Gateway FX7024 - can it be done?

[Lord_Jeremy]

Hey. I just came into possession of a Gateway minitower model FX7024. It's got a Systemboard motherboard, I think. I'm not sure what model, though it has integrated graphics. I know it's got a G33 chipset and the FSB is clocked at 1066 MHz and RAM is clocked at 667 MHz. Don't know much else about that. It's got a Core 2 Quad Q6600 in it. What are the chances there are drivers for this baby, I'm a Mac guy and I'd really love to run Leopard and potentially Snow Leopard on this. Personally I use a MacBook Pro but it'd be awesome to have a quad-core box around for my video encoding work and the like.

I've already got a Family Pack of Leopard with two licenses left. Does that mean I can go about attempting to install 10.5 on this machine legally?

Oh and if anyone else has a similar machine running OS X, I'd love to hear about how that's going for you.

EDIT:
I've figured out that this thing should have an Intel GMA 3100, but I haven't been able to verify that. Because of its similarity to the MacBook's X3100, does that mean there are proper video drivers for this thing?

[Lord_Jeremy]

Alright. I didn't get any responses so I just went ahead and did it. For anyone with similar hardware that wants to try this in the future I'll describe what I had to do.

For starters, I set up the BIOS to use AHCI for SATA and disabled all but one core for the installation. My first attempt to use the iATKOS v7 DVD in an IDE DVD drive failed because apparently my motherboard's IDE controller isn't supported. I worked around this by using an IDE-USB interface. With that, the DVD booted fine and I was able to install the OS. The next setback was that the motherboard has an onboard GMA 3100 (not an X3100), which does not have supported drivers. I got around a hang at boot by dropping in a friend's GeForce 8800 GT. During installation, I installed just about all the drivers to cover all the bases. I used the stock kernel and chameleon 2 bootloader and everything seems to work just fine.

The system works well. After installation I was able to re-enable all four cores in the BIOS and System Profiler now reads four cores. Unfortunately, the system won't boot without the 8800 in it, which is a small problem because I just borrowed that card. I plan to get an nVidia card, probably a 260, for the system soon so the missing video drivers aren't too much of a problem.

[cdcooo2]

Hey I have the same computer. I'm trying to put a second HDD in the expansion bay and boot iATKOS v.7 from it, but I'm having trouble configuring the BiOS. I had the 8800GT, which came with my system, so I don't think thats the problem. I disabled all but one of the processors and set the SATA to AHCI, set the Max CPUID limit to disabled, enabled the XD technology, but i could not find anything in the bios settings about ACPI except for the S3 State choice under power. I think thats my problem, but when I boot into verbose the last line before the install freezes is an error about the firewire which i think is unrelated. Also when i boot normally i get to the gray apple logo and the black circle just keeps twirling until a white sort of "do not enter sign" appears and then nothing happens. Please let me know if there is anything else i should be doing. I really would like to try this out. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[Lord_Jeremy]

Hmm. Just now saw your posts. I don't have the machine at hand right now, but if a few days I should be able to get back with my BIOS settings.

Ok, when I try an install, if I use the original IDE DVD drive the disk won't boot. I had to take out the DVD drive and use an IDE to USB adaptor to install OS X. I haven't checked whether the computer will boot/read/burn DVDs properly with the drive back in because my friend took back the 8800 so I can't boot the machine right now. I would imagine using any USB DVD reader will work just fine to get the install disk to boot. Good luck!