[SOLVED] End of the road to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

[macnb]

I am a noob but have earned a few strips installing OS X on a netbootbook (Samsung N130)
I have successfully managed that. It was relatively painless compared to the desktop I doing next.

I have two identical and relatively "old" Dell Inspiron 530 spec'ed as follows:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 9300
CHIPSET: G33/G31/P35 with ICH9 (well that's what working Windows 7 tells me.)
GPU: ATI HD 3900
RAM: 4 GB running @ 800 MHz
SATA 0: 740 GB HDD
SATA 1: DVD-ROM

I am trying to install via Retail 10.6.0 DVD and does not even get to boot Mac OS but hanps with the grey screen with an Apple logo with a "No Entry" symbol.

I have tried booting with Nawcom BootCD (see here http://prasys.info/2010/10/nawcoms-bootcd-the-sucessor-to-empireefi/)
as follows:

1. Set BIOS HDD to RAID (as opposed to IDE. Dell does not not provide any other setting like ACHI).
2. Boot a CD using Nawcom BootCD and when it has finished, I pressed F5 and swapped it with Retail CD. and hit enter.
3. It start making noises, screen goes black. I move the mouse and it dsplays corrupted output on the screen that changes with the mouse movement. so I reboot and get to step 2 again and enter -x -v and then enter.
4. this time, there's lot of verbose output appears on the screen. there's some error re USB could not be enumerated and eventually gets stuck outputting "Still waiting for root"....

So gave that up and downloaded iBoot Supported boot CD and booted that.
This time, after I swap the iBoot CD with the Retail CD, I get the grey screen with an Apple logo and the spinning wheel.
Eventually the logo has "No Entry" symbol on it and the wheel continues to spin.

No joy

Next, I download and burned iBoot ATI CD and tred that.
Again, same result as iBoot Supported.

I have trawled through the net and there appears to lots of Dell owners with this specific motherboard have exactly the same problem and seems to do with the G33/P35 chipset. That is, it seems OS X has never run on this chipset and there are no drivers for it - certainly not within iBoot or any other Chameleon boot discs.

Someone please correct me and give me (other P35/ICH6 motherboard owners) some pointers to fixing. I have bought three Retail DVD's in assumption it OS X can be easily made to work on a retail PC.

By the way, there are many variations of Dell Inspiron 530's around the world and they are not all the same (different motherboards, different CPU's, different ATI/Nvidia GPU's, etc, etc) and those who have managed to run OS X, they appear to have a non-P35 chipset motherboard.

Seems that developers of iBoot can help many of us here. Please.

Awaiting eagerly......
Macnb

 

[humph]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

Only thing I can think of would be to generate a DSDT with a bunch of spoof device IDs (from ICH7? 10?) for the various parts of chipset that are not "supported" and see if that can cause OSX to load drivers that turn out to work "by luck" since is still Intel and close enough. You'd need to make a custom USB-stick booter though, to get the DSDT to load when trying to boot the install DVD.

So perhaps/hopefully someone knows an easier solution.

 

[macnb]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

@humph,
many thanks for your suggestions. I think you have given a significant clue re DSDT file for the Dell 530.

Just need to find the closest match to Dell 530, and then try to get it onto the iBoot CD so that it can subsequently boot the Retail OSX dvd.Not sure how to do that yet but I sure someone can point me in the right direction.

 

[MacMan]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

@humph,
many thanks for your suggestions. I think you have given a significant clue re DSDT file for the Dell 530.

Just need to find the closest match to Dell 530, and then try to get it onto the iBoot CD so that it can subsequently boot the Retail OSX dvd.Not sure how to do that yet but I sure someone can point me in the right direction.

iBoot is designed to not use a DSDT and cannot be modified to add it.

As humph suggests, you will need to create you own custom USB stick based boot helper.

 

[humph]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

The 1st thing to do is to try booting OSX DVD with iBoot(s) in verbose mode, to see if any insights gained from the on-screen messages. Might save a ton of time in targeting what edits needed to DSDT. Or might even find that the error can be worked around w/o using a DSDT.aml, just edits to (or modded versions of) kexts to inject ID etc via .plist changes; sort of the old-fashioned way before DSDT editing was mainstream. Note u still therefore need a USB booter to be able to add/change kexts.

To build a USB booter - well I wont cover all the details as there are other posts covering that - but in brief:
- Boot Linux (Live CD OK usually)
- Get the standard DSDT & save to eg: a spare USB stick
http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4463
- Get & save device listing using lspci command in Linux (lspci -nn and similar)
- Figure out what devices are "not supported", and what the corresponding spoofable ID's are for real macs, which might mean lots of reading and posting. At this stage I'd not worry about audio, LAN etc, unless those prove to be a problem to boot; so stuff like SATA controller, SMBus etc - core chipset items.

Ideally now get hold of a working OSX system then:
- Decompile DSDT from above using iasl (or GUI tool like iASLMe)
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=189272
- Edit DSDT, broadly following MacMan's guide, but also considering the injection of IDs, also see:
http://www.projectosx.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=852
(There's other good stuff about various DSDT fixes there also).
- Compile DSDT.dsl to an .aml using iasl/iASLMe
I guess you may be able to do the above in Linux using linux version iasl, but not tried it..and seems most experts advise to do decompile/compile under OSX.

Rest is easiest from a mac, but could be done in Windows using HFS-capable file system tool such as TransMac.
- Create USB stick 1 partition GUID/HFS+ (standard OSX):
- Create /Extra folder on USB
- Create /Extra/Extensions folder
- Get suitable com.apple.Boot.plist
- Get suitable smbios.plist
- Get minimal kexts: fakesmc is bare minimum. You may need others depending on hardware. But don't worry about LAN, 100% working Video, Sound etc at this stage, you just want to be able to boot DVD and install OSX. Rest can be fixed later.

- Populate /Extra with the DSDT.aml, smbios.plist, com.apple.Boot.plist
- Populate /Extra/Extensions with the kexts
- Ideally create a cache (Extensions.mkext) of the kexts from /E/E and put in /Extra if you are doing this on a Mac. Although you can ignore this bit as Chameleon should load kexts from /E/E if no cache.
Also, else I guess you could just use the Extensions.mkext from a iBoot CD's preboot.dmg, in which case no need to put individual kexts in /E/E.
- "Install" Chameleon-AsereBLN onto the USB stick.

Plug in, try to boot the USB stick. You're pretty much guaranteed to get to/see the Chameleon boot screen. Select OSX DVD and "boot" using -v (verbose). Errors will give you insight to what (if anything) else needs to be added in terms of kexts, or whether the DSDT edits are sufficient.

Doing this for the first time might take a day (or two!), with most of the time spent on the DSDT. But if/when you need to edit, change things, it'll be quite fast.

P.S. But if you have access to a Mac, then another consideration, may save some hassle, is to install OSX to the "external" USB-adaptor-connected-HD taken from your hack. Then of course still need to get it to boot in the hack using similar to above.

 

[macnb]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

@ humph
Many thanks for taking time to help write comprehensive tips.
I think my main problem is not seeing the SATA drives.

I think building a USB booter seems to be the convenient way to go as I now have so many CD coasters that I can open a bar now

I am going to attempt some of your suggestions and report back in a few days.

P.S. But if you have access to a Mac, then another consideration, may save some hassle, is to install OSX to the "external" USB-adaptor-connected-HD taken from your hack. Then of course still need to get it to boot in the hack using similar to above.

Good news is that I do have access to a "MAC" -- it's a Samsung netbook which I hacked that's running OS X 10.6.4. In fact I just tried reading iBoot disk but there are no /Extra folder that I can see -- only one text file (licence agreement). Looks all empty -- as if the files are hidden. Surely, "hacks" do not hide files..do they

 

[Going Bald]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

Good news is that I do have access to a "MAC" -- it's a Samsung netbook which I hacked that's running OS X 10.6.4. In fact I just tried reading iBoot disk but there are no /Extra folder that I can see -- only one text file (licence agreement). Looks all empty -- as if the files are hidden. Surely, "hacks" do not hide files..do they

The iBoot disk is compiled so it will automatically run the script file and let you choose from the lists what you want to install, so you won't see individual files - they are in archives. Since you have access to a "MAC", try the mpkg method detailed here: http://puru.se/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=189&start=10
load your kext files for the video and such before moving the drive to your target machine and you should at least be able to get video during the startup post with -v

 

[cochon]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

Are you sure your ATI HD 3900 support ?

I have Dell XPS 435MT, with ATI HD 3600 (1 DVI, 2 HDMI). I changed to nVidia 220GT.

 

[humph]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

... try the mpkg method detailed here: http://puru.se/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=189&start=10

I never worked out exactly why, but various people say don't use mpkg install method (but never explained why), seemed to me perhaps to not necessarily apply right permissions/ownership etc. Of course, it's worth experimenting with.
As far as I can remember I just used normal DVD install approach, but targeting external drive connected to MBP, last time I needed a 'clean' system on a drive to boot a hack.

But your post raises another idea that Macnb could try...boot the hack off USB connected drive (so HD controller not relevant?). Still have to fix the problem via DSDT or kexts later to get internal drives working, but it'd be excellent to be able to boot and mess around that way.

Are you sure your ATI HD 3900 support ?

Yeah - Excellent point.
I dont see any 3900 series support in AsereBLN-Chameleon GraphicsEnabler, lots of 3400, 3600, 3800 plus 3800x2.

Whether it was left out due to problems / never-can-work situation, or just omitted as was "rare" (perhaps a special Dell version of something that is supported?), guess we'll only find out when Macnb is able to get machine to boot. Well, I guess could Google OSX 3900...but will leave that to others
But still should get basic video, just not accelerated etc.

 

[humph]

Re: End of the road trying to install Snow Leopard on Dell 530

Good news is that I do have access to a "MAC" -- it's a Samsung netbook which I hacked that's running OS X 10.6.4. In fact I just tried reading iBoot disk but there are no /Extra folder that I can see -- only one text file (licence agreement). Looks all empty -- as if the files are hidden. Surely, "hacks" do not hide files..do they

Ah, I forgot that recent iBoots hide contents! You'd be able to see stuff in terminal.
But since you have OSX on other machine, you don't need to do it that way.
Just run MultiBeast targeting the externally connected drive (not the netbooks drive!) once it has OSX on it, which will install basic stuff in /Extra. (Either the DSDT or no DSDT approach, depending on whether you have a DSDT).
That way, you'll get the essential kexts, config files and /Extra etc.

I think i'd try the no DSDT approach first, try to boot of external USB HD initially. See where that gets you. You might need to edit the com.apple.Boot.plist to set the EHCI and UHCI flags to No, to be able to boot off USB.

EDIT: This post http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t48315.html has some interesting info related to ICH8.
Perhaps try setting BIOS to IDE not AHCI, and try iBoot again? I believe iBoot includes modded ApplePIIXATA or similar, so might work. Although, use of IDE when booting off HD may require modding kext or DSDT mod if the ICH8 stuff in standard AppleIntelPIIXATA (inside IOATAFamily) is not the right device ID for your board. Anyway, not real sure about all this, but am pretty sure there's a way to get this working!