osx86 Island

Most of this is from a very old post authored by insanelymac moderator Krazubu and was useful to me in fixing some GFX kext files.

This was at one point posted on insanelymac, but has since fallen into the abyss.  I’m not sure why, but here is an old copy I saved for my personal reference, I realize I’m not in the scene much anymore – but I was forced to update the site because of spamming and remembered this was never published, so here you go!

Most credit goes to Krazubu

 

This thread is not a guide, its purpose is to keep some updated informations about ATI cards.
People who have the skills may find interesting infos. It’s not complete and if you know how to fill the holes, it’s very welcome.

Support of ATI cards is made by 2 kexts :
- A framebuffer, located in /System/Library/Extensions/ATINDRV.kext/Contents/PlugIns/ATY_Somefile.kext
This one is responsible of 2D support, including resolution change, output signal handle, and refresh rate.

- An acceleration driver located in /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonXXXX.kext

This one brings hardware acceleration allowing use of QE (Quartz Exterme) and usually CI (Core Image) too, except on some older models
which only support QE.

****************************************************************

List of the available framebuffers :
QUOTE
ATY_Wormy : RV530 on X1600, some X1650 and some X1300
Used on 1st gen macbook pro and 1st gen iMac
head 1 : LVDS
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_Alopias : RV580 on X1900 XT, known to work with GPU RV520 on X1800 and X1850
Used on mac pro
head 1 : DVI+VGA
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_Sphyrna : RV516 on some X1300, and some X1550
Used on Xserve.
head 1 : disabled
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_lago.kext : RV610, HD2400XT / HD2400
Used on iMac
head 1 : LVDS
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_Hypoprion : RV630, HD2600Pro
Used on iMac
head 1 : LVDS
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_Lamna : RV630, HD2600XT
Used on mac pro
head 1 : DVI+VGA
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_Franklin : R600, HD2900
mac model : ?
head 1 : ?
head 1 : ?

ATY_Megalodon : RV670 XT [ATI Radeon HD 3870]
Used on mac pro, sold by AMD in PC/Mac version
head 1 : DVI+VGA
head 2 : DVI+VGA

ATY_Triakis : ?

ATY_Prionace : ?

ATY_Caretta : ?

The framebuffer controls the basic functions like resolution, refresh rate, and output type.
Each frambuffer is designed to run on a particular model of mac, and only supports the features it’s designed for.
examples :

-The Sphyrna framebuffer is designed for Xserve which has no primary output, but only an external one, as secondary. As a consequence, this driver may be used to run a board with RV516 or close GPU, but will never be able to output something on the primary output.

-The Iago framebuffer is designed for iMacs with RV610 GPUs with an internal display using LVDS signal. It’s then impossible to use a DVI or VGA display on the primary output. However the secondary output supports DVI + VGA, since the iMac have an external output that supports this kind of displays.
Each framebuffer has a different shark codename

To choose your framebuffer, you have to modify a key inside your injecter :
QUOTE
<key>@0,name</key>
<string>ATY,Wormy</string>

and

<key>@1,name</key>
<string>ATY,Wormy</string>

Replace with the codename that you want to try.

****************************************************************

List of the available acceleration kexts :

QUOTE

ATIRadeon7500.kext (tiger only) = R100 family (7000 to 7500)

ATIRadeon8500.kext (tiger only) = R200 family (8500 to 9250)

ATIRadeon9700.kext (tiger only) = R400 family (9400 to 9800 + X300 to X600 + X1050)

ATIRadeonX1000.kext = R500 family (X1300 to X1950)

ATIRadeonX2000.kext = R600 family

The advantage of this file is that it’s generic and supports the whole family at once. No need to have a specific file for each card.

Eg : ATIRadeonX1000.kext will work fine with any X1000 series (the card still has to be a “real” X1000 and not an older revamped model, see note below).

****************************************************************

List of the officially supported cards, following the list of present device IDs in the kexts :

ATIRadeonX1000.kext from 10.4.8 :

QUOTE
0×7146 1002 RV515 [Radeon X1300]
0×7142 1002 RV515 PRO [Radeon X1300/X1550 Series]
0×7109 1002 R520 [Radeon X1800]
0x71C5 1002 M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600]
0x71C0 1002 RV530 [Radeon X1600] (iMac)
0×7240 1002 R580 [Radeon X1900]
0×7249 1002 R580 [Radeon X1900 XT]

ATIRadeonX1000.kext from 10.5.6 :

QUOTE
0×7187 1002 ? [Radeon X1300]
0×7210 1002 RV550 [Mobility Radeon HD 2300]
0x71DE 1002 RV535 [Radeon X2500]
0×7146 1002 RV515 [Radeon X1300]
0×7142 1002 RV515 PRO [Radeon X1300/X1550 Series]
0×7109 1002 R520 [Radeon X1800]
0x71C5 1002 RV530 (M56P) [Radeon Mobility X1600] (mac book pro)
0x71C0 1002 RV530 [Radeon X1600] (Primary) (iMac)
0×7240 1002 R580 [Radeon X1900] (Primary) (mac pro)
0×7249 1002 R580 [Radeon X1900 XT] (Primary)
0×7291 1002 RV560 [Radeon X1650]

ATIRadeonX2000.kext from 10.5.6 :

QUOTE
0×9400 1002 R600 XT [Radeon HD 2900 XT]
0×9401 1002 R600 XT [Radeon HD 2900 XT]
0×9402 1002 R600 XT [Radeon HD 2900 XT]
0×9403 1002 R600 XT [Radeon HD 2900 Pro] iMac 24″
0×9581 1002 RV630 [Mobility Radeon HD 2600]
0×9583 1002 RV630 [Mobility Radeon HD 2600XT] iMac 20″
0×9588 1002 RV630 [Radeon HD 2600 XT] Mac pro
0x94c8 1002 RV610 [Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT] iMac 20″
0x94c9 1002 RV610 [Mobility Radeon HD 2400]
0×9500 1002 ?
0×9501 1002 RV670 XT [Radeon HD 3870]
0×9505 1002 RV670 [Radeon HD 3850]
0×9507 1002 RV670 [Radeon HD 3830]
0×9504 1002 RV670 [Mobility Radeon HD 3850]
0×9506 1002 ?
0×9598 1002 RV630 [Radeon HD 4570]

That means if you have one of the boards above, it should be supported, however that support will be limited by the outputs that the framebuffer is designed to support.

To enable the use of a kext for your card, you have to insert your dev ID inside the plist of the chosen kext, if it’s not already there.

GPUs from R100 to R400 have supported acceleration with Tiger, however they don’t work anymore with Leopard. Those GPUs also never got any intel framebuffer.

Note about board numbers and generations :
Better rely on the GPU model than the board name, those are confusing and don’t really mean a thing, ATI do what they want with them. Two cards with a very close number, can be very different, and on the opposite, two cards with a very different number can be very close if not identical.

Example : there are three X1300 models, different enough to use different kexts, and be supported or not.

A marketing trick consists in rebranding some models that use chips from older generation with up to date names so that they don’t feel old.

This is the case of the X2500 which is actually a X1000 series card, hence its support by the X1000 kext, instead of the X2000 one, as the card name would suggest. Same with X1050, it’s not a X1000 but would use the 9700 kext.
To get a detailed list of board names and their GPUs, you can check this database.

Missing so far :
- Needs updates for cards supported by older kexts (Tiger only).
- Some framebuffers missing/unknown.
- Some device IDs unkown.

—–

A response from Slice on insanelymac forums consisted of:

You say nothing about X700-X850?

I want to say something about acceleration. The driver ATIRadeonXXXX.kext has internal check for DeviceID so it needs for binary patch.
For R300 family in Tiger it was performed by koverg.patch. There are many successful reports with it.
I investigated R200-R400 and found more information.
For R200 we must to patch ATIRadeon8500
CODE
DeviceID Sample
4242..4243 514c
5148..514d 514c
4c64..4c67 4c66
5964 5963
5c61 5c63

For example, if you have DeviceID=514e then your sample=514c
Open ATIRadeon8500.kext/Contents/MacOS/ATIRadeon8500 with HexEdit. HexEdit_Fat.zip ( 178.08K ) Number of downloads: 0

Search 3d4c51 replace to 3d4e51 (you see bytes 4e and 51 in reverse order).

For R300
CODE
DeviceID Sample
3150..3154 3e50
3e50..3e54 3e50
4145..414b 4144
4151 4150
4153..4156 4152
4e45..4e47 4e44
4e49..4e4a 4e48
4e50..4e53 4e50
5460..5464 5b60
5b60..5b65 5b60
5a41, 5a61 5b60
5a42, 5a62 5b60

The same but with ATIRadeon9700.
The last sample 5b60 is the same patch as koverg did.

For R400 you have two samples 4a48 and 4a4e
CODE
DeviceID
4a4f..4a54
4b4a..4b4f
5548..5554
564a..5653
5954..5955
5974..5975
5d48..5d57
5e48..5e4f

For example you have DeviceID=5e49
Open ATIRadeon9700.kext/Contents/MacOS/ATIRadeon9700 with HexEdit
Search 3d484a replace to 3d495e
Search 3d4e4a replace to 3d495e
Yes, replace both sample! In two or three places!

I still have no investigation about newer Radeon R500-R700 and ATIRadeonX1000(2000).kext but I think there is the same problem here.
If you know that your DeviceID is not supported and you know nearest good you can make your own patch.
For example.
Your DeviceID=71cd. Supported one is 71c5.
Open ATIRadeonX1000.kext/Contents/MacOS/ATIRadeonX1000 with HexEdit
Search 3dc571 replace to 3dcd71

FUJILIVES: I’ve used this method to hex-edit some files in the past and it works nearly identical to natit, so more often than not, its fairly safe to assume its not necessary as long as we have injectors.

Spotlight search in entourage sometimes stops working, and no matter what ‘rebuild’ options you choose inside entourage, the search just won’t cooperate.

A year ago I had this problem and struggled to fix it, now, a year later I had the problem again, but forgot how I fixed it.  After struggling for a bit, I remembered what I had done before.

This may not be the case for everyone, but for me, the problem wasn’t because of entourage, it was because of OSX’s own spotlight database.  I had manually done it via terminal before (deleted old stuff and rebuilt new spotlight database), but this time I tried a little app called “Maintenance” (v 3.8 at the time of this writeup).  I simply chose the rebuild spotlight index option, and ran it.  A couple seconds later it gave me a notice that it had completed, then, if you click the spotlight button up on the top-right-hand-side of your mac, you’ll notice it shows that the database is rebuilding.  I went to lunch, came back, and it had completed.

I performed a search in entourage, and, much to my satisfaction, everything worked again.

The download link to this utility is here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

I hope this helps someone else out there, as it managed to frustrate me twice now.

First off, I’d like to say thank you for all of the wonderful comments I’ve received over the last year or so about this single-post-of-a-blog.  Secondly, I’d like to point out that everything you are reading about the Snow Leopard install below, is pretty damned out of date at this point.  The install was originally based around a Dev release, which on its own makes it sketchy, but it was also poorly worded in some points (sorry, I tried to make it readable!) and included files that ‘not everyone’ needed.  Most people who delve into projects like that plan on doing a ‘one time go’ and having everything working.  OSX on a PC isn’t usually that simple, let alone if you are doing ‘manual installs’, and even less friendly if you are doing such an install from an obscure Dev release.

Someday I may delve back into the realm of osx86, but shortly after writing that article I had given up hope on the ATI mobility ever working in my laptop with quartz extreme / hardware acceleration, and sold it for a few hundred bucks which I used to buy a second monitor for my ‘real’ computer.

I say all of this because you should know that, while the information, order of potential operations, and rough explanations of what’s happening below are all very useful, that tutorial should not be followed as an exact step by step guide, as it will surely result in you wasting more time than you want.  Please, continue to use it as a reference, but find the ‘up to date’ counterparts of the files below and use those instead, and if you are serious about running osx86, your best bet will almost always be to find a ‘distro’ that some of the osx86 pro’s put together – some of those are truly awesome, and much easier to deal with when you have multi-multi-multi installs to worry about before you get everything ‘just right’.

This isn’t the only reason I’ve come here today, I came here to share a note to the world about OSX and Entourage and how the OSX Keychain has changed the way it handles Certs.

The first time I installed entourage it went pretty smooth.  The second time, a year later, I had a problem with an SSL cert, but after a bit of fiddling around, I managed to get the cert warning to go away and everything to work properly again.  A year later again, I had installed another update to entourage, and received more cert warnings.  At this point I really struggled to get the cert to work properly, but eventually got it to go again.  And now, about another 6 months out, our company’s cert expired and I had to renew it.  I fumbled through that (much easier than I thought it would be, thanks to great guides online) and everything was working great for the pc’s where I work.  However, the mac and Entourage once again gave me a fight.

I am writing this to give the very simple solution that worked to install an entourage ‘exchange server’ certificate for me – because it took me an absurd 4 hours to stumble into in the first place, and outright pissed me off for something that should have been very easy from the start:

I went into IIS on the server with the cert, and exported it out as a password protected pfx file that included full directory listing information (or whatever the checkbox is called).  This step won’t be an option for most of you, so you’ll have to ask your admin to do it.  If he doesn’t know how, tell him to look it up, if a friggin Mac graphics guy knows his way around IIS (or wherever your server has your cert installed) better than the Admin, you have big problems.

Since some change in osx, I don’t know when, but presumably within the last year, Keychain changed the way it handled ‘root’ cert files, and I can’t just drop a cert file in there the way I would normally do it.  So, what I had to do was take my copy of that pfx cert file with a password in it, rename it to .p12 (this is the magical step that I didn’t know about…  why it can’t be named pfx I have no freaking clue, but OSX gets what OSX wants) and drag it into the ‘system’ folder of the OSX keychain access application, put in the pfx/p12 password, and my root password, and it finally freaking let me install it properly.

For me that was all I had to do, but you might also have to open the Microsoft cert manager inside the office folder on your mac and make sure you have that same cert installed there as well.

So yeah, while this solution wont make sense to some of you, and to others it will be unnecessary because the ‘old’ way still works, I had a royal bitch of a time getting my email to work again after that cert renewal, so I’m throwing this up here in case someone else has the same issue.

Good luck!

This is not “every” method to get snow leopard installed.  I will probably modify this as time goes on so that people can add to it as they need, so we can get problems resolved for more people.  I also want to say that if any of this is wrong, I am sorry, I myself am a newbie at this type of installation (I’d only been using releases prior to this, and even rely on that for parts of the tutorial) – so bare with me and we’ll correct the information as much as we can as time goes on.

1) Set up your work environment – 10A261 is not a “stable distribution” that has pre-modded kexts – so you will need to set up an environment you can work through problems with.

First I would recommend you obtain and install a version of OSX, preferably a 10.5.6 distribution, that you can work with to start from.

I used XxX_x86_10.5.6_Install_Disc_Universal_Final – but you may want to use a different one  - I am a big fan of Ideneb, for example.

You should install this version of osx as your “fail-safe” for working on snow-leopard, a place to go and work with osx-related files that (hopefully) will be more stable for you.  This means when you install, you should use your distribution’s disk-utility (found at the top in a drop-down menu) to create multiple partitions if you dont have multiple partitions set up already.  4 partitions seems to be the sweet number for this type of project (3 for the project 1 for windows) – but for the method described in my tutorial, you’ll need 3 partitions set up like this.

Partition 1 – 20 gig~ (where leopard will be installed) – make this partition big enough for OSX (about 10 gigs) and if you’ll be loading the OSX install DVD DMG image onto this drive to work with, I’d recommend about 20 gigs of space

Partition 2 – 10 gig~ (this will become your “dvd” drive – where we “Restore” the OSX install DVD to – i’d recommend making it about 10 gigs)

Partition 3 – 20+ gig~ (this is your final destination drive, where you are looking to install Snow Leopard – Make this as big as you can if you plan on using it heavily after snow is installed – otherwise, 20 gigs will allow you to do just about everything you’d want to do for “testing” if that is your goal, as it was mine)

Partition 4 - Optional, ??? Gig~ (as big or small as you want, this is where other operating systems would go if you wanted, on my system, I use this as my windows partition)

During installation choose the PCEFI V9 bootloader option.  If you are using an older distro that does not have pcefi 9 as an option its ok, we can fix that later – though having it right off the bat will make things go smoother for you.  If you do not have PCEFI V9 as an option, just boot with a chameleon of some sort, and once you are all loaded up, use

  PCefi_v9_Installer_Final_2.dmg (9.9 MiB, 10,418 hits)

and install it within OSX after you get your system up and running.

2) Restore the Snow Leopard DVD image (dmg) file to a drive to work from.

Insert  your Snow Leopard 10A261 DVD or, do as I did, and use the disks image in DMG format, and just double-click it to mount the image.  Open up ‘Disk Utility’ and click the partition you would like to function as your Snow Leopard installation DVD after this “restore” is done. (note: It should be a different partition than the one you are currently running leopard) and choose “Restore” from the tabs that pop up to the right.  In the “Source” box that pops up, drag your 10A261 image that you just mounted.  In the Destination box, drag the partition you wish to install Snow Leopard to.  Check the “Erase destination” check box at the bottom.

The benefit to the method described above is that you basically end up with what the computer will see just like a bootable DVD, that you can modify very fast without needing to have duel-layer DVDs and without having to reburn the image every time you make a change.  You COULD easily boot from this “cloned” drive via PCEFI V9 with this method if you had to, in this tutorial, currently, you do not need to, but I show this method because it makes sense for a lot of projects you might work on in the future – so its good for you to know and get used to.  Again, this is not the only method, this is just the method I am using for this tutorial.

3) Show Hidden Files

Some of the files on this DVD, as well as other places you might need to access, are “hidden”.  To show hidden files open up Terminal and type

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Alternatively, if you perfer working from a graphic user interface, there is a tool below that you can download and simply double-click to show or hide all files

  ShowAllFiles.zip - Toggle 'Hidden' OSX File Visibility (34.8 KiB, 4,724 hits)

4) Modify the “Restored” (cloned) DVD image that you now have on a partition

Open disk you just restored the DVD to and you should now see the previosly “hidden” folders, including one named “System”.

Navigate to System/Installation/Packages/

You will need to delete “osinstall.mpkg” and replace it with another one, otherwise it will not allow you to install to a drive.  After you delete it the one on your “restored” DVD partition, download

  261OSInstall.mpkg - OSInstall.mpkg for 10A261 (839.7 KiB, 217,998 hits)

and put it inside System/Installation/Packages/ to replace the old one.

5) Install Snow Leopard to an empty partition

If you have been following directions closely, you will already have an empty drive in mind to install Snow Leopard to – if not, you will need to create one before you continue, you can accomplish this under Disk Utility.

To begin installation, go to your “Restored” dvd image drive and Navigate to System/Installation/Packages/.  Double-Click osinstall.mpkg (which we just replaced in step 4) to start your osx installation, and you will be on your way to installing Snow Leopard!  Be sure to point this installation to the drive you planned on installing Snow Leopard to, this should NOT be the drive that you are running your current leopard install from.  After you choose a drive click “continue” and at the next screen choose “Customize” at the bottom left and set custom install options.  I recommend you uncheck everything except the essential system software.  I think on mine, i was running into issues installing X11, so after unchecking the additional languages and X11, I was able to finish the installation successfully.

Congratulations!  You just mostly installed Snow Leopard.  We’re not quite done yet, so be sure to not rush and restart just yet!

6) Set up the extensions to work with your odd-ball hardware

Snow leopard still has some kexts that need to be added or changed in order to continue.

First, You’ll need a decrypt file.  There are different ones, but some dont play as well with Snow as others, one known to work can be found below:

  This is the dsmos kext file for 10A261 (17.9 KiB, 5,254 hits)

Grab the decrypt kext file and put it in your newly-installed Snow Leopard partition’s extensions folder.  If this is your first time installing kexts, this might get a little tricky, as you have to actually put it in the folder, and then correct the permissions via command line…  But there are tools out there that can turn this process into a simple drag-and-drop.

Normally I would use kext-helper to install kexts quickly and easily on a “mostly-working” install of osx, but for the sake of this tutorial, we will be using osx86tools, so we can run it from our Leopard partition, and still be able to select the Snow Leopard partition to install the kexts to.  I try to keep things as “gui” as possible, so I am trying to avoid setting permissions after every kext-change via terminal.  Once you do it a couple times, its not difficult, but it definately gets annoying and kext-helper and osx86tool utilities definately help prevent any “typo” related issues when cycling through lots of kexts trying to get a piece of hardware working.

Open osx86tools and choose to install kexts from the button on the right.  Choose the kexts you want to install (in this example, just the decrypt kext you downloaded) and choose the drive you installed snow-leopard to as the target drive, and enter your username and password at any prompts.

Tada!  You installed your first kext in Snow Leopard.  You will need to repeat this process for any kext files specific to your systems needs.  For many though, you will only really need, at the basic level:

PS2 Keyboard and Mouse kext files – this will be very useful for laptop users to get thier touchpad and keyboard going, for example.

  Snow Leopard 10A261 ps2 Kext (321.1 KiB, 8,120 hits)

nullCPUpower or some other form of cpu power management disabler.  You can also just remove the appleintelCPUpowermanagement.kext, but I perfer to leave as many files intact as possible, so whenever someone invents a new method to get by things, I’m not missing something that new method might need to make it happen.

  Disabler (7.9 KiB, 4,232 hits)

7) Configure your PCEFI boot wait times

If PCEFI9 is installed already, great!  We can move right to configuring PCEFI9′s wait-timer and dropping in our boot files.  If however, you do not have PCEFI9 installed yet, you will need to install it.  If you have been following the tutorial, you should have installed it earlier, but if you didn’t you can grab the installer from Step 1 of this tutorial.

First we should configure PCEFI9 to have a longer startup time if you havn’t already done so.  This isn’t a “neccesary step” but its a very good one to do.  If chameleon doesnt have a timer you’ll need to mash F8 after your bios finishes loading on your computer but before your hard-drive starts to read fully in order choose what boot partition to start from.  With a timer, things are much less of a pain, especially since for some people, F8 opens bios options, which when you accidentally do – just gets frustrating.  There are several ways to do this, but the way I will tell you is a popular way that I will quote from the InsanelyMac forums:

Browse with Finder to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist and just drag the file to your desktop.  After that edit your file (the desktop one) and save it.  To finish the job you drag the desktop version in the same folder where the old one was … /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/ and it should show you a dialog window.  Press the Authenticate button and type your password when it’s asked for.  Good job … all done!

Now that you know “how” to change the file, here is “what” you should be adding.

Look for a pre-existing line that says <key>Timeout</key> – if it exists, just edit the string underneith it with the ammount of delay time you want on boot, to choose what disk to boot from.  If it does not exist, you will have to add the whole line.  The end result of this portion should be added in to look something like this:

<key>Timeout</key>
<string>8</string>

The above example will put an 8 second delay on your startup, so that if you dont touch the keyboard for 8 seconds after the bootloader shows up, it will automatically boot.  If you press down or up and choose a different drive though, the timer will freeze and let you type extra boot commands etc (I.E. you could type -x and force it to start in safe mode).

8) Make Snow Leopard Bootable.

PCEFI9 should be installed by now.

Part of chameleon/pcefi is a file simply called “boot” that sits in the root of whatever drive OSX is installed on.  We need to replace the default PCEFI9 bootlloader file with the one found below:

  Snow Leopard bootloader to be used with PCEFI9 for 10A261 (36.5 KiB, 6,094 hits)

The boot file is hidden by default, so if you havn’t done so already, make hidden files visable by following either the terminal or application directions found in Step 3 of this tutorial.

After files are made visible, navigate to the root of the drive your current (working) osx install is sitting on.  Delete the file named ‘boot’.  After it is deleted, put the new ‘boot’ file from above in the old one’s place.  Do this by simply copying it, and pasting it into the drive.  Do this for every-drive you want it to be on, including the drive you  just installed Snow Leopard on.

Next you will want to use a tool called DSDT patcher.  In all honesty, the DSDT patcher does things that I dont fully understand, but aparently for some people, they cant boot Snow Leopard without it, and with it, they can.  Others have said DSDT is not required, but it doesnt hurt either way, so for the sake of this tutorial I am going to include it.

DSDT used to be somewhat confusing.  I was guided through it on forums and in IRC a couple times, but I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing or, in the end, if I did it right.  Now there is a GUI you can use to make this process very easy thanks to the awesome coders at pcwizcomputer.com.  Basically you just open it, make sure darwin/macosx is chosen, check “Apply DSDT patch to:” and then choose the drive you want to apply it to.  Do this to every drive you want it done to (you should basically do it to every drive you dropped a ‘boot’ file in).  If you downloaded the PCEFI9 package from this tutorial, you can find the DSDT patcher right inside that.

Otherwise, you can download the DSDT patcher standalone below:

  PCwiz DSDT Patcher with GUI (1.5 MiB, 9,030 hits)

9) Start Snow Leopard and hope it works.

If you have done everything above correctly, and are lucky with hardware on your system being compliant with stuff that works in Snow Leopard, you should be able to boot at this point.

Restart your computer, and, provided you added the timer to PCEFI/Chameleon, you will be able to interupt the boot process with little effort, to stop it from just launching your normal osx 10.5.6 again by pressing the up or down arrows on your keyboard.

Arrow down to whatever drive you installed Snow Leopard, and use the strings to boot.

-v -f

-v -f -x

-v -f -legacy -x

and if that doesnt work, you are pretty much boned for now, and will have to go try changing some kext files out, screwing with frameworks in Snow Leopard, and messing with bios options to see if you cant get some hardware enabled or disabled that is potentially causing a conflict that is preventing OSX from booting.

As files that solve common problems arise, I’ll toss them into the download section, so that you might be able to get things going – less common problems though, you’ll have to fish around for solutions to yourself, or hope someone already resolved it and published the solution somewhere ^^.

Thats all I have for right now, I myself have some issues with this install, where my desktop continually crashes in a never ending cycle.  We’ve found a work-around, but it breaks other things in turn – so its a problem we’re working on.  This should not be expected to go smoothly, as this is both a developer’s release, but also not intended to be run on “general” pc hardware as it is.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful in your Snowy adventures, and that it helps you at least get started in the realm of osx86.  If I missed anything I’m sorry, I’ll try to update and fix problem areas of this tutorial as time goes on, but for now

osx86 Island Welcomes you to Snow Leopard!

Thanks for reading!

A special thank you to the irc-osx86-hu crew for walking me through this process, the people at Insanelymac for the awesome resources on this sort of thing, and all of the people who take the time to provide GUI based tools to make delving into projects like this easier!

Fujilives & Ridgeline

We are glad you stopped by. I am happy to announce we have a Dell Studio Post Installer and will be adding others as time goes on including tutorials and video tutorials on how to install Leopard, Snow Leopard and Dual Boot. We are happy to help in anyway we can so if you need something specific please feel free to ask and we will try to help.

Thanks, Ridgeline