[Success] Project "iDell" XPS 8300 *10.6.8 /64bit!*

[Gravewyrm]

Hey guys, sorry for the terrible response time. I've been pretty busy with work. I very highly recommend moving to OS X Lion over snow leopard due to a few key reasons.

1.) Lion has native support for a wider range of Video cards, including GeForce GTX series, and the Radeon HD 6000 series cards. Also, if you want to use the IGP on the Intel chips, Lion supports it, and Tony has the tools to get it working, 100% for you.

2.)Snow Leopard is pretty much out-dated now, and because of the latest improvements to Lion, i won't be doing much more support for Snow Leopard.

Here in a week or so, i will have a full blown guide on how to get OS X Lion loaded to a USB stick, and how to get Lion from said USB stick, to your XPS 8300.
I will have separate guides for GeForce users, and Radeon HD users.

To finish up, those of you who are having issues with the WiFi now working or Bluetooth ....
The WiFi kext provided will NOT work with the stock 1501 WiFi Half Mini card that comes stock with your machine. it will work with the 1397, or 1510 cards only.
Bluetooth is a tricky one. Check my sig block, and use the same BT dongle i do for 100% OOB compatibility.

Cheers ..

~~Grave

 

[rishi211]

Looking forward to the documentation your working on. I will purchase Lion soon in preparation.

Thanks for all your hard work on this Grave and everyone else involved!

-Rishi

 

[macintouch]

Thats great Grave! I'm gonna order the XPS 8300 now to replace an old mac pro.

 

[pringlet]

Please disregard my original questions below. I managed to get it to work. Steps I took to get past the black screen:
1. installed a different, older Radeon 2400 video card
2. booted to iboot
3. booted the 10.6.7 installation with the PCIRootUID=1 -v
4. Installed the Update Helper (again)
5. Installed the 10.6.8 update
6. Confirmed able to boot to 10.6.8
7 Swapped back in the Radeon 6770 and booted. Card appears to be fully supported

Current problems
1. only 4GB of RAM is recognized
2. still have to use iboot to boot - cannot boot straight from the harddrive even with the flags mentioned above
3. no wireless


New 8300 owner here and I'm having problems booting after applying the 10.6.7 combo update, and multi-beast.

Specs
i7-2600 3.4ghz
Radeon HD 6770
60GB SSD


When I reboot I see the gray apple logo, no progress wheel and it just sits there. In verbose mode, it goes to black screen after just a couple seconds. The very last message I see before it goes black is "Starting Darwin"

Here's what I'm doing
1. Installing 10.6.3 <- This is successful. I can boot in to it using iboot
2. Installing the 10.6.7 combo update
3. Installing Multi-Beast: (using the options showing in post 1 of this thread)
4. Installing Update Helper
5. Ejecting CD, ejecting flash drive
6. Rebooting
7. <hanging!!>

Any advice/thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

thanks
pt

 

[Gravewyrm]

Please disregard my original questions below. I managed to get it to work. Steps I took to get past the black screen:
1. installed a different, older Radeon 2400 video card
2. booted to iboot
3. booted the 10.6.7 installation with the PCIRootUID=1 -v
4. Installed the Update Helper (again)
5. Installed the 10.6.8 update
6. Confirmed able to boot to 10.6.8
7 Swapped back in the Radeon 6770 and booted. Card appears to be fully supported

Current problems
1. only 4GB of RAM is recognized
2. still have to use iboot to boot - cannot boot straight from the harddrive even with the flags mentioned above
3. no wireless

1. You are probably booting in 32bit, instead of 64bit, seeing as how you state in #2 that you are using the iBoot CD.

2. Download the latest Chimera in the downloads section of the site. it fixes 95% of the boot issues people are encountering atm.

3. I stated, many times, that the STOCK Wireless card will NOT work. You have to get a 1397, or 1510 card for it to work. The 1501 card is not supported, there are no kexts available for it at all, to my knowledge.

~~Grave

 

[pringlet]

Please disregard my original questions below. I managed to get it to work. Steps I took to get past the black screen:
1. installed a different, older Radeon 2400 video card
2. booted to iboot
3. booted the 10.6.7 installation with the PCIRootUID=1 -v
4. Installed the Update Helper (again)
5. Installed the 10.6.8 update
6. Confirmed able to boot to 10.6.8
7 Swapped back in the Radeon 6770 and booted. Card appears to be fully supported

Current problems
1. only 4GB of RAM is recognized
2. still have to use iboot to boot - cannot boot straight from the harddrive even with the flags mentioned above
3. no wireless

1. You are probably booting in 32bit, instead of 64bit, seeing as how you state in #2 that you are using the iBoot CD.

2. Download the latest Chimera in the downloads section of the site. it fixes 95% of the boot issues people are encountering atm.

3. I stated, many times, that the STOCK Wireless card will NOT work. You have to get a 1397, or 1510 card for it to work. The 1501 card is not supported, there are no kexts available for it at all, to my knowledge.

~~Grave

Thanks Grave for your help on this.

[pt]

 

[rexsmith]

My installation has got to the point everything basic seems to be working as far as I can tell, except it will not boot without iboot.
I just installed Chimera and now it boots fine from the Hard drive , but I no longer have my Galaxy GT430 graphics acceleration.
I seem to have an either or choice of booting from the HD or having graphics acceleration.
I have been unable to either to get it to boot properly when the graphics is working or to get the graphics to work when it is booting ok.


What is the connection or break in the connection between these two things?

Thanks to all for their trailblazing work
Mike

 

[Gravewyrm]

My installation has got to the point everything basic seems to be working as far as I can tell, except it will not boot without iboot.
I just installed Chimera and now it boots fine from the Hard drive , but I no longer have my Galaxy GT430 graphics acceleration.
I seem to have an either or choice of booting from the HD or having graphics acceleration.
I have been unable to either to get it to boot properly when the graphics is working or to get the graphics to work when it is booting ok.


What is the connection or break in the connection between these two things?

Thanks to all for their trailblazing work
Mike

Have you tried using Graphics Enabler=No in your boot.plist? Or tried booting with that flag? The GT430 is a very touchy card. Make sure you are using the official Quadro drivers from nVidia. Those seem to do the trick for me, when i was on 10.6.x.

~~Grave

 

[bayani691]

Hi Grave,

I have been following this topic for quite a while. thank you so much for your help on getting my XPS8300 working on 10.6.8!! works great.. Do you have a new guide to get it to 10.7.2?? I'm not to keen on updating, but looks like I have to just to get iCloud to work.

I've been playing around with a Gigabyte and MSI mobo SB set up. So i have a Lion USB for install. I just wanted to see how you got yours to work?? and what works and what doesn't... thanks in advance for your help.

 

[matth76]

Hi everybody....

I stumbled across this thread today after day dreaming about what to do with a new XPS 8300 I ordered about a month ago from Dell Outlet. I also ordered a samsung 128gb ssd to go with it that will be here in a couple of days.

Here's the specs
Dell xps 8300
I7 3.4ghz quad
12 gb ram
USB 3.0 card
Gt-530 video card
New samsung 128 gb ssd on the way
1.5 tb hard drive

I think I want to try lion on it.

All I have at my disposal is an IPad2. My daughter has a MacBook issued to her from high school, but the priviledges on it are pretty tight I suspect.

This sounds awesome and I'm done for the semester working on my MBA; so I have some free time.

Anyone near Louisville, KY want to earn some extra money, beer, etc to help me out? I don't know if I can pull this off by myself.
Any takers out there?