It also does not appear to install Kexts like Parallels did, so less conflicts - but prolly also the reason why its not as snappy. What I thought was particularly good is that it took a copy of my Parallels drive, converted it then installed VMWare tools into it /without/ altering my original Parallels drive - so I would urge you to give it a go. If it's crap, just delete.

 

[ellnic]

I tried the Intel Thermal kext but it seems to make no difference in reading or temperature. Out of interest, could you use the attached NVclockX kext and use something like iStat to tell me what your GPU temp is? Mine runs at about 56c.

EDIT: This post talks about undervolting to lower temp. http://dottech.org/tipsntricks/4932/

Albeit, on a Windows system. But if you scroll down you will see that he had temperatures higher than mine! Maybe it is not uncommon for the T7500?

Also found this: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 550AAW9maa

Ignore the main answer but scroll down to the other answers - they all say 70c-80c is normal

More info: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... t7500.html

This also seems very interesting: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... -64-a.html

 

[stee01]

For Spee: These are the ones I use.

ACPI_IOPCI.zip

With those kexts I get this error:

I'll keep looking for info, but having a hard time believing this is being such a pain, snow runs a breeze!

Thanks for the assistance so far

 

[ellnic]

This is a long shot - but do you have your BIOS set to AHCI? If it's set to ATA it can cause issues. I guess it's already set if snow leo works though. Are you on BIOS revision A09?

Also try repairing permissions on the key drive. Open a terminal and type:

sudo diskutil repairpermissions [then drag the Lion_USB on desktop here]

Then push enter, enter pass and wait.

 

[stee01]

This is a long shot - but do you have your BIOS set to AHCI? If it's set to ATA it can cause issues. I guess it's already set if snow leo works though. Are you on BIOS revision A09?

Also try repairing permissions on the key drive. Open a terminal and type:

sudo diskutil repairpermissions [then drag the Lion_USB on desktop here]

Then push enter, enter pass and wait.

Bios is ahci, revision is A09

slightly confused about this error when running repairpermissions

Error starting permissions repair for disk3s2 LION_USB: Permissions are not enabled on the disk (-69861)

Worryingly in disk utility BOOT lists itself as journaled, LION_USB doesnt (just extended). I bet thats the problem. I feel like a right idiot now.

I'll redo the lion install partition and report back

 

[ellnic]

Actually, the error is correct - technically, unlike a boot volume such as your HDD, the key drive should ignore permissions (the check box when you get info on it). I suggested that command in case they were not ignored.

Both partitions should be extended and journaled though. Don't feel like an idiot, we've all done similar things. I know I have ;-)