Getting feet wet before diving in...

[iKarith]

Hi everyone,

Let me start by saying I'm fully well aware I'm so far in over my head here that I don't even know how far in over my head I actually am yet. I'm looking to build a pretty decent Kaby Lake Hackintosh, but that system is bugetarily going to take a few months to buy all the fun pieces as I'm operating on a limited budget month by month. We'll be ringting in 2018 before I have all the pieces to build the system I want, so I'm seeking advice on the machine I've got to play with in the meantime--it's NOT an ideal Hackintosh build in 2017! A Dell Inspiron 620.

That means i3-2120, 4GB, 1TB spinning rust locked in ATA mode, Dell 1502 wireless and RTL8167 Gigabit. Intel HD 2000 graphics. This thing sucked when it was new in 2011, but free's a good price. It doesn't even have AHCI unless you hack its BIOS! Free is a good price though, and I'm willing to spend a small amount on this system for things that will eventually make it a nice machine for lighter "old" games (Windows XP or 7 era).

Basically, I've got a GeForce GTX 650 that will go in, and I can also drop in some RAM. CPU ... I could upgrade it to a better i3, but the i5s start to be more than it's worth spending on this thing right now. I realize I have a weaker than a 2011 Mac Mini here, but that should do for very light web browsing. My fiancee's mom has an i3-based Mac Mini 2012 and it's not zippy, but it's actually not bad with 16GB and a SSD. The 16GB was a big deal for Lion, but that machine was PAIN under Sierra until I finally got her to let me put a SSD in it. I figure this i3 with 12GB and a SSD will still feel a little slow. But it's mostly to give me a Mac to poke at in the meantime.

The next purchase would be a Kaby Lake i7-7700 with a 270-series motherboard, 16GB of DDR4, and a new case and PSU. That'd require a reinstall of the Hackintosh to move the SSD to it, and I might need to keep the old GTX 650 with the new system for a month or so. I'd LOVE to have some sweet vega action by then ... but until Apple actually releases a modular Mac Pro, and possibly not even then, I don't see AMD as a good option based on the issues described here on the site. The final Hackintosh is a workstation, not a game machine, but an affordable modern NV card should do what I need to finish up with the build, along with bringing the machine up to 32GB.

...So, what am I doing wrong here, aside from even looking at a machine with a Sandy Bridge? Are there gotchas I maybe don't know about? Most of what I found for this machine (and others like it) talked about Lion obviously.

Thanks, help is appreciated!

 

[trs96]

Welcome to the tonymacx86 forum. You could try installing Sierra with a Legacy Unibeast installer. The Dell 620 models are new enough that it should not be a problem when you use a compatible graphics card.

Follow this guide (steps 2-4) for the HP 6200. It's the same Sandy Bridge, 2011 era system.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...profile-the-cheapomac-ii.230056/#post-1566950

 

[iKarith]

Thanks for a link to the HP 6200. The post you linked is the BIOS flashing guide--are you suggesting the Dell uses the same process (I don't believe it does) or that I should follow the unibeast guide above that? Assuming the latter.

The first order of business is to see if I can get AHCI in the BIOS. AMI has apparently determined that this should be essentially impossible for an end user to do. Justifiable, but I know this setting exists and I know Dell chose to disable it for idiotproofing their consumer-focused desktop. *sigh*

 

[trs96]

Thanks for a link to the HP 6200. The post you linked is the BIOS flashing guide--are you suggesting the Dell uses the same process (I don't believe it does) or that I should follow the unibeast guide above that? Assuming the latter.

The first order of business is to see if I can get AHCI in the BIOS. AMI has apparently determined that this should be essentially impossible for an end user to do. Justifiable, but I know this setting exists and I know Dell chose to disable it for idiotproofing their consumer-focused desktop. *sigh*

Does it have a raid option in the BIOS ? If you set the Sata mode to RAID it will work in the same way as AHCI. Try it. Do any BIOS flashing you need according to the DELL methods they propose on their website. I'm referring you to that guide for the Unibeast and Multibeast sections, steps 2 through 4 only. In Multibeast, you will need to select the Realtek LAN kext and not the Intel for your ethernet to work.

 

[iKarith]

Absolutely not. Dell has locked all of that stuff out of the Inspiron 620 BIOS. I did find a solution--the bios-mods.com forum's readers have the tools needed to patch it (and I'm just gonna assume they've got them legitimately), and they take requests.

I found the droid I was looking for by searching for "inspiron 620 ms-a10". The thread contains some misinformation from the Dell Community forum that the chipset doesn't support AHCI, followed by someone calling BS on that (as was done on the Dell Community forum as well), and providing a patched BIOS. The BIOS, mind you, not the patching tools. I'd provide a link ... but I am not sure that's kosher for this forum since the BIOS files would theoretically be software someone has modified.

The included install.bat file will require some editing to contain the correct path, and you'll want to add /ForceIt if you already have MS-A10 installed. What you need will now appear under Advanced.

The BIOS is still legacy-only. UEFI is possible, but nobody's gone and enabled it. That's what the above link to a Sandy Bridge HP guide is for I assume.

 

[iKarith]

Apparently I'm getting the full experience!

The Realtek driver "cannot be used" (thank you Apple for your ever so descriptive error message), and if I don't boot the system with nv_disable=1, it reboots. Audio is recognized (Intel HDA) according to system profiler, however when I go to sound everything is grayed out. Realtek Gigabit ethernet is also not working, and I sort of didn't expect the Dell 1502 wifi module to work without tweaking. I think I'm supposed to install NV graphics drivers from their website for a GTX 650 Ti, but I wouldn't swear to that either (and when I use the search dingus on NV's website, that's a dead end...)

I've got a Fenvi Broadcom BCM94322 card on the way--I _think_ that's supposed to just work. If it does, it'll solve some problems.

 

[iKarith]

Update on ethernet: The Realtek RTL8111 kext didn't work with 10.12.6 as installed, showing a link that was disconnected in network (and no network device in System Profiler). The solution was to reinstall the appropriate kext manually, using the process described in this post.

I'll try and seek answers to the remaining problems in the appropriate places, but I'll link the solutions here in this thread for anyone who goes looking for info on this Dell later on. Sound and NV graphics don't work yet, but now that I have networking that should hopefully be easier to address. I'm posting this from my new crapintosh–say hello to shogo everyone!

 

[iKarith]

The video card I am using in this Inspiron 620 is a GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB (this required replacing the Dell power supply with something that had a VGA power connector.). The guides suggest that 600 series cards "just work", and NV's web page doesn't give you any drivers to download if you tell it you have this card.

To get this card working on my Crapintosh required inject Nvidia and Nvidia Web for Sierra as described in the Nvidia guide. The reason why I had trouble with it was that the information in that guide said you'd need the web drivers for later GPUs and you'd need inject for older ones... Perhaps there's something involved with the fact that this is a legacy boot? Not sure, but that's what I had to do.

 

[iKarith]

In this post I figured out (with help, thanks again pilgrim!) how to fix the Inspiron 620's HDA audio, which is Conexant based. The solution was VoodooHDA, which I had installed, but MultiBeast didn't install it properly apparently. The fix was rather similar to what was done for the Realtek gigabit LAN card: Uninstall what MultiBeast had done since it didn't work and run the installer from SourceForge.

I've also added darkwake-0 in my clover config and set my system definition to a Sandy Bridge based iMac. I don't know if darkwake=0 is appropriate for this machine, but it was an attempt to alleviate a problem where Apple -> Restart would cause the screen to go into powersave mode and not come up. This may be because the system definition is wrong for my video card and I don't really understand what questions to ask yet to fix that. The term SSDT has come up, but I've generally seen it relating to processor, not video card, and apparently you may need one of each. I saw a link to a script to generate one for processor, but that doesn't necessarily help me since the problem I'm most needing to fix is GPU related. Unfortunately "black screen" questions generally seem to deal with booting, so searching for that needle wasn't helpful.

I did transplant this machine to a different case. The front panel is a custom connector on the Dell marked in the service manual as LEDH1. I suspect this part is used on several Dell chassis and motherboards (if only because I know that several Dells use this motherboard, and several motherboards use this chassis...) I pulled the assembly and found two LEDs and the power switch, wired with one leg of the power switch shorted to two other pins like so:

The Inspiron 620 does not require those other two pins to be connected. What the other pins (outlined in purple) do is beyond me. This board works without connecting them--I only assume the other pins are connected to make this LEDH1 assembly work on other motherboards, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Using Left to right and top to bottom, pins 1 and 3 are the HDD LED, 2 and 4 are power LED, 5 and 6 are the power switch. Contrary to Intel standard, 7 and 8 do not accept a reset signal, and pin 9 cannot be +5v if pin 5 is ground for the power switch as it is on other Intel boards. This is Dell custom territory. Just connect the two LEDs and the power switch.

If you're likewise transplanting a board into a bigger case with "LEDH1" connector, odds are this info will be the same for you. I will only guarantee it if you're using an Inspiron 620 or 660, or the equivalent Vostro models.

For anyone reading this who IS questioning one of these things as buying advice, I'd recommend against it. Having to track down a hacked BIOS for AHCI support, not being able to otherwise configure recommended settings, having an EFI machine crippled so it can only boot legacy mode (which is recommended for series 6, but still), and having a power supply with no GPU power nor really having space for a power supply whose SATA connectors are not at right angles... Plus most of what you do with MultiBeast didn't work for me on Sierra (though that may be MultiBeast doing too much magic.) And as I said above, I still haven't sorted out power management for the system and/or GPU (though that's probably my own lack of clue about such things yet), ... you could probably find a MUCH easier first build.

(Mods, this thread started out as requesting buying advice as to whether it was worthwhile to do something useful with this Dell and upgrading it as I went to something a bit higher end. It's kind of become more of a guide to hackintoshing this old Dell... If you'd like to edit the subject accordingly, I'd appreciate it. The thread might also be best moved elsewhere since it's well beyond buying advice at this point. I'll post something new if I have questions about components to upgrade this machine.)