Snow leopard retail on Asus M2N-E SLI (2 installation approaches)

[joe611]

Hi all,

I have tried to install snow leopard retail disc on my asus m2n-e sli motherboard, which uses a nforce500 chip. I have tried two approaches but still failed, it would be great if you could lead me to the right direction :)

Approach 1:
http://www.ihackintosh.com/2009/09/install-snow-leopard-106-on-amd-pc-hackintosh/
This link illustrates how to install snow leopard onto a disk using an existing mac with leopard. I followed Phase 2 of this guide, however I used my own method to get the guide's Phase 1 (getting retail snow leopard onto the targeted disk) done. I used a mac already with snow leopard on it, booted from the installation disc and then connected my target drive through usb and installed it there, as if I am re-installing snow leopard on my mac. It restarted and got to the desktop fine, then I performed the tasks in phase 2, installing Chameleon and also added the nforce kext. After installation I shut it down, and put this newly installed drive into my desktop (Asus M2N-E SLI).

It booted up fine, however in verbose mode the last message that i see before reaching to the desktop says "SMC is stuck and cannot recover". I can move my mouse around, but if i attempt to mouse click or keyboard press, the screen flashes black for 1 second and then returns to normal. The mouse clicks and keyboard presses aren't actually being registered (I can only see mouse move responses). If I do the clicks or presses a couple of times it causes a kernel panic.

I'm not exactly sure what went wrong there...

Approach 2:
According to the hardware compatibility list for 10.6.0 (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.6.0) this motherboard should work using retail disc with the chocolate kernel. It says it used the Cxxx usb disc image for this motherboard (http://www.kexts.com/view/177-m2n-e_sli_cxxx_edition.html). I downloaded the image, restored it onto a usb drive, but cannot get it to boot. Do you guys know which partition scheme I should be using for the usb drive (GUID, MBR?), and the partition format (MS-DOS, Mac OS journaled?).

Lastly, my configuration:
Asus M2n-e SLI
Evga 8800 GTS 320mb
AMD X2 4800

Thanks for your help guys!

Joe

[joe611]

Update:
I have now managed to boot into the os using Chameleon on usb with AppleNForceATA.kext added. My graphics card, on board lan and audio don't seem to work. The graphics card is a Nvidia 8800 GTS 320 mb (Evga).

I have tried Graphics Enabler in the boot plist file and EFI strings but neither of them worked. System profiler does show the vendor being NVIDIA, but VRAM is only 32MB and I'm limited to 800 x 600 resolution.

Any help with the graphics, lan or audio would be appreciated, thanks! :)

[joe611]

Some help please?

[idiom]

That motherboard requires the nForceLan.kext

This is a 32bit kext that works with both leopard and snow leopard when installed to the System/Library/Extensions folder.

[lemonsoda]

hi mate

try extracting your dsdt and try using some mods in this dsdt and recompile to dsdt.aml in root / or /extra

http://osx86.co/f84/dsdt-for-a8n-sli-premium-sleep-working-t6299/

you can pull your dsdt using dsdte (best) or from a bios file using dsdt patcher for windows if you need to mess around with it pre boot.

to find graphics card location, install dsdte and open registry (ioregistryexplorer) the gfx0 section needs ot be placed underneath the current graphics card location in your dsdt

remove the nvcap if it doesn't match yours and clear package value at top of gfx section to leave empty brackets () before compiling value will be generated on compile to .aml

use graphicsenabler still to calculate the correct nvcap and you can insert it into dsdt afterwards

if you need hdmi, you can try the mac 8800 rom with bootflags VBIOS=Yes UseNvidiaROM=Yes 10de_04xx.rom in /Extra xx = your nv pid

let us know how you get on. your bios settings are also important. try to disable all that you dont need