Install Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on AMD Phenom II 920
This is my first attempt at a guide on installing Snow Leopard on AMD Phenom II processors. This is how it worked for me on my PC and I am not sure if it will work on your PC or not. I am not responsible for any damages (highly unlikely)…
- Primary Author
- @ushpiy Published 2010-05-13
- Collection
- Snow Leopard 10.6
- Archival Footprint
- 62,613 historical reads · 7 curated field notes (from 10 dispatches) · 2010-05-13 – 2011-11-25
- Credited Voices (7)
- @ushpiy (3)@Erigz (2)@wot@malki@schnubbi-gilles@akimoa@Tahay
This is my first attempt at a guide on installing Snow Leopard on AMD Phenom II processors. This is how it worked for me on my PC and I am not sure if it will work on your PC or not. I am not responsible for any damages (highly unlikely) which you may have.
Here are my PC specifications:
AMD Phenom II x4 920
ATI HD 3300
Seagate 500 GB Hard drive
Biostar TA790GX 128M
Kingston 4 GB (2*2) RAM
Windows 7 x64 already installed
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please enable "AHCI" support in your BIOS, otherwise Snow Leopard will not boot (If you have installed Windows 7, without AHCI support, then you may have to reinstall it).
Step 1: Download "Snow Leopard Client-Server 10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD". Just search for it on Google and you will find it.
Step 2: Burn it to a DVD at the lowest speed possible like I did it using Nero at 4x.
Step 3: Pop in the drive in your PC and do a reboot. An alien like background will come up, just press any key and it will soon load up.
Step 4: Select your language and do the other things like accepting the agreements.
Step 5: Click on "Utilities" on the top menu and select "Disk Utility". Select the partition on which you want to install Snow Leopard and then format it using "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Give it a easy name such as "Snow".
Step 6: After doing this select the drive, and now you come to the "Customize". Here select the following which I have written below:
Legacy Kernel 10.2.0
AMD Patch
Choose your graphics card (I didn't choose any as mine wasn't there)
AppleAzaliaAudio (I chose this, you should try Voodoo HDA v2.5.3)
ATIATA
ElliottForceLegacyRTC
Legacy AHCI SATA Fix
LegacyAppleIntelPIIXATA
IOATA Family SATA Fix
About This Mac Fix
Evoreboot
IOATAFamily Fix
Orange Icon Fix
SMBIOS Resolver
Rosetta
Step 7: Click on "Install" and skip the disk verification. It should install successfully. Reboot.
Note: Below are the solutions for the errors which I experienced post reboot. You may or may not experience them.
Error 1: I got a screen saying this:
Boot0: Testing Boot0: Testing Boot0: Testing Boot0: Error
To resolve this, enter your disc, press F8 and browse through the drives till you find Snow, click enter and you should hopefully boot into Snow Leopard. But since you can not use Snow Leopard without inserting your DVD, just follow the below steps to resolve this error:
Step 1: Boot into Windows using the Snow Leopard installation DVD and download EasyBcd.
Step 2: Goto the option "Add/Remove Entries" and goto the Mac option and add a new entry for Snow Leopard. Choose the x86 PC option and name the entry as Snow Leopard. Save all this by clicking on Save.
Step 3: Insert your Windows 7 Install disk so you can repair the PC and the bootloader. If you can't reboot into Windows still, then insert the disk and this time instead of using Startup Repair use the last option ie. the Command Prompt option. Here type in the following commands:
bootrec/fixmbr bootrec/fixboot
You should now be able to boot into Windows but on clicking the option to boot into Snow Leopard you get a Chain Booting Error, now download the attachment:
Goto your Windows 7 drive (assuming its C) then boot into Windows, then goto C drive and then the "NST" file, make a backup of your original "nst_mac.mbr". Now unzip the file and rename tboot as "nst_mac.mbr" and paste it in "C:/NST", that is replace the original file.
Reboot and you should get the Chameleon bootloader and click on the Snow drive icon, finally you can boot into Snow Leopard without the DVD.
Optimizing Snow Leopard
As you might've noticed I didn't select any graphics card, to get a somewhat higher resolution, I followed this guide:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/… ↗
To automate all this, follow this:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/… ↗
To get read/write support on your NTFS drives then follow this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2009091314… ↗
To patch the CPUIDS (get iTunes, Spotlight, etc working), follow this:
leoh azard.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=760&p=7781
Update to 10.6.3 using this:
leoh azard.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1243
Finally, the solution for Chain Booting Error came through this:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14… ↗
Thank you for reading and I hope it will help you to have a successful hack. It would not have been possible to install Snow Leopard without the support of the community, so thank you all!
Author Updates & Technical Revisions
Follow-up dispatches by @ushpiy
My BIOS settings are default and the only thing which is changed is the "AHCI" thing.
Synthesized Community Field Notes
7 technical responses curated from 10 original dispatches
Could you do screenshots of your BIOS settings and post them here ?
That's bad, since I thought that my inability to boot the installer comes from wrong BIOS settings
Anyway, I would change a little bit in your tutorial - if you don't want to mess with all the bootloader and BCD stuff do it like this:
Before installing OS X, use Windows to create an empty partition. Then run "diskpart" from command line and enter "SELECT DISK 0" (or whichever you are gonna have both Windows and OS X on) , then "SELECT PARTITION X" (X - number of created partition, where you want to install OS X), and then "ACTIVE"
Then install (Snow) Leopard from DVD, as normal. This will make Chameleon install on OS X's partition instead of erasing Windows' partition bootloader. After that you will be able to boot both Windows and OS X with Chameleon, without any further changes.
Sorry to bump an old thread, but how do you set it to AHCI mode with that biostar mobo? I have a mobo very similar to that, and when I changed it from IDE to AHCI, nothing will boot up, and I can not reinstall windows without changing it to IDE. Any help is appreciated, Thanks!
@ thread starter
i'm having problems booting the DVD I have almost your exact same setup:
AMD Phenom ii X4 925
Biostar TA790-GX motherboard
Nvidia 9800 GFX card
4 GB ram
the dvd boots past the alien screen but gets to a place where it stops on my USB ports.
Here's the message:
USBF: 6.748 AppleUSBOHCI [0x66d9800]:CheckSleepCompatibility - Controller will be unloaded accross sleepany ideas? unplugged all devices, used a different mouse, tried switching settings in the bios for usb... no luck... idk
AHCI Windows 7
When you have installed your Windows 7 or Vista in IDE Mode and you change the value in BIOS to AHCI you´ll get a blue screen. To solve this follow this Link:
support.micro soft.com/kb/922976/en-us
After the installaition of this Update you can change your bios settings to AHCI without any Issues
Delete AppleUSBEHCI.kext inside the IOUSBFamily.kext in the Plugins Folder and try again ...dont forget to fix the permissions after
How can i make my Amd phenom x4 930 run Mac primarily?
I have a hp dv6-3055dx.
Specs are as fallow
Amd phenom x4 930
6gb memory
640gb sata hard drive
Ati shared 4200 graphics
I tried using the iaktos OSx86 v7 that supposed to have amd support. However I keep getting a processor error. Would the above process work for the n930 processor as well? And would i need windows installed on my machine because I went to restore using my recovery DVDs and disc 3 won't read on there is not windows on my machine.
Sources & Contributor Provenance (7 credited usernames · Thread #6131)
| Username | Dossier Contribution | Dispatches | Active Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| @ushpiy | Primary Author | 3 | 2010-05-13 → 2010-05-23 |
| @Erigz | Contributor | 2 | 2010-05-17 → 2010-05-23 |
| @wot | Contributor | 1 | 2010-10-12 |
| @malki | Contributor | 1 | 2010-12-28 |
| @schnubbi-gilles | Contributor | 1 | 2011-11-09 |
| @akimoa | Contributor | 1 | 2011-11-09 |
| @Tahay | Contributor | 1 | 2011-11-25 |