Tim Sodhi’s Weblog

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to relegate my main machine (Gigabyte 965P – DS4) to a file server. I decided to go the no-hassles route and installed Windows 7. After painstakingly converting all my drives back to NTFS, I found to my chagrin, the great amount of lag when opening a network share via Samba (SMB) on my Macs. The Finder would scan the remote directory for what seemed like minutes before it showed me the contents of the folders.

That in addition to the messed up permissions on the server machine made it nearly impossible to sync files to and from the iMac/Mac Mini/MacBook Pro. Each time I’d initiate a transfer/sync session, the permissions on the Windows server would cause the sync client to erroneously recognize the entire data set as new, and cause a full copy between machines. Not too serious, but it does get old when the entire network is choked up due to 100GB of data crossing over each night.

And this is when I decided to head back to Mac for my server needs. It is an old adage that if you don’t flex your muscles enough, you lose them. Apparently, the same goes for Hackintosh skills! For the life of me, I couldn’t remember which set of KEXTs I used in my /E/E folder, so I decided to go back to the easier Leopard route. I installed iPC, only to notice the slower network speeds of 32MBps (Gigabit Ethernet). I could get up to 60-70MBps on Snow Leopard – so indeed, I decided to reconvert all my drives to HFS and then start the process of installing Snow Leopard.

I had to refer back to my blog and to the relevant websites to pick up pointers. Luckily I had my DSDT handy and after a couple of trial and errors, I finally had Snow Kitty back up on my Hack. I used Chameleon RC4, and with no need for manual UUID injection, things just worked the way they should. I added a number of flags to my com.apple.boot.plist – mainly to cause a timeout at the boot selection screen, as well as to hide some extra drives that showed up. I also have a new set of KEXTs I am using. These are:-

fakesmc.kext (new one)
LegacyAppleYukon2.kext
LegacyHDA.kext
NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
OpenHaltRestart.kext

It has been a few weeks since then. I am running a 32Bit Kernel and Extensions, and I couldn’t be happier. Chronosync keeps all my Macs up-to-date and runs scheduled backups of all my home movies and iPhoto data.

Seems that booting the retail Snow Leopard DVD on a Hackintosh is now possible with a new release of Boot132. Insanelymac has more information. I am going to try this later this week.

This post has been a long time coming. I had promised something on these lines the previous week when I managed to boot my Hackintosh (see specs) in Snow Leopard. Like almost everyone, I installed from Leopard on to another partition. Wrought with its own challenges, this is however, the easiest way of getting Snow Leopard installed.

I, however, am on the quest for the holy grail – Vanilla Snow Leopard, installed the retail method. I haven’t yet reached that goal, but I am getting there. This is a mini-guide on how to get Snow Leopard installed as the only OS, via a USB boot loader. This guide is generic enough and can be applied to other motherboards and configurations as well.

Here’s a brief rundown of the procedure: first, we’ll restore the retail Snow Leopard DVD on to a partition or a thumb drive (at least 7 GB). We will install the Boot loader in the USB thumb drive so that we may boot from it and kickstart the Snow Leopard installation. Once the installation is over, we will boot into Snow Leopard with the USB boot loader and install the boot loader on the Snow partition.

What you will need to install via the USB thumb drive-

• Chameleon 2.0 RC1
• PCI EFI 10.1 Boot file from Netkas
• KEXTs (generic and for your system)
• com.apple.Boot.plist with your EFI String.
• DSDT.aml for your system
• Retail DVD (buy one. Please.)
• Working Leopard Installation (just to get us started)
• USB Thumb Drive (at least 100 MB)
• A partition to restore the DVD/Image to, no less than 7 GB. Either on the Thumb Drive or on another HDD, or you can partition your own HDD

We begin by restoring the Snow Leopard DVD on to a partition. I strongly recommend using another drive if you have one. For instance if you have an external USB drive that is at least 8 GB, you can restore the DVD to that drive. Or if you have a second HDD in your system, partition off 8 GB using Disk Utility (easy if you have a GUID partition), and restore the Snow Leopard DVD. It is rather easy to restore: open Disk Utility and select the drive you want to restore to, and right click to select Restore from the menu. Point the source to the Snow Leopard Image/DVD and the destination – your new partition.

Once that is done, install Chameleon on to your USB Thumb Drive. It might fail at the end, but don’t worry that’s normal. Now take the Boot file from the PC EFI 10.1 (Netkas) and copy it to the Thumb Drive overwriting the old Boot file. This 10.1 Boot is rock stable and already 64 Bit compatible. Using Chameleon RC1 boot file has proven cumbersome for some.

Next, copy the KEXTs to the Thumb Drive’s /Extra/Extensions. One BIG note here. Do not add any extraneous KEXTs, like a patched AppleHDA, or IONetworkingFamily.kext, or IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext, as these WILL cause a KP (Kernel Panic) during install. Believe me, I ran into literally dozens of such KPs before I realized this info. My recommendation is to only keep the following KEXTs on the Thumb Drive (in the Archive).

• OpenHaltRestart.kext
• NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
• fakeSMC.kext

You will need Graphics enabled for your system. By which I mean either an EFI string for your Graphics card, or some other mechanism (DSDT?). It is a critical component. For many the installation won’t start because of this. So make sure you have the EFI string in your com.apple.Boot.plist. Additionally, I also recommend booting with the arch=i386 flag. There’s a difference between the arch=i386 and -x32 flags. The former will load 32 bit KEXTs and the latter forces a 32 bit kernel. For maximum compatibility I recommend using both, but just add the arch=i386 flag to the com.apple.Boot.plist.

Kernel Flags
arch=i386
GraphicsEnabler
y
device-properties
YOUR EFI GFX STRING HERE

And finally, the most important aspect for Snow Kitty – DSDT.aml. A ton of literature is freely available to educate you on this, but for our purposes, it suffices to remark that DSDT is a very important component of the Snow Leopard install. Luckily it is rather easy to create a DSDT for your system. A number of tools for Windows and OSX (here) will create a DSDT, which though might not make all your devices work out of the box, but will indeed work with Snow Leopard. You can play around with entering Ethernet and Sound customizations in your DSDT once you are in Snow Leopard.

So go ahead, create a DSDT.aml for your system. One tweak is needed to ensure that your CMOS doesn’t reset every time you reboot in Snow Leopard. Nasty business that. Edit your DSDT.aml as specified here.

Place the patched DSDT.aml in /Extra/ on your Thumb Drive. You are ready. No need to correct permissions on the Thumb Drive or create an Extensions.mkext. Of course if you want to, here’s how.

sudo chown -R root:wheel /Extra/Extensions/
sudo chmod -R 755 /Extra/Extensions/

Reboot! And press F12 or the corresponding key on your system to bring up the Boot Menu. Select the USB Thumb drive in the list and hopefully you’ll be greeted with the Boot Menu. Go over to the partition to which you restored the Leopard DVD/Image. Don’t press Enter, rather enter extended boot arguments

-x32 -v

If all goes well, you’ll be in the Snow Leopard installation. Proceed as always. Use Disk Utility to erase your Leopard installation (why would you need it now?) and install all that you need. If any KPs occur, check the KEXTs in the USB thumb drive, and your DSDT.aml. But, if you have taken the proper precautions, it will all be fine.

Finish the installation and boot once more from your Thumb Drive. This time however, choose to boot from the new Snow Leopard installation, with the same boot flags as before (-x32 -v -f). Fly through the welcome screen and set up your account. It should be rock solid and stable thus far.

Post Installation
Now to bring it full circle. The post installation procedures. You can use the three KEXTs from the Thumb drive, as well as your DSDT.aml. But depending on your configuration, you might need more KEXTs/Injectors for your sound card, etc.

Here’s what you will need:

• Kext Utility for Snow Leopard (64 Bit)
• Chameleon 2.0 RC1
• Netkas PC EFI 10.1
• KEXTs for your system
• DSDT from the Thumb Drive
• KEXTs from your Thumb Drive

Install Chameleon 2.0 RC1 to the Snow Leopard installation. Replace the boot file with that by Netkas. Basically, follow the same steps as before, instead this time copy all the KEXTs and DSDT to the /Extra/Extensions and /Extra respectively, on the Snow Leopard installation drive. This time however, include fixes for your specific hardware. And this is key – repair permissions and rebuild the kextcache anytime anything changes in /Extra/Extensions. This is key. I can’t stress this enough. You WILL get a KP otherwise.

Graphics
Assuming you have EFI strings in your com.apple.Boot.plist, you are good to go.

Audio
I am a bit ashamed to say, I had it with my ALC888 sound card, and chose to purchase a USB sound device that works out the box with Leopard. I didn’t expect much from this nine dollar purchase, but wow, I am quite impressed with the sound – clarity and deeper tones compared to the ALC888! However, you might want to crawl through InsanelyMac to search for solutions for your specific card. ALC888 works for some with DSDT and for some not. I was in the latter half of the population.

Ethernet
965P-DS4 or DS3 version 3.3 features the Marvell Yukon 88E8056 Gigabit ethernet chip, which is unfortunately not supported out of the box in Snow Leopard. You will need to edit the IONetworkingFamily.kext, found in your /System/Library/Extensions/. I would recommend copying this KEXT to your /Extra/Extensions and editing it there. Right-click on the KEXT and select Show Package Contents. In Contents->PlugIns->AppleYukon2.kext (show Package Contents)-> Contents->Info.plist. Search for 88E08053.

Yukon-88E8053 change to
Yukon-88E8056

0×436211ab change to
0×436411ab

Yukon Gigabit Adapter 88E8053 Singleport Copper SA change to
Yukon Gigabit Adapter 88E8056 Singleport Copper SA

And save the plist. You are set with Ethernet.

Orange e-SATA icons
Copy the IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext to the /Extra/Extensions folder.

You are set. Edit the com.apple.Boot.plist and remove arch=i386.

arch=i386

Use the Kext Utility to build Extensions.mkext in the /Extra folder. Reboot.

Boot from the main drive now, and choose the Snow Leopard installation, and type the boot flags:

-x32 -v -f

Boot into the Snow Leopard desktop, and run Kext Utility once again. Reboot

Boot from the main drive and choose the Snow Leopard installation. No boot flags required this time. Boot into a 64 Bit desktop! Congratulations.

Not a how-to A lot has happened in the OSX86 world. From its humble beginnings back in 2006, when it was the playground of the extremely talented few, and OSX installations were wrought with issues, to the “boom” period when large number of “distros” were the call of the day, and industrious users created their brand of 10.5 flavors for the masses. iPC, iAtkos, iDeneb, and others will be familiar to anyone who has expressed interest in installing OSX on their non-Apple boxes. Where it once was the realm of the adventurous few, it became the turf of every person with the Apple gleam in their eye. And now, when installing retail OSX is the cool thing to do.

No “distros”, no flavors, just plain vanilla OS installed directly from a retail Leopard DVD (10.5.6) bought from the Apple Store. That is the project I decided to undertake this weekend. Laid low by chronic back pain and neck muscle ache, I decided to sit back and take the hours out to install retail OSX on my system that I built back in 2007. A few specs:

• Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 ver. 3.0 Motherboard
• Intel Core2Duo E6600 CPU (OC’d to 3.6 GHz)
• 4 GB of DDR2 800 MHz RAM
• SATA-2 HDD’s 4.0TB in AHCI
• S-ATA DVD/CD Writer LiteOn
• XFX nVidia 7600GT (512 MB)
• Gateway FPD2485W S-IPS LCD
• Apple Aluminium Keyboard
• Logitech MX Revolution Mouse

Here is a list of things I did need.

• A retail Leopard DVD. I used 10.5.6.
• Boot 132 Disk for your system or a generic one.
• Chameleon Bootloader 2.0 (RC1) or better.
• KEXTs for your graphics card (you can go EFI strings later).
• A LOT of patience.

The basic challenge is that Leopard won’t boot on a non-Apple machine without some coaxing. Enter the Boot 132 disc. I won’t go into details, but basically you can create a flat DMG with the KEXTs in a folder and the Boot 132 bootloader will load them for you at boot time. KEXTs are kernel Extensions that allow extended functionality to be added to the Kernel without the need to compile all the extensions for devices, etc., directly in the kernel. Boot 132 allows KEXTs for non-Apple hardware to be loaded at boot time and extend the base Apple kernel so that a retail Leopard DVD can be booted. More details here.

Here’s how I went about the installation. I inserted the Boot 132 disc and on being prompted, the retail Leopard DVD. The Installation was straightforward, and understandably the OS installation gave a “Failed” notice at the end. This is because a bootloader hasn’t been installed on the OSX partition.

Next up, I booted from the Boot 132 disc, but chose instead to boot from the newly installed OSX Partition. Leopard welcome and setup screens later, I was in! I didn’t have QE/CI though, as I hadn’t yet edited the com.apple.boot.plist with my EFI string (easily extracted via GFXUtil). I quickly installed Chameleon 2.0 (RC1, as RC2 just doesn’t seem to work for me) and copied a whole list of KEXTs to the /Extra/Extensions folder, and com.apple.boot.plist to /Extra. These are the KEXTs I used.

• AHCIPortInjector.kext
• AppleACPIPlatform.kext
• AppleAHCIPort.kext
• Disabler.kext
• dsmos.kext
• IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext
• IONetworkingFamily.kext
• OpenHaltRestart.kext
• SMBIOSEnabler.kext
• UUID.kext

I deleted the Extensions.mkext in that folder, and corrected the permissions.

sudo chown -R root:wheel /Extra/Extensions; sudo chmod -R 755 /Extra/Extentions

Rebooted, and this one’s important – typed in -v -f to force compile the KEXTs at the Chameleon Boot screen, and voila, Bob’s your chum!

I did however have to install AppleHDA.kext manually, as it can’t be copied to the /Extra/Extensions folder (due to multiple dependencies). I am just so impressed with the performance and stability. Uptime of three days and counting. Again, this is not meant to serve as a how-to, but rather a brief insight into the installation process. . Bring on Snow Leopard!