Hi All,
Here's the full rundown if anyone wants to duplicate what I've done so far, installing snow leopard on my HP envy 17 3270nr
1. Started with only 4GB installed. Not sure if this was necessary, but that what I had in case it’s relevant. Again, I happened to have the battery unplugged to, but probably not relevant either.
2. Using installed ubuntu 12.04, used gparted to copy my working patched version of the SL10.6.3 installer (patched to allow install to MBR partition drive), to a spare unformatted section of the on-board hard drive (in my case in the extended partition). This is a partition i’d created on a 20GB external drive hdd using the ‘restore image’ feature in disc utility on another machine which would boot to the osx installer. I did this using the copy and paste partition feature of gparted.
3. Used gparted to format a spare 100GB partition as ‘unformatted’ on the built in sata drive of my envy 17. This is where osx will go.
4. Rebooted using iboot legacy 2.7.2, this straight away listed ‘Mac OSX Install DVD’ but actually it’s a patched imaged of a DVD on a SATA drive.
5. Selected and ran the installer from the installer partition with -f -v (these boot flags might not be necessary, didn’t need PCIRootUID=x, GraphicsEnabler=no etc, which was a surprise)
6. Graphical installer starts up fine, (low res), usb mouse not working, but touchpad ok, tapping the pad to click rather than the button. Used disc utility to format 100GB partition as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Install completed sucessfully, but automatic shutdown/reboot did not work, ending with the looping message “SerialATAPI device reconfiuration did not complete successfully. (failedCommandInfo = 0x1)”
7. Rebooted again using iBoot legacy 2.7.2
8. Post install completed ok (keybard detection, etc), but there was a really annoying changing sound coming from the speakers! After this, the external mouse started working again, and the trackpad stopped being able to click. At this point i had:
- USB external drive: YES, USB is reported as up to 480Mb/sec in system profiler.
- ethernet: NO,
- volume control and mute switch: YES,
- audio: NO
- camera: unknown
- wifi: NO
- DVD drive: YES (burner untested).
9. Upgrading snow leopard to 10.6.8... processor is i7 3610QM (ivy bridge), so I assumed the info here
http://tonymacx86.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/get-ready-for-os-x-lion-update-to-1068.html did not apply.
10. [red herring - don't bother] Copied AtherosL1cEthernet.kext from
http://www.osx86.net/view/1085-atheros_ar8151.html to /System/Library/Extensions/
11. Ran the updater, then MultiBeast 3.10.1, selecting
- EasyBeast
- System Utlities
- VoodooHDA 0.2.72
- After the install I rebooted with -f -v. Hangs at [PCI configuration begin]
12. Fixed booting by adding -f -v npci=0x3000 (long wait at PCI configuratin begin, but does work after 30sec ish. Now you can see the desktop, no external mouse, trackpad can’t click either. This means you need to be pretty good on the keyboard, and enable tab selection in the keyboard preferences. Installed IOUSBFamily rollback, to hopefully get my mouse back! Didn’t work. But I found that bluetooth was working, so i grabbed a dusty bluetooth mouse and paired that. At least I can now click things!
13. Downloaded and installed
http://www.osx86.net/view/2053-atheros_8151_lan_kext.html using kext utility. Rebooted with -f and network working! All of my network devices appeared.
Tried to install mountain lion from the app store. I got the message ‘We could not complete your purchase. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion requires a Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 or Xeon processor’.
At this point I had:
- USB: no (no mouse, removable media, etc)
- DVD: untested
- Wifi: no
- Ethernet: yes
- Bluetooth: yes
- Audio: unknown
Hope this helps someone. Currently I’m trying to run OSX in a VM to see if the ML download will work from there. My ultimate aim is to get ML working, so I’ve not spent a lot of time on the hardware kexts etc in SL for USB, wifi, graphics etc. Plenty of scope for someone to dig deeper if they only want snow leopard.
Generally my experience was that most things worked quite well until after the combo update and running multibeast.
I'll try to answer any questions, but there's not much more to add than what's above.