Need Help/Guidance w/some issues (phenom)

[spydeyrch]

Hey y'all. How ya doing? :D I am new to this forum. And pretty much new to the whole OSX86 scene. I have a little experience now but not much. I have been visiting insanelymac.com and hackint0sh.org quite a bit to try and find some answers to what I am having errors with. :'( I was hoping that I could get some help with a few things. So I have kind of a list of a few things. I have read hours and hours worth of threads and have gotten some answers to my questions but not all of them were answered or were just partly answered. Then I found this site (infinitemac.com) which looks to help more the AMD community than the other sites seem to.

Man, I honestly don't know where to start. First let me tell you my system specs:

AMD Phenom 9950 (o'cld 3.2)
ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe
AMD 790FX / SB750 Chipset
ATI 3870 (can crossfire due to having two but only have one in right now)
4 Gigs of DDR2 1066 RAM
1 Seagate 500 Gig SATA HDD in AHCI mode
1 SATA DVD drive

Here are the different distros I have and tried: iDeneb 10.5.5, Leo4All v4.1, LawlessPPC for AMD. Currently I am using iDeneb 10.5.5 (writing this thread from it) I have had the most success with iDeneb so far so let me start there with my issues. :D

Ok, so I have no other OS on my HDD, just to simplify things. I start up the computer with the iDeneb disc in my DVD drive. Darwin pops up and I type in -v at the prompt just to see if there are any errors, I dont see any but then again it does go by SUPER fast, so it is kind of hard to detect/read if there were any errors. After about 3-5 mins, the OS X installer GUI pops up. I select disk utility and select my HDD, I format it as one partition and as HSF+ Journaled. Then I select the drive to install to. At which point I hit customize and select the corresponding patches and apps to install. I select the AMD patch, the skge/marvell network kext, the ATI 3870, several apps (dont remember all of them), the SMBIOS - 1066 patch, and the XNU 9.4.0 kernel. I also select the apple.azila (sp?) patch for audio. On the osx86 wiki on the HCL, my mobo is mentioned and the guy that tested it says that the apple.azila audio patch works for him. But he has a 790GX and SB 700 (maybe SB600, dont remember exactly). So that is problem number one, I dont have any audio. My lan and video work fine. I enabled Quartz GL via osx86tools. I keep reading in posts about some QE/CI or QI/CE option/ability but to be honest I really don't know what it is and if I need it, have it, and do or don't have it enabled. Is it worth it too? Anyway, so I hit the install button and check the disk then install.

After it installs, at the Darwin prompt, I hit -v to see if anything goes wrong. As far as I can see, nothing, no errors. Some of the, take a few moments to load but no errors, then it goes to this blueish colored screen. At which point if I wait for a few minutes, like 5, my mouse pointer will show up in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Then the cursor will change to the multi colored (rainbow colored) "busy" cursor icon then back to the normal pointer icon. If I move my mouse, the cursor will follow, but .... there is an extra cursor icon in the upper left corner still and it doesn't respond to anything. I can move my cursor down to the middle of the screen and I will have two cursors: one in the middle and one in the upper left corner. Hopefully that makes sense. Oh, the other thing is the my HDD light will continually go off as if something is accessing it but nothing is on the screen. So I have to restart the machine.

Once it is restarted, at the darwin prompt I will input -v -x -f and I can get to the login screen after a few minutes. Yet I am in safe mode (as I am right now). I then proceed to update my kernel to the voodoo 9.5 kernel and restart. At the restart I still have to use the -x -v -f string or no boot to the login will happen. I then have to repair permissions, using osx86tools. I then reboot and I have to use the -x -v -f every time (I know that I can put the -x string in my xxx.xxx.plist for when it boots but I really don't want to boot into safe mode every time.) I have tried just using -x and both -x -f but for some reason it will not boot unless I have the full -x -f -v string. :'( So that is problem number 2, how do I get it to NOT have boot into safemode everytime I want to use my system?

Ok, so I think that about does it for my current install w/iDeneb.

#1. no Audio
#2. have to boot into safe mode every time.

Ok, so I am going to post this thread right now and start working on an addition to it in the hopes that while I work on the additions, I can get some help with these issues. If I can get these issues fixed ... AWESOME!!! I would be set!!!

Also, if you don't have the time to answer my questions but you do have or know of a post/thread that would answer them or help me with clear answers and understandable explanations, the thread's url would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

P.S. I realize that I wrote ALOT but I have searched for literally hours/days on end and have only scratched the surface of what I believe I need to fix these issues. I have two young children and work full time and have church callings that take a lot of my time. So I normally only have the wee hours of the night to research this stuff and to be honest, I am getting pretty worn down with only getting 3-4 hours of sleep each night. So I figured, in place of putting my health on the line, ^_^, I would just lay it all out on the table and ask for help, as I haven't been able to find what I need. So thanks in advance and sorry for the loooooong post. I hope that someone at least has the heart to help me. :)

[lanceomni]

P.S. I realize that I wrote ALOTActually Id rather have too much info than too little... that is unless your posting a 50 page crash report ;)

Well have to wait and see what the Phenom user have to say but Im pretty sure Voodoo 9.5 should have fixed Phenom related issues.

It is strange that you have to use -f every time. Try deleting the extensions cache. Type the following in Terminal:
sudo rm -R /System/Library/Extensions.mkextWhile we are in there lets make sure permissions are set correctly. Type the following in Terminal (pressing enter after each line:
sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions && chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions

diskutil repairpermissions /[EDIT]Reboot with -v -x -f and then reboot again without -f and see how it goes. Actually just go ahead and boot with -v -f

-x boots the bare necessities. I'm not sure if its a graphics related issue but.

[spydeyrch]

Thanks for the response. So I deleted the extensions cache, like you said and just to make sure, I did it a second time. The second time it said that no such file or folder exists. The strange thing is that when I typed in the first line to verify my permisions, it said that no such file or folder exists. So I typed in the second line, to use diskutil to repair permissions. It said that it finished and was successful. I am going to reboot now, we will see what happens. Thanks for your help! :D

[spydeyrch]

Ok, so I rebooted and used -v -f, I didn't see any kernel panics or any other errors, after os x loaded everything, it went to the blueish screen again. The HDD LED would flash showing activity then after a while it would stop. No matter what I did, as far as input (keyboard, etc) nothing worked. I did noticed that if I right clicked with my mouse, the HDD LED would flash up again for a while. Don't know if that matters but hey, who knows, right. :-) I am going to try something. I am going to reinstall and NOT select a graphics driver, lets see what happens. :-)

[nfoav8or]

I am going to reinstall and NOT select a graphics driver, lets see what happens. :-)

This is actually the ideal way of installing for first time installs with any new distro as selecting too many things might cause unfriendly results and then it isn't easily known where the actual problem lies.

If the display issue keeps up you may want to go ahead and delete the ATI kexts so we can fix the issue after having a normal boot working. To do this in single-user mode type in -s as a boot flag then after it boots:/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /System/Library/
mkdir /Users/[your home folder]/Desktop/ATI
cp -Rf Extensions/ATI* /Users/[your home folder]/Desktop/ATI/ don't forget the "/" here
rm -Rf Extensions/ATI*
rm -Rf Extensions/GeForce*
rm -Rf Extensions/NVDA*
rm -Rf Extensions.*
reboot
(you can also fix the permissions before you reboot but you shouldn't need to unless you've done some other modifications to the Extensions folder... I've also included the GeForce and NVDA kexts/bundles above because you won't need these with your graphics card. Sometimes these cause issues even without a GeForce/nVidia card in place))

You should get the default resolution without QE support (check your Display in System Profiler). You can now extract the actual Apple ATI kexts (if those on the install DVD weren't the correct ones for ATI already). Download a combo update directly from Apple's Download site:

hxxp://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/

(replace the "xx" with "tt" yourself as I didn't want to link to this directly from the forum on purpose)
Grab one that is a post-10.5.2 combo update but don't install it. Get a copy of Pacifist so you can extract the ATI kexts from within the installer. Copy these to another folder on your Desktop before copying them to your Extensions folder. Don't fix the permissions just yet (just to make sure we don't create a Kernel Panic like with the addition of NVDAResman.kext with nVidia cards... this actual worry doesn't apply to you, I just do it this way to make sure)
Reboot your system and startup again with the -s boot flag:
/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /System/Library/
chmod -R 755 Extensions/ && chown -R 0:0 Extensions/ && touch Extensions/
rm -Rf Extensions.*
reboot

Now it should boot up fine without any boot flags (unless there still other non-graphics related issues keeping you from booting up other than in safe mode).

Some notes with using the Voodoo kernel. Make sure you've got a good copy of a decrypter in place as this can also cause the spinning ball at startup (pre-login). If you need one, or any other file (I typically recommend 3 files: the AppleDecrypt.kext file I mentioned earlier, AppleSMBIOSEFI.kext, and Disabler.kext to counter the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext that Apple implemented and causes Kernel Panics... the voodoo kernel tries to blacklist this kext but I think Apple is making a workaround for this later so I include it) PM me and I'll send you some links to the ones I host.

I also recommend having the voodoo kernel as two files directly on root as when updating Apple will also update the kernel and if your default kernel is mach_kernel then you don't want to have this replaced and make your system unbootable. For this I will assume you've downloaded the voodoo kernel (http://code.google.com/p/xnu-dev/) Release 1.0 Revision A. Open the image then open Terminal.app and type in the following:
cp /Volumes/Voodoo\ Kernel/Files/mach_kernel.voodoo /mach_kernel.voodoo
cp /mach_kernel.voodoo /mach_kernel
sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
If you use VMWare or Parallels you'll want your default kernel to be mach_kernel but if you don't use these apps then you might as well make the default mach_kernel.voodoo. One more thing... your Phenom is 64 bit capable so you might as well add in "-force64" to your kernel strings so it is supported at every boot. Save and exit the nano editor by typing [ctrl]+[o], [enter], [ctrl]+[x].
Now you can reboot your system to get full use of the voodoo kernel. Also, whenever you update with Apple Software Update in the future, remember to re-copy the mach_kernel.voodoo file over as mach_kernel in Terminal again.

How are you connecting to the Internet on yoour Hackintosh, LAN or wireless? does the onboard LAN give you any issues? sometimes disabling this and getting a separate card (listed in the HCL (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2#Wired_.28Ethernet.29)) may help to counter the ability to login to your system.

That's all the time I have for now but I'll look back in soon to check up more on your audio. Good luck.

[spydeyrch]

Let me just say .... WOW!!! That is a lot of VERY useful information, just the kind of thing that I have been looking for. Over the last month or two, all I would get at other forums is just a link to another post that presumablly has the answers that I am looking for. But I would have to read the WHOLE thread to even see if in fact it had it. Don get me wrong, links to other posts are great because they let me in on some info that I didn't know before or other cool ideas...but this is great.

So I went a head and reinstalled iDeneb excluding the ATI drivers. This is what I installed : AMD patch, apple SMBIOS - 27 - 1066, skge marvel LAN, and some apps. I creent dont have viedo, audio, or chipset kext installed. After the install, I input -v at the darwin prompt to see what would happen. it ran through it's normal stuff. Oh, by the way when I say normal stuff, I am only assuming that it is normal. There has always, no matter what install I do, been some weird messages that keep repeating themselves for a while then it continues. I will have to reboot to write down what it says so that I can post it. Ayway, after the install, once everything was finished, running in the darwin prompt, when the login should have come up, this time in stead of a blueish screen, a very wierd glitchy screen came up. It was a dark blue color while all the other times it was the normal mac light blue, also this time it had like tons of bubbles on it. Basically it was a graphics glitch of some sorts. Then when I moved my mouse, the screen just wigged out on me. I am going to try a couple things and then try your idea nfoav8or. Thanks again guys for your help. This has been some of the best input that I have recieved since I started this project. Will report back soon. :D

[LawlessPPC]

the wierd graphics you get only happen with ati cards the reason being its trying to use the built in apple drivers. These arent quite compatible. Boot into safe mode and install the right drivers for your card here are the ones i think are suitable.
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=107526

akso dont be suprised if you update osx and your graphix go odd again just reinstall the driver. If when you install it doesnt work upon reboot. Install using pacifist and tell it to replace with older versions as some installers wont replace with older files. You end up with a mix of part old and part new driver.


This should give you what you want

[spydeyrch]

Sweet, this is great, being able to get some real help!!! Thank you a ton! Ok, so I am going to try nfoav8or's advice first then I will try LawlessPPC's advice. The whole reason I am trying to get this to run is for a few different things. One, I want to make sure that I can get it to run 100% (or close to it) on my machine and then try to go vanilla, :cool: once I know what kexts I need. But for that, I will need some more help, but that is later. First the issue at hand. Wish me luck!!

:-)

[spydeyrch]

[QUOTE=
How are you connecting to the Internet on yoour Hackintosh, LAN or wireless? does the onboard LAN give you any issues? sometimes disabling this and getting a separate card (listed in the HCL (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2#Wired_.28Ethernet.29)) may help to counter the ability to login to your system.QUOTE]

I am connecting using my onboard LAN via Marvell. It hasn't given me any issues so far. :)

I currently don't have any spare parts, just got done building a system for a family. I will see if a friend or my father has an extra LAN card. :-)

[nfoav8or]

I currently don't have any spare parts, just got done building a system for a family. I will see if a friend or my father has an extra LAN card. :-)

Don't worry about this just yet. Give the file that Lawless intro'd to you and use that with my first post instead extracting from the Apple Update. Then when you update make sure you keep this file on hand to reinstall using pacifist like he said as well.

(Good thinking Lawless. thanks :))

[spydeyrch]

One quick question for you nfoav8or and/or Lawless, do you think that the problem of me having to boot into safe boot (safe mode) is due to the graphics card drivers having an issue? Cause to tell you the truth, when I do boot into safe mode, everything seems fine, graphically speaking. If I install iDeneb with the ATI 3870 drivers supplied with the iDeneb install DVD, then I can boot into safe mode, no graphical glitches or anything are present. If I try to boot into normal mode, there aren't any graphical glitches either (as in funny bubbles, or stripes and boxes, etc.) but it just shows that blue screen and two mouse pointers, one which moves and one which doesn't. I did notice one thing. In the darwin load, right before I get to the login screen in safe mode, there is some kind of a long message about the sandbox. It almost looks like a kind of error. I cant read all of it though because it is several lines long and when it shows up, I literally have like 5 seconds to read it before I am taken from verbose mode for boot up to the login screen. Is there any where to find a log of the boot up proccess or the different items that were loded or the different errors? That would be EXTREMELY helpful in trouble shooting this.

Right now I am at work, and I didn't have the time last night to try your solution. Kids come first. :D So I till try it later tonight. Thanks again for your help and willingness to give it, plus your patience with a n00b.:rolleyes:

[LawlessPPC]

your graphics issues are caused by what i posted earlier. boot logs are contained within console (well can be viewed from within it)

[spydeyrch]

Thanks for the quick reply Lawless. :) So I understand from your previous post that the graphics glitches (bubbles, stipes, boxes, etc) are due to the graphics kext not funtioning properly. And thanks for the great step by step proccess on how to fix it (you to nfoav8or), I will try it once I get home to test it. What I was wondering is if the reason why I cant boot to normal mode is truly due to a graphics kext error. What makes us think that it really is a graphics issue that is not allowing me to boot into normal mode? Cause when I boot into normal mode, no login is visible and yes the mouse pointer is present twice, but there are no typical glitches like when I don't install the ATI 3870 kext during the install process. Does that make sense? :-/

I am just trying to see if there is any proccess of elimination that I can do here at work without being at my computer. Just trying to be efficient. :D

[spydeyrch]

Oh, one more thing. Thanks for putting up with my annoying questions. What can I say, I am a n00b at this.

Oh, and where in the console can I find those boot logs? Any commands that I need to get to them? Thank again, you have been a HUGE help.. :-)

[LawlessPPC]

the reason why safe mode works is it doesnt load the graphics driver it only runs in vesa mode i know this issue with ati cards quite well as i had to fix the installer for the hd3650 to be 10.5.4 compatible in my distro. I had to make sure my installer would over write files that were newer than those being installed. Console is a complete program not shell or cli. It allows you to read all system errors, logs and crash reports. Just look at it and youll get the jist of it. Its in applications/utilities

[LawlessPPC]

safe mode -x can also avoid other potential driver issues.

[spydeyrch]

Dude, you're awesome!! Thanks very much for your input. I will try your suggestions once I get home. :D Also, I will check out the console program. Just from the name, I assumed that you were referring to the terminal, but silly me, if you were talking about the terminal, you would have said terminal. Thanks once more!! I will probably thank you like 50 more times before I get everything fixed seeing as I feel like a complete reject when it comes to this stuff (hence the n00b questions :eek: ) I will leave you alone for the time being until I get home to try your suggestions. Take care! :)

[spydeyrch]

Ok guys, Thanks for your help and patience with my stupid questions. I followed your advice nfoav8or and LawlessPPC. I am now in normal mode and it works just fine. There are only a couple small issues: If I don't run -v at the boot prompt then the grey apple logo/screen stays on the screen for an indeffinite time, until I move the mouse then the busy little clock like icon shows up and within a few moments I am on my desktop. I also noticed that during the install of iDeneb right around "about a minute left" the progress bar would stop and all activity would stop unless I constantly moved the mouse, then it would finally finish in about a minute. If I stopped moving the mouse during the install, then the progress bar would stop too. I have also noticed that if I open up a menu (i.e. File, Edit, View, etc.) in normal mode, then the highlighted option in the menu will start to jump between where my cursor is actually at in the menu and the top option, kind of annoying. So I think that it has to do with my mouse for some reason. I will try a different mouse and see what is up with it.

Also, my usb keyboard is not detected in either safe or normal mode if I have it connected via usb. But if I use a usb to ps/2 converter, it works just fine. The board is a logitech board and even has the apple icons on some of the keys, so I would assume that it should work with it.

I currently have everything running under the voodoo XNU 9.4.0 kernel and have not upgraded to the voodoo xnu 9.5.0 kernel yet. In the past when I have done it, my LAN stops working for some reason. It gets an IP via DHCP but it wont get the router and DNS server info automatically anymore (if I update to 9.5.0). ANy thoughts there? Also, during the install, I disabled the firewire kexts, actually, I just had them not installed because it was causing some wierd issue to come up. Any idea where I can get some good kexts for firewire to work? I need to get my audio working and time machine. Apart form that, it seems all else is going GREAT!!! My next project, once I get this done, is to get this installed off of retail, as I have a legit copy. :D

Thanks again guys for your quick help and very clear an precise responses. Thanks you very much!

[spydeyrch]

I would prefer to get time machine up and running that way I could back up everything that I have running right now stable right now with out having to reinstall if something goes wrong, such as an update or etc. Right now if I select a drive, partitioned to HSF+, external or internal doesn't matter, it will start to back up/run time machine but then about 10 second into it it will come back with an error saying that it cant find the designated drive even though it is mounted and works fine. I have tried USB, firewire, internal sata, and internal ide, nothing seems to be working right. Any ideas? Thanks again for your EXCELENT HELP!!!

Spydey

[spydeyrch]

Ok, so it looks like I got time machine working. I actually didn't have to do anything. I do have it backing up to the same HDD as my osx86 is installed on but to partition 2. So far it is working! YAY!!!! No if I could only get my firewire working and back it up to an external drive that I have. :-/

[spydeyrch]

Ok, so after I got time machine going and backed-up my good install ;), I decided to attack the issues of my audio (ADI AD2000B), chipset (AMD 790FX/SB750), LAN (Marvell 88E8056) that goes buggy when I update to voodoo 9.5.0 :-/, my eSata controller (Marvell 88SE6111) so that I could get eSata going, and my firewire (LSI L-FW3227) because I didn't install the kexts for firewire in my initial install :rolleyes:. I located some threads for all of my different devices in different forums and decided to try the audio first. The one that looked the most promising was the AppleAzaliaAudio.kext (which surprising enough, I noticed existing on the iDeneb DVD when I was doing the inistial install.) Instead of grabbing it from the DVD, I decided to download it from a link posted in a forum which the author of the post stated that he had the same audio chip as my motherboard did. So I installed that kext with osx86 tools and restarted the machine. I didn't want to cause a kernel panic by installing too many kexts at once. But, when I restarted, I had an error message come up.:mad: Even before I got to the Darwin prompt, an error message came up saying something to the effect of: Can not boot, can not find /system/library/..........com.apple.boot.plist.

Ok, nothing to scary, right? :eek: That is why I did a full back up using time machine of a working system, right. For cases or situations like this. So, I booted off of my iDeneb dvd and used the restore previous backup option to restore my system. Now the only issue is that after the restore, when I try to boot from the HDD, it gives me this error or something similar:

boot: 0
boot: 0
boot: 0
boot: MBR

:mad::'(

And then nothing. No matter what I try, nothing. The weird thing is that when I was given the option to restore from a previous backup, there were two backups, one that that was just a little less then 10 mins older than the other.:-/ So I chose the older of the two thinking that it would contain the least amount of changes and the most probability of booting correctly. WELL I WAS WRONG!! :'( hahahaha. ^_^

So, any ideas as to why that happened? I would REALLY REALLY like to get time machine working properly before I update to voodoo 9.5.0 and/or install any other kexts, just in case, you know what I mean?

So any input would be GREAT! Thanks guys.

[nfoav8or]

backing up from a time machine backup doesn't reinstall the bootloader to your drive. Use your install DVD and let the time run out on the bootloader so it will auto-boot to your HD. Then reinstall chameleon to your HD and all should be well again. If you're getting bad results with osx86 tools utility, then I'd suggest manually installing the kexts... this way you KNOW what exactly is being done to your system and aren't allowing the mysterious "forces" from an app control this. weird things happen at times... bugs in the hackintosh world... don't assume it will happen every time with that software, but just be aware of what is being done to your computer.

[spydeyrch]

Thanks for the quick response nfoav8or, I appreciate it. Quick question, n00b question again :eek:, how do I go about re-installing the bootloader? Thanks! :-)

[nfoav8or]

boot up with the install DVD but let the initial boot timer run out. This should make it then boot up the HD. Once booted up, download chameleon (http://chameleon.osx86.hu/) and install it to the HD you are running off of.