First off, thank you immensely for making this guide. I had tried previous installs in the past without much success at all. I just upgraded my PC, and this guide worked great, once I finally stopped messing things up and screwing myself over. I figured I'd post this because everyone likes to be appreciated.
Also, I know a lot of people look for successes from other people with the same hardware. I did not upgrade my computer specifically for OS X, but since I had a had a new board and chip, I thought I would try.
For those who are curious/have similar hardware and want to know:
- Core i7 920
- eVGA x58 LE (141-BL-E575)
- 6GB (3x2GB) Crucial Ballistix DDR-1600
- GeForce GTX 275 1GB
- WD Raptor 75GB
- WD 500GB
- Seagate 500GB
- SoundBlaster X-Fi
I used iATKOS v7 to install Leopard to the WD 500GB drive I had lying around, with one partition for the Snow Leopard image. After booting Leopard, I installed according to the guide, and everything worked out perfectly for the most part. Full graphics acceleration with just the EFI string, CPU/RAM properly recognized. Initially I tried using my USB drive, but iATKOS was very unhappy about that. Once Snow Leopard was up, I removed the WD 500GB from my system.
Various settings that might be applicable to others:
- Memory profile for my RAM is set to XMP Profile 1.
- HyperThreading is turned OFF.
- CPU is not overclocked in any way.
- Hard disks are set to AHCI (duh!), with no special RAID or anything.
- On-board audio is turned OFF. I have an X-Fi, which obviously doesn't work in OSX. I just decided to not worry about the audio. Might see about getting on-board audio working later, but I don't want to screw with my cables every time I switch OSes.
- ACPI HPET set to 64-bit mode and enabled.
- I did not use someone else's DSDT, and instead went through the process to create my own.
Caveats:
- For network support,
use this kext. Works great.
- iATKOS v7 requires "cpus=1 busratio=20" to boot on this MB/chip combo.
- iATKOS v7 seems to not like the Seagate drive. When it's plugged in, I would get the dreaded "Still waiting for root device...", so I disconnected my target Snow Leopard drive until after Leopard was installed and then reconnected it and it worked fine. However, I noticed that iATKOS did not always do this; I had to boot from it to fix my com.apple.Boot.plist, and about 10% of the time it would actually work. Kalyway would boot fine, but wouldn't install.
- Chameleon 2 RC3 would not install properly using the GUI installer. Even after making sure the right partition was marked active using fdisk, it simply wasn't seeing a boot sector. I ended up doing a "manual" install of Chameleon 2 RC4, which worked. Just make sure you write to the right places when you install it (yes, I screwed it up and had to start over once).
- Occasionally I would get hangs during the various install processes because it was waiting on a response from a USB device. For the most part, I just unplugged any USB devices I didn't need for the install to get around it. I plugged them all back in once Snow Leopard was up and running, and after 10+ reboots, it hasn't happened at all.
Again, thanks for making this guide, it was a huge help.