Lion Server on an HP Mediasmart EX485

[fance]

BEWARE: 10.7.4 appears to cause an unrecoverable kernel panic on MediaSmart EX485 series servers (at least on mine with an upgraded processor and 4 GM RAM).

I've tried just about every combination of the EasyBeast and custom settings that I can think of and it appears to be a dead loss. Have just re-created a clean 10.7 install and am slowly bringing the machine back up to 10.7.3 and hoping for the best.

If you are thinking of doing a 10.7.4 install on an HP MediaSmart 485/487 series machine I would recommend that you SuperDuper onto a spare drive to save you hours of pointless headaches!

A lesson for all Hackintoshers - SuperDuper is your friend!

 

[counter5th]

Hello hackintoshers!

i just wanted to inform you that i have installed 10.7.4 on the HP MSS

i first did a fresh install via unibeast using 10.7.3 following this great guide. once that was up and running i downloaded the combo update, installed the update, and then

BEFORE REBOOT run the latest multibeast and install patched appleintelcpupowermanagment.kext

located drivers and bootloaders>misc>patche appleintelcpu...>10.7.4

Now reboot and after a few minutes the server should be back up!

i think the update removes the nullcpupowermanagement kext that prevents a kernel panic upon boot.

In my case i was installing lion on the MSS for the first time so if you already have lion, just download the combo update and run multibeast before you reboot.

hope this helps, thanks for all the info!

 

[fance]

Just tried it (10.7.3 to combo 10.7.4) upgrade and it barfed my machine again, even with the same kext's. Going to try ONE more time, then thinking it's 10.7.3 land for me (or turning the 485 into an iSCSI box)

 

[counter5th]

Just tried it (10.7.3 to combo 10.7.4) upgrade and it barfed my machine again, even with the same kext's. Going to try ONE more time, then thinking it's 10.7.3 land for me (or turning the 485 into an iSCSI box)

Sorry to hear that. I should add that i upgraded my processor to an intel e5200. I dont know if that has anything to do with it. Ill try to post some pictures of the system running.

 

[Balrog76]

Hoping someone can helt.

I have a ex490 modded with an intel e4500 dual core. Hardware has been running for over a year with WHS 2003 installed, so know that HW should be ok.

I have a macbook pro, running Lion. So thought I would try the hackint0sh way with the ex490. Here is what i did:

1. Removed all disks from ex490.
2. Attached boot disk from ex490 to macbook via sata to usb cable.
3. booted macbook with cmd+r and chose "reinstall Lion" via the internet download (no media) option.
4. Installed Lion unto the usb attached disk.
5. went trough setup (language, location, remote management) booted (no problems)
6. Installed multibeast with following options: easybeast, realtek gigabit network drives, ans system utilities.
7. tried to reboot. macbook hangs on shutdown. Black screen. unresponsive.
8. Turned of macbook by holding down power. And turned it on again. It boots! When it comes up, it says something about "recovered from error" or something like that.
9. Ok so I thought maybe its fine. Moved the disk to the ex490 and crossed my fingers.
10. Turned on ex490. Spin up, but then nothing. Blinking blue in the rightmost status indicator.

Any suggestions? Did I miss something? Sorry about my bad english

 

[counter5th]

here are a couple of screen shots. i access the hp mss via screen share off a new MBPr. so far it has been really stable running 24/7 serving iTunes to two MacBooks and an apple tv. it also holds a medium sized iPhoto library that we access via our laptops. it's connected to a e4200 linksys router via cat 6. everything thing else is connected wirelessly either on a G or N network. i live in a very small studio apartment so range is not an issue.

itunes performance is phenomenal. music streams instantaneously. movies also perform really well with only a few seconds delay between loading the library(200+ movies) and playback of a file.

iPhoto library is also stored on the server. it's medium size library about 185gb. performance is ok. it takes about 15 seconds to load the library and there is a little bit of stutter when scrolling through really fast. sometimes you see it lag between loading the low rez thumbnail and and the higher resolution one.

timemachine performance is the worst. i attribute that to the actual time machine app. it was never a very fast app to begin with. right now i have the server backing itself up to an internal drive in the hp mss and the laptops backing up to usb drive connected to the mss. they simply mount the volume and back up wirelessly. slow but it works.

a weird quirk that you should know about is that when you enter time machine in the server to retrieve a file, the graphics can not render the star field and it causes occasional glitches. i had to do a hard reboot after it got stuck on dialog box. i'm a little concerned on the reliability of actually being able to recover using time machine on the server.

final thoughts:
the mss runs very cool and quiet. have only had to hard reboot a couple of times all related to a seagate hd and time machine. having os x run on the hp mss has enabled me to get rid of my hackintosh tower that used to run 24/7 housing all the drives that currently live in the server. the tower was a beast (geek bench 15000)! consuming a lot of electricity and handling the bulk of my edit work, browsing, ect. since the new mbpr gets a 12000 geek bench score i thought i might be able to replace the tower with it and the hp mss. after about a week of testing the new mbpr kept up with my old hackintosh build. i was getting about 80% of the horsepower, using a lot less electricity, all in a much smaller package while still being able to access all of my files via the hp mss. so for now i get a bit more live from some old hardware and reduced the space and energy needed, a decent trade off in my opinion.

looking ahead i will be building a dedicated server from scratch reusing parts from my hackintosh tower mainly the i7 2600k and 12 gb of memory and stuffing them into the fractal design R2 case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... =u00000626

my previous Hackintosh was housed in a fractal design mid tower and it was the quietest machine i had built to date.

 

[counter5th]

Hoping someone can helt.

I have a ex490 modded with an intel e4500 dual core. Hardware has been running for over a year with WHS 2003 installed, so know that HW should be ok.

I have a macbook pro, running Lion. So thought I would try the hackint0sh way with the ex490. Here is what i did:

1. Removed all disks from ex490.
2. Attached boot disk from ex490 to macbook via sata to usb cable.
3. booted macbook with cmd+r and chose "reinstall Lion" via the internet download (no media) option.
4. Installed Lion unto the usb attached disk.
5. went trough setup (language, location, remote management) booted (no problems)
6. Installed multibeast with following options: easybeast, realtek gigabit network drives, ans system utilities.
7. tried to reboot. macbook hangs on shutdown. Black screen. unresponsive.
8. Turned of macbook by holding down power. And turned it on again. It boots! When it comes up, it says something about "recovered from error" or something like that.
9. Ok so I thought maybe its fine. Moved the disk to the ex490 and crossed my fingers.
10. Turned on ex490. Spin up, but then nothing. Blinking blue in the rightmost status indicator.

Any suggestions? Did I miss something? Sorry about my bad english

it's hard to say. if you can boot to it from your macbook try running multi beast again and then make sure that you install the drive to the bay at the bottom on the mss. the light closest to the usb port in the front will continuously blink, mine does that as well. i simply covered it with black electrical tape. reinstall the network kext and try again. it might be booting but not getting a network connection. also double check your ethernet cable.

 

[Balrog76]

Hi Counter5th

Thank you for your suggestions. Unfortunately they did not improve the situation. I wish I knew if the server is booting or not. But it sounds like the disks are going quiet earlier than I would normally suspect during a boot, so I don't think it does.
One thing is certain, nothing is requesting an IP from my DHCP server. I also tried to give the server a fixed I when I had the disk in the MBP. The expected IP never comes up when I boot the server.

I an a little lost here.

Does anyone have recent experience with ex4XX and Lion? 10.7.4 Has something changed since you all installed yours? Am I doing something wrong?

I tried building a unibeast usb drive with my bought lion download. Worked like a charm. But it's the same story when I try to switch the disk to the ex485 and boot. Just sits there, blinking at me...

 

[counter5th]

One other thing, did you set up auto login and screen share/ remote login? If you missed this step it will never reach the desktop.

One thing i've learned from years of hackintoshing is that everyones experience is different even on identical hardware. The key to success is patience, perserverence, and attention to detail. Take a break from the build, then come back and start from the beginning. Try a different hard drive and a different install machine if possible.

Stick with it!

 

[Balrog76]

Hi again Counter,

Yea, I did set up remotelogin (used remote management, but that should be ok right?), and I also set the machine to autologin. When i start up the disk attached to my macbook, it boots right to the desktop, and gets an IP, and I can VNC into it. So seems like it's not booting.

Anyway, I am suspecting the CPU to be the bad boy here. It's the only part of my ex485 thats not "stock". It's an e4500 core 2 duo.
As it happens, I was looking to upgrade it anyway, and after careful study, I found out that the ex485 should run fine with an e8400 core 2 duo which, as far as I can read, should also be hackint0sh'able.

SO I've found a very cheap, used e8400, and should have it in a couple of days. I will report back here when I've tried swapping that in, and reinstalling. Hopefully that will help.

Thank you for all the good suggestions so far.