Mac OS X on x86 Hardware 2008–2024 Technical Archive
InfiniteMac OSx86 › Leopard 10.5 › Problems with Darwin
4,702 reads · 2009-01-08 – 2009-01-09
Dossier Leopard 10.5 NVIDIA GeForce AHCI / SATA

Problems with Darwin

I've been able to go as far as actually starting the installation. When the installation reached about 8% everything froze... It refused to go any further. When I tried to restart and try installing it from the DVD again, it wouldn't go…

Primary Author
@Skydog Published 2009-01-08
Collection
Leopard 10.5
Archival Footprint
4,702 historical reads · 2 curated field notes (from 7 dispatches) · 2009-01-08 – 2009-01-09
Credited Voices (3)
@Skydog (4)@lanceomni (2)@Voyn1x

I've been able to go as far as actually starting the installation. When the installation reached about 8% everything froze... It refused to go any further. When I tried to restart and try installing it from the DVD again, it wouldn't go past the beautiful apple loading screen... Any ideas?
My bet is it stores the boot info for the dvd on the drive, so let's say I should format the destination drive again and start all over again - but what if it fails again?

My system:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2,4Ghz
Asus P5N32-E SLI with nForce 680i chipset
2GB DDR2 RAM (667Mhz)
Club 3D GeForce 7600GT 256MB
4 Hard Disks:
- 500GB Maxtor (sata) (contains Vista)
- 160GB Seagate (sata) (contains XP)
- 40GB Seagate (sata) (contains Ubuntu)
- 35GB Samsung (ATA) <<---- This one was supposed to contain Mac OS X.

It might seem weird to you that I chose the smallest one, but I'm all about... testing it out before actually ruining my budget on a real Mac.

All help is appriciated. Oh one more thing - I had to unplug all the drives cept the samsung one cause Darwin was going HAYWIRE when they were plugged in. Overall, this darwin thing is... damn weird. I know it does it's job in most cases, but it's been acting strangely on my machine since the first boot-from-dvd.

Author Updates & Technical Revisions

Follow-up dispatches by @Skydog

Author Update #1 @Skydog 2009-01-09

The drive is... a Samsung SpinPoint from 2001. .
It has a nice history too... it served like... 3 computers already.
Damn these things go forward so fast. Back then I'd never would've imagined that we'd be riding 1TB machines in... 8 years?
-v was the "boot up with diagnostic messages" mode, right?
I don't think getting the DVD to work again is a problem here, since I've noticed that all ya have to do is to 'erase' the data it stored on the plugged in drive. Then it behaves like it's running for the first time again on that machine - therefore it works.
The problem here is, why the installation froze at ~8%.
Could the single fact that the drive is ATA be the cause?

Author Update #2 @Skydog 2009-01-09

Believe me, you can't burn it any slower. With my DVD's it won't go below 4x, so I recored at 4x using DVD Decrypter. Any suggestions as to what software I should use? And should we fail to do anything about the problem... should I consider other versions of iATKOS, or other 'distributions' of Leopard?

Author Update #3 @Skydog 2009-01-09

I tried three times with 2 different DVD's. Always stops at 8%. It's possible that the download was broken... my friend supplied me with a distro of Kalyway he used himself so I'll try that now.

EDIT: Writin this edit from Leo. So... yep. All problems solved. Kalyway made it easier than installing Ubuntu.
Requesting closure/deletion of this thread.

Synthesized Community Field Notes

2 technical responses curated from 7 original dispatches

Field Note #1 @lanceomni 2009-01-09

Boot with -v and let us know where it hangs. I assume now when you boot you see a blank screen with apple logo.

That is an old pata drive you got there. Almost old enough to be in a museum. JK

Field Note #2 @Voyn1x 2009-01-09

ATA drives in most cases are easier to get up and running on OS X than SATA.

It could be caused by a bad burn so it might be worth reburning the image at a slower speed and see if that helps?

Corroborated & Participated: @lanceomni
Sources & Contributor Provenance (3 credited usernames · Thread #1891)
UsernameDossier ContributionDispatchesActive Window
@SkydogPrimary Author42009-01-08 → 2009-01-09
@lanceomniContributor22009-01-09
@Voyn1xContributor12009-01-09