Just my note of appreciation for all the work you've put into this guide and tools.

I've been a happy ES2L Leopard user for about a year and have just upgraded to Snow. It went quite smoothly, thanks to you and the other contributors. Many kudos!

Boot Loader
 

I used this guide to do an install and am having one problem. I would like my default boot drive to be disk0s3

I have another install @ disk0s2 that is the drive that I told myhack to install to.

Which boot.plist file do I edit?

Thanks

Craig

I'm trying to wrap my head around the best backup options and recovery options when things go wrong. Forgive me for asking lots of questions.. some of these may seem stupid, but I'm trying to assess what is needed and the trade-offs. I've been winging it until this point, but decided its time to give myself backup ability and do it right.

Let's assume a working HD and a separate drive used as backup... also assume we all used the install method from post #1

a) I believe that Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and Disk Utility can all clone the main section of the working drive to the backup drive, but will NOT copy the bootloader?

b) Before even doing the above backup, the backup drive should be prepared (GPT, etc) as described in post #1?

c) once prepared.. you can do the clone.. at this point your data/etc is safe.. but the backup drive would not be bootable

d) let's say you had a failed 10.6.2->10.6.3 upgrade at this point and your machine KPs when trying to boot... can we restore from the backup drive, if so.. how? what I am booting with... will I always be able to get to the Chameleon menu (installed on drive #1) and pick the 2nd drive (even tho it does not have a bootloader on it?)

e) let me re-ask d) assuming I had installed Chameleon after step c .. how does that change things.

f) what did I forget to ask? :)

many thanks!

PS. I did thread title searches for Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and backups.. I found surprisingly little and not with much detail.. maybe can get enough info here to make a nice guide.

Perils of using the ES2L w/ fixes .dsl file?
 

First want to say thanks for the fantastic guide and really helpful followup posts. Never having done any of this before, I was booting Snow Leopard on my new system about 4 hours after the parts showed up at my door, and that felt pretty good!

However, I keep failing to get a usable dsdt.aml file out of the main instructions here. I'm just copying and pasting the required sections into my own dsdt.dsl (first from the dsdtfix file, then from the example dsdt.dsl), but I keep getting 2 errors in iASLme. One thing I did notice is that my .dsl file seems to have a lot of leading slashes (\) before various things that neither example .dsl provided in the kit have. Is that a problem?

Finally to see if audio could work at all, I just took the new ES2L w/ fixes .dsl file from the kit and used that, and now I have working audio using that dsdt.aml, and the Legacy883 and 10.6.2 AppleHDA kexts (on 10.6.3).

First question: is there a newer version of DSDTpatcher out there that I should be using? I'm at work now, but when I get home I'll try to update with the specific errors I'm getting.

Second (more important) question: I've seen warnings on this board and in this very guide against using someone else's dsdt file, but I don't really understand the actual risks very well. If it's just general stability, i.e. the occasional KP, then maybe that's something I can conscience for now. If there's graver dangers ahead, I'd really appreciate any info on them so I can stop using it if I need to.

@ zim2dive regarding backup strategy.

I believe you have to install chameleon separately, thats what I had to do.

I was in that situation you described with the 10.6.3 update. I had made a backup before trying the update, (with superduper, it has a 'smartupdate' option to only copy new files, its quicker). When the update failed, I simply booted from the bckup drive and used superduper 'in reverese', to get back to 10.6.2.

The way I see it, the advantage with having the bootloader installed on the backupdrive is that you can just switch drives and be up and running. Which is handy if theres a mechanical fault on the original drive or you can't find that usb stick you had the bootloader on. I have a setup with the drive outside the case so its easy to switch drives, but I have a very quiet 500gb single platter drive, it might get noisy if you have a 1TB drive.

I have an interesting issue.

After upgrading to 10.6.3 yesterday, all of the text in the OS is slightly raised. It's to the point that some text is overlaying other text, cutting off lines and overall, changing the way I feel about my OS.

Is anyone else having this issue? If you're confused as to what I mean, the attachment is a screenshot of my Safari and Menubar.

The part that makes it really annoying is the fact that it's only the text, not the icons. If the icons were raised as well, it would be less noticeable.


*Edit: I've run into a much more serious issue. I can't boot into the OS at all. I've tried -x, -v, -f, but nothing works. No kernel panic errors. Just a hang. While booting in verbose safe, the last line that appears is
and then it loaded HDAEnabler like 16 more time.

The only thing that I've done since the upgrade to 10.6.3 was create the E/E/ folder and move SleepEnabler.kext for 10.6.3 into it.

I've booted into the USB disk and removed it and used DiskUtil to repair permissions, but nothing changed.

Please don't tell me I have to start from scratch.

I'm just gonna leave the computer running and see what happens overnight. Actually, I booted into single-user mode and when I mounted the filesystem, it said that it was modified. I'm guessing that this is because of trying to follow Zim2Dive's situation where he copied over SleepEnabler, then ran Kext Util. Once I did that, I pretty much lost my OS.

a flawless update. Everything working as before. Thanks everyone

Now I have another interesting issue.

I don't know why, but on my vanilla install of Snow, I can't seem to get sound working. I HAD it working, but not, it doesn't.

System Profiler is recognizing that there is a soundcard installed, and it is clearly being recognized as an 833, but no inputs or outputs are listed.

The only kexts I have installed are HDAEnabler, AppleHDA, and Legacy833.

For information's sake, I have a G31M-ES2l Rev2, EVGA 9400GT, E5200 oc to 3.00ghz, and I'm trying to use the built-in sound.

Ok, so I got my new (SATA) drive in the mail. So I...

-Shut down hack
-inserted new drive.
-Rebooted.
-Once in OSX, presented with dialog for unrecognized drive, chose to initialize as per post #1with a 500G main drive, I chose to partition my new drive (GPT) into 2 500M partitions.. 1 for TimeMachine, and one as a pure clone (or maybe I'll find some other purpose later)
- per suggestion, I downloaded SuperDuper and fired it up... I was all set to use it, but it has a note that says it does not copy some I wasn't 100% sure what this would mean.. but I decided to go for it.. with the plan being to do the full copy, install Chameleon and then see if I could boot from Clone.. that would be my test.


- after Super Duper ran, I figured I would also do my first Time Machine run. So I let that complete as well.

- Now time to install Chameleon on the 2nd drive.. I followed this guide: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/inde...pic,649.0.html
My steps were:I shut down.. rebooted, and selected my Clone drive from the list.. and am posting from that session. So it appears to work. Please feel free to point out anything I could have done differently/better.

FWIW, I plugged a GT220 in to this setup and it worked right away.. tho not giving the slight performance boost I expected : http://osx86.net/f7/9500gt-beats-gt2...998/#post47483