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Lion Server on an HP Mediasmart EX485

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@Balrog76

I'm struggling with the EX490 myself. I'm trying a headless Lion install with very little success until now. From your comment's I gather that a 490 does not require a BIOS modification, is this correct? I'm going to try to check your advanced disk format suggestion.

Update: It worked! The advanced disk format tip was the key. I've got a fully functional OS X Mountain Lion running EX490 Mediasmart server. Thanks again!
 
OMG i ran across this while trying to decide what to do with my 2 old media smart servers. I want to give it a try. I'm all mac now! If i can get this to work, that'd be awesome!

Anyone tried to get mountain lion installed?


UPDATED: i got ML to run first time. Im so stoked! Thanks Everyone for the post on this!!

Also was there an answer for the 1024x768 max when screen sharing?
 
I am hoping that someone here can help me....

I have read-reread-and read again the posts here and they've been enlightening. However, I *still* don't have my MP MediaSmart Server EX485 running OSX Lion yet (not server)... *sadface*

I got the KVM so I have USB keyboard/mouse and a VGA adapter to see whats going on.

I used my MacBook Pro to install onto a USB caddy with my drive in it, install went fine, rebooted fine, installed EasyBeast for Lion, selected (what I *think* were the appropriate options - someone really should provide a screenshot as to the exact options needed during the EasyBeast Install) and then booted up my EX485 with the new drive. I get a boot loader which boots into OSX - I get the Apple logo, and it starts spinning the loading flower (just like any Mac). Then after about 20-30 secs it renders a slightly different grey box roughly on top of the Apple symbol with a circle with a slash through it. System seems to crash/stop loading at this point.

I've tried everything I can think of...it KILLS me that I cannot get it to load OSX (especially when I can see how close it gets). Please, any advice would be appreciated. I do have Mountain Lion....should I just give up on Lion and try Mountain Lion instead?

Ash
 
Did you check the The advanced disk format tip? If you use a HD > 1 GB then you need to check this.
 
Did you check the The advanced disk format tip? If you use a HD > 1 GB then you need to check this.

Is this BIOS setting or something else? If so, where is it changed?
 
I read this thread and tried to install ML on my EX495 and wanted to share my experience so that others can use it. I tried 3 times before I got it to work. I have an out of the box EX495, i.e. without any modifications and three 1.5TB drives. Two main points seemed to make my installation attempts fail 1) Advanced Formatting of the hard drives and 2) using a hard drive that is larger than 1TB to boot the hackintosh.
I followed these steps to overcome that
1. Removed HD from Server and connected it to my iMAc via a USB to SATA adapter. Formatted server HD with two partitions. One smaller than 1TB like for instance 240GB and another for the rest like 1.26TB
2. booted my iMac with an EFI Boot and installed Mountain Lion on smaller partition on the server HD attached via SATA adapter
Note: this was done to overcome the larger than 1TB issue
3. Went through initial setup of Mountain Lion, enabled screen sharing and remote login
4. Checked remote access from another computer, shutdown and started up again to check everything works, run software update and installed updates
5. Shut down, unplugged server HD from my iMac and restarted iMac from its regular boot drive
6. reattached server HD and ran MultiBeast with EasyBeast, Drivers for Realtek Network (did not select Lnx2Mac Realtek RTL81xx Driver) and changed installation Destination to the server HD attached via SATA adapter; I did not select anything else in MultiBeast
Note: this was done to get around the Advanced Formatting issue
7. unmounted server HD after successful install of MultiBeast

8. Installed server HD in EX495, started up and it worked

I hope this will help others and thanks to all who posted to this thread as it helped me solve this puzzle after reading it over and over. Hence I thought I'd share my learnings to save them some time.



Cheers
 
What a fantastic thread…

Thank you to Neuroman and everyone else for contributing.

I have been using Macs since 2003 and when I got my EX490 I was very disappointed that it didn’t work very well with OSX or by its self for that matter. After stumbling across this thread it has revolutionized my whole EX490 experience!

I upgraded my processor to a Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16Ghz) and swapped the standard 2 gig of ram for 4 gigs.

As this was my first attempt at a Hackintosh I stumbled across a few issues but managed to get the system up and running in about 5 hours of starting the project.

The biggest issue I had was trying to get the system to boot off a Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB HDD. I had partitioned it and installed OSX on the 500 GB partition and ran the procedure for the advanced disk format to enable the chimera boot loader file to stick. No matter what I did I couldn’t get the EX490 to boot from a WD Caviar Green drive. After doing an intensive Google search on the subject I found that I wasn’t the only person having this issue with a Hackintosh and the WD HDD, so I gave up on using this drive and used a Seagate Barracuda 1 TB drive instead which worked perfectly.

I installed Mountain Lion 10.8.2 originally and have just updated OSX to 10.8.3 using the Combo update method and I haven’t experienced any problems.

Overall I am very pleased with the project and now feel I have added another couple of years to the life to the EX490. Again Thank you to everyone who shared their knowledge and thoughts to the thread.:D
 
Has anyone tried to install the Mavericks GM on the HP EX490?
 
No one? I've tried to update via the App store, but it just reboots into Mountain Lion. Will try to install on a new Hard drive via the easybeast method.
 
Hi Dajestar

I have only just got round to trying Mavericks on an EX490 and it worked without any issues. I installed 10.9 onto a HDD via my MacBook Pro loaded the latest Multibeast and Ethernet drivers and set everything up in System Preferences. Then stuck the HDD into the EX490 and started it up. After a few seconds the server appeared on my Shared Devices in the Finder window on my MacBook Pro and I was able to access the EX490 in the usual screen sharing way.

The great thing about the latest Multibeast is that there is an option to make the screen 1080 x 1260 so you can fit loads more on the desktop screen sharing view! A vast improvement for the EX490... Thank you!

I have only done a trial install at the minute (which seems to be flawless) and I am currently backing up all my data so I can do a full permanent install with Mavericks!

Good luck with your install.
 
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