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Daemon
01-19-2008, 04:22 AM
The DVD booted up fine. With the Disk Utility I was able to format my newly connected 500GB SATA drive with HFS+. The installation crashed about 6 minutes before the end with the following error:

ReportCrash [779]: mkdir() failed to create /Library/Logs with error: Read-only file system

After restarting the installation by booting up from the DVD, it happily detected that majority of the files had been copied over and it took about 2-3 minutes to complete the rest of the process and announced that the installation was a success and that the computer will reboot.

With the DVD's bootloader to boot the drive (I think that's one of the problems, the bootloader was never installed because of that crash), I get the following error:

/com.apple.Boot.plist not found

Without the DVD's bootloader I'm stuck with a blinking cursor after "Verifying DMI Pool information..." or whatever that BIOS message is just before the OS takes over.

Here is some information about my machine

DVD Image MD5 checksum: 9fa4a7e1726757b958ce8da3a6fe8187
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-55, 2600 MHz (13 x 200)
Motherboard Name: MSI K8N SLI-F
Motherboard Chipset: nVIDIA nForce4 SLI, AMD Hammer
System Memory 1536 MB (PC2700 DDR SDRAM) (3x 512 MB sticks)
BIOS Type: Award (08/24/06)
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX (768 MB)
Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF CD210C [21" CRT] (HVAY101285)
Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF CD210C [21" CRT] (HVAY801967)
Audio Adapter: NVIDIA MCP04 - Audio Codec Interface
Disk Drive: ST3250824AS (232 GB, SATA) (WindowsXP partition, Linux partitions)
Disk Drive: NVIDIA STRIPE 298.10G (298 GB) (2 RAID0 SATA drives) (NTFS storage)
Disk Drive: ST3500320AS (465 GB, SATA) (HFS+ formatted) <-- this is where I'm trying to install
Optical Drive: SAMSUNG CD-R/RW SW-252S (52x/32x/52x CD-RW)
Optical Drive: TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-H552U (DVD+R9:5x, DVD+RW:16x/4x, DVD-RW:12x/4x, DVD-ROM:16x, CD:40x/32x/48x DVD+RW/DVD-RW)
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 USB Keyboard
Mouse: HID-compliant mouse (MS Habu Optical)
Mouse: PS/2 Compatible Mouse (MS Intellimouse Explorer Optical)
Network Adapter: NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller - Packet Scheduler Miniport (192.168.0.x)
USB1 Controller: nVIDIA MCP04 - OHCI USB Controller
USB2 Controller: nVIDIA MCP04 - EHCI USB 2.0 Controller
USB Device: Habu Mouse
USB Device: Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard
USB Device: Plantronics DSP-500 USB Audio Device

Any ideas, I've searched everywhere for that crash error and how to fix it but no luck so far.

naquaada
01-19-2008, 05:08 AM
I also had problems installing with a 500GB Samsung on my nForce 4 system.

Check in the BIOS which mode your harddrive is set to. Set it to Auto or LBA. A harddisk in that size must be set to LBA, I had problems when it was set to Large mode. Boot from the DVD, enter Disk Utility, format it to HFS+ (journaled) as selected by default. Select in 'Security Options' 'Overwrite with zeroes'. So every block of the drive came in touch with the HFS+ filesystem, and the disk is checked for errors during this progress. This may take a while, after this you can install. If it works, you have to use an USB keyboard, PS/2 drivers aren't available after the installation of zaphyroth's actual image.

Other things: remove all unneccessary drives from the System. On some mainboards not all SATA ports aren't used for booting, on my Asus board it's only Port 1 and 2 (of 4). Check if you have set the 150/300 MB-Jumper if your mainboard supports SATA-2. The DVD-ROM should be on Secondary Master. Maybe you have to disable USB Legacy support in BIOS if you have problems with mouse or keyboard.

Before partitioning take a look at my installation system: http://osx.kbot.de/comments.php?DiscussionID=33&page=1#Item_1
It saves a lot of time, trouble and torn-out-hair. That's my partition scheme for a 500GB HD (465,8 GB available)

1 - Main Partition 218,06 GB
2 - Recovery Partition 15,90 GB
3 - Shared Systemdata Partition 30,90 GB
4 - Data/Media Partition 200,90 GB

Maybe you can skip the Tiger preinstallation if it works directly with leopard, I needed to fix a kernel panic on my ATI system.

Daemon
01-19-2008, 06:24 AM
I will try your suggestion about overwriting every single disk block with zeros. The drive is set to Auto in the BIOS and is detected perfectly by the installer. It shows the correct size and I've run multiple successful verifications on it with the Disk Utility tool.

For the record, I've tried the install about 4-5 times, yielding the same result, regardless of whether the additional drives are connected or not. I've even tried disabling them from the the BIOS to the point where only the 500 GB SATA drive was visible making no difference to the final end result. My CD-ROM is primary IDE master, DVD is secondary IDE master. Does the installer expect the SATA drive to be a specific # master?

Current drive configuration based on connection:

IDE Primary Master: CD drive
IDE Primary Slave: none
IDE Secondary Master: DVD drive
IDE Secondary Slave: none

SATA 1: 500GB
(Under BIOS it's listed as 3rd Primary Master and the drive I'm trying to install to.)
SATA 2: 250GB
(Under BIOS it's listed as 4th Primary Master)
SATA 3: 160GB (RAID configured)
SATA 4: 160GB (RAID configured)
(Those are listed under the RAID controller BIOS displayed after initial BIOS screen as a healthy RAID configuration)

The MSI mobo is very flexible about selecting a boot device and I plan to use the built-in BIOS boot device selector to switch between Leopard (on the 500 GB drive) and WinXP (on the 250 GB drive).

Regarding the mouse and keyboard, I actually have 2 mice and 2 keyboards connected, one USB and one PS/2 of each, so I really haven't run into any problems with those (at least in the installer boot up).

naquaada
01-19-2008, 07:39 AM
3rd Primary Master for the 1st SATA drive is correct. 1st and 2nd Primary Master are the ones from the IDE channels. It's a bit weird, but ok. Remove the CD drive from Primary Master, this could cause problems, perhaps MacOS expects a harddisk drive on this channel. I don't think OS X regonizes the SATA RAID structure, better remove it. MacOS cares a sh*t about BIOS. I have a DVD-RW-drive connected which is not recognized in BIOS, but I could use it without problems in OS X, even burning is possible. nForce 4 systems are rather common and working fine in OSx86. I have now a working dual-Leopard-system on the board with the 500GB HD which made the same errors as yours. For dual-boot you could use the Windows boot selector, you need only a little program from the OSx86 DVD and some entries in the boot.ini.
Tip: Buy other RAMs. With your configuration you won't get fast Dual-Channel-RAM which extremely increases the performance. You always have to use identical pairs. nForce 4 mainboards support up to 4 GB RAM, but some are switching to DDR333 speed if 4GB are installed. But 2 GB are enough for every normal use. On ebay you can get new Samsung DDR3200-RAMs (2x 1GB bundle) for about 55 Euro including shipping from the USA. They're working without problems on my boards.

naquaada
01-19-2008, 07:58 AM
Ah, forgot: MacOS doesn't like overclocking. At least our Tiger version got problems with IDE and stability at 5-10% more clock, tested on an FX-55 and FX-57.

Daemon
01-20-2008, 04:51 PM
So my motherboard burned out. That was a bummer. On the bright side, I had wanted to upgrade my processor for a while so I went to my local computer store and got:

CPU: AMD Phenom 9500 (Quadcore)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
Mobo Chipset: AMD 790FX
Memory: 2x2GB OCZ DDR2

Armed with this new equipment I decided to give the installation another shot. It didn't crash but I ended up with the same problem (booting from the DVD just showed the "Missing com.apple.Boot.plist" and booting directly from the drive showed just the blinking cursor after "Verifying DMI pool information"). I did some more research and one forum thread recommended that I partition the drive with a MS-DOS style MBR and not GUID (which apparently was the problem) and that seemed to fix the boot problem.

I am typing this response from within Leopard now and I figured I'd point out my error if that would help someone else in the future.

naquaada
01-20-2008, 07:20 PM
uaaa I don't think the Phenom is supported yet. Watch for the TLB bug in the Phenom.

Daemon
01-20-2008, 11:03 PM
I don't think that's gonna be a problem, there is an update to the motherboard BIOS to work around that issue (even though CPU performance takes a slight hit of ~10%).

roisoft
01-20-2008, 11:21 PM
Hey Daemon, all the cores of your phenom are recognized? Can you post a Xbench score here, please?

Daemon
01-25-2008, 08:09 AM
All 4 cores are recognized.

<pre>
Results 134.11
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.1 (9B18)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model ACPI
Drive Type ST3500320AS
CPU Test 113.86
GCD Loop 168.26 8.87 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 116.26 2.76 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 81.57 2.69 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 120.10 20.91 Mops/sec
Thread Test 233.12
Computation 202.92 4.11 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 273.89 11.78 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 146.30
System 147.02
Allocate 184.79 678.63 Kalloc/sec
Fill 144.31 7016.71 MB/sec
Copy 124.00 2561.11 MB/sec
Stream 145.60
Copy 141.42 2921.02 MB/sec
Scale 140.38 2900.12 MB/sec
Add 150.83 3213.10 MB/sec
Triad 150.41 3217.57 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 177.25
Line 143.48 9.55 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 184.25 55.01 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 151.60 12.36 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 144.02 3.63 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 439.99 27.52 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 118.51
Spinning Squares 118.51 150.34 frames/sec
User Interface Test 270.64
Elements 270.64 1.24 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 68.90
Sequential 150.91
Uncached Write 170.99 104.99 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 172.51 97.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 98.74 28.90 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 211.26 106.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 44.64
Uncached Write 14.18 1.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 247.27 79.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 107.77 0.76 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 174.31 32.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
</pre>

perisman
03-23-2008, 11:54 AM
hi
Daemon did you have pc_efi installed on loader?
I have phenom 9500 and always with efi instant reboot when loads efi emulator, I had to modify 10.5.2 iso to boot with old bootloader and install old bootloader after install and modify some kexts. I tried with to diferent mobos (amd 690G and nforce4) and the same result.
If your mobo works with pc_efi with phenom, maybe I will be use pc_efi with phenom...
thanks it advance

Shadow3k
04-17-2008, 03:40 PM
How to install on Phenom
http://www.infinitemac.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=978&page=1#Item_1

jmattos
05-12-2008, 08:32 PM
Daemon

It looks like your system specs are close to mine... what distro did you use?

specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2 6400+ Black, 3.2GHz
MOBO: MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD RD790FX Phenom (http://tinyurl.com/69dsfy)
Chipset: AMD 790FX chipset (AMD 790FX + SB600)
RAM: 4GB Mushkin HP2-6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory
HDD: 500GB S-ATA II 7200 RPM on SATA-1
VID: ATI Radeon HD3870 512MB x 2 (with crossfire cables)
CDRW: Internal DVD+CD Rewritable Combo Drive 16X52X32X52 (Primary Master)
DVDR: ASUS Internal SATA DVD+/- RW + CDRW Rewritable Drive (Primary Slave)
SOUND: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 Retail Edition
NET: Onboard Gigabit (10/100/1000Mbps) PCI Network Card

Gdfath3r
06-21-2008, 04:15 PM
I have kinda Install problem:
Install disk: 10.5.2 v2 Zephyroth
Hardware: cpu: Opteron170
Mobo: DFI NF4 Ultra-D
HDD: IDE 250Gb Maxtor
VGA: Galaxy 8800gt 512Mb

Problem detail:
If I boot with install disk, system will boot normally.
Without install disk, I am getting cpu panic which says: " Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI\" .\n"@/Volumes/disk1s2/leo_xnu/xnu-1228/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1405

Can somebody help me with this problem?

Update:

I found a solution. I havent installed LAN card drivers, and my system booted normally.
Also AppleACPIPlatform.kext has dependecies which results in kernel panic if, like in this example a specific hardware is installed.