[GUIDE] Installing Snow Leopard/Leopard retail DVD on the GA-E7AUM-DS2H Options

[dlach]

There are now two parts to this guide, Snow Leopard and Leopard

Updated 07/31/2010

The latest news is that Olegischinski has developed a foolproof install method go to THIS post.

Old news:

There have been a lot of changes, before proceeding, you should go to the following post and read the part about installation. There are alternatives to this guide that may work better for you.
post.

go HERE



Updated 03/09/20120, recent updates:
- added info about baby steps and USB keyboard/mouse
- added USB keyboard bios setting
- added note on updating to 10.6.2
- Adidasprince's chameleon patch.
-I've put up the Snow Leopard guide below.

NOTICES:

Important
Please realize that if you are installing OSX on this board (or any non-Apple HW) you are doing something it was not intended to do.
So take baby steps. Don't use more than one monitor, preferably DVI. Use a USB keyboard and mouse (when was the last time you saw a Mac with a PS/2 port?). If installing Snow Leopard use SATA optical and hard disks. Most importantly, follow the guide EXACTLY and do not deviate, even a little the first time through. Afterward, you can experiment but experience has shown time and time again that it will save you and the people on this thread who try to help a lot of frustration if you stick to the guide.

Finally, this is common etiquette on this board but people seem to not know it. Please read the whole thread and use search tools before asking for help. It isn't really that long and you will find a lot of answers. People tend to get annoyed if you post a question without even trying to look for the answer, and you just might be ignore or even berated.

Adidasprince has posted a patched chameleon that fixes the 2GB limitation.
see this.

Please do NOT post here saying that you don't have the 2GB memory restriction problem without having run the memory test HERE at post #61. I am tired of responding to people who haven't bothered to read this thread or the big thread and have subsequently been proven wrong.

Old News:
Gigabyte has sent us a new BIOS to fix the > 2GB limit!!!
see post #66. EDIT: Unfortunately it doesn't appear to fix the problem.



Part 1: Installing Leopard using a retail 10.5.6 DVD on the GA-E7AUM-DS2H

Last Updated: 09/07/09

This guide was greatly facilitated by the hard work of folks like Signal64 and Koalala over on the
GA-E7AUM-DS2H thread over in Reader News & Review HERE. EDIT: that thread has been closed by the moderators. Please feel free to discuss issues with this board here, but also please refrain from posting info about Macbook Pro restore disks and osx86 "distros". This thread is about getting the board working using a retail install.

The vanilla install is quite simple Only a few kexts are required. A few more are optional to address issues.

WARNING - follow this guide at your own risk. I take no responsibility if you bork your board. That said, I have done the install several times while working it out so it is pretty low risk.

KNOWN ISSUES WITHOUT RESOLUTION
1) As of now, this mobo only works with 2GB of ram or less EDIT: when using the on-board video, otherwise there is no such limitation. There is some work going on in the aforementioned thread to try and fix it. Now is appears that nobody is working on it. I've opened a ticket the Gigabyte, they asked me to check the DRAM voltage which I did, I upped it to 2.0 according to Corsair spec and it had no effect, and of course I didn't expect it would. I've reported back to Gigabyte and pointed them to the memory test that shows the problem. Who knows, maybe they'll fix it.
2)After resuming from sleep audio does not work. EDIT: I tried THIS usb audio adapter and it works great and has no issues recovering from sleep.

Everything else works though some kexts are required for audio, restart, and working ethernet LAN after restart.

Steps

1) Acquire the necessary files listed at the end of this post, and prepare a boot CD with the image also listed at the end of this post (NEWISO.iso).

2) Flash your BIOS with Koalala's updated bios. You must do this. Flashing the bios on this mobo is low risk due to its dual bios feature. Just unzip e7aumd2hf3x.zip and copy to a FAT formatted USB stick. Reboot and go into Qflash at the first screen.

2a) After updating the BIOS, reboot and go into the BIOS. Pick "load optimized defaults" and type "Y". Now go to the "Integrated Peripherals" menu. Set both "Onboard IDE controller" and "NV SATA controller" to enabled. If you have an all SATA set-up Set "On-chip SATA mode" to AHCI, otherwise leave it on IDE. Set "USB keyboard support" to enabled. Hit F10 to save and exit.

3) Boot from the NEWISO boot CD. Hit return twice at the prompt. Remove the boot CD and put in the Retail 10.5.6 DVD. When it prompts for device ID take the default (9f).

4) Once the retail disk boots, pick your language and then before proceeding, open the disk utility from the utilities menu bar. If you don't see your disk listed on the left hand side, you didn't get your disk cabling/jumpers done properly.

5) Select your disk from the left hand pane and pick partition from the right hand pane. Create your partitioning scheme however you like but be sure to click on the option button and make sure it is GUID partition otherwise you can't install a retail DVD. If you don't know how to do this look HERE for a reasonable guide. Also make sure to take the default format (Mac OSX Extended journaled). If you find yourself reinstalling, erase the partition you are installing to before proceeding.

6) Exit the disk manager and continue with the installation. When the installation is done, put your boot CD back in as it reboots. When you get to the prompt for device id pick 80 if you have only one drive, otherwise you may have to fiddle with the number 81, 82 to get to your drive.

7) After OSX has booted and you've done all the account creation stuff, get the following onto your desktop either via ethernet or a USB stick (get them at the bottom of this post). UInstaller.zip (OSX Univeral installer), dsmos.kext, SMBIOSenabler.kext, AppleHDA.kext.

8) Open UInstaller.zip by double-clicking an navigating into the folder (it is a good idea to read the user guide at this point). Start UInstaller by double clicking on it.

9) Choose the Hard drive to install on at the top (your OSX partitiion). Select the "Install PC_EFI V9 Chameleon" check box. Select the "Install Custom Kexts from HD" checkbox and browse to the location (desktop) of the dsmos.kext, SMBIOSenabler.kext and AppleHDA.kext and select them all. They will appear in the box next to the browse button.

10) Do NOT select any other check box. In particular make sure that the "Apply kext package" check box under "Select motherboard package to install" is NOT checked.

11) Click on the "Install" button at the bottom left corner. When it is done, exit the Universall Installer.

12) Open the disk utility, in the finder under Applications->Uitlities. Select your OSX volume in the left pane and click on "Repair Disk Permissions". Wait for it to complete, it will take a few minutes.

13) Remove the boot CD and Shutdown (not restart).

14) After rebooting you can install the nForceLan package to get ethernet LAN enabled upon resume from sleep (it is reported that resume from sleep is not a problem with wifi cards). You can also install the OpenHaltRestart.kext to get restart working. And finally if you have a SATA HD you can install OrangeHDIconFix to fix the orange icon. You can find links to these below. I have not yet personally verified these but Blueknight over in the aforementioned thread has.

EDIT: re nForceLan I finally tried the nForceLan.kext to make my ethernet work on resume from sleep. It works fine, except the nForceLAN produced a kernel panic after restarting at the end of the package install. Booting in safe mode and removing
/System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/nvenet.kext
solved the problem see here . If you install this kext, I recommend you do this before you restart ;^).

EDIT: re mkv Video playback - Some people have reported a problem with the onboard video providing lousy playback through plex of hi def mkv's. yhX over on the big thread reported you could fix this by removing AppleUpstreamUserClient.kext.

That's it! Start up and enjoy.

EDIT: Upgrading to 10.5.7. I successfully updated using the combo update. After the update is through do not press restart but rather use the UInstaller (or your favorite kext tool e.g. KextHelper or OSX86Tools) to reapply DSMOS.kext and the AppleHDA.kext from step 9. Then restart and you should be good to go. I, of course was optimistic when I first updated and pressed restart. If this happens to you simply use the boot cd to boot from the hard disk and apply the kexts. Some people are hoping this fixes the 2GB ram limitation and I confess to having been too lazy to try it. I also doubt the 10.5.7 update will fix the problem. Eventually I'll try it and let you know. EDIT: I tried it, the 10.5.7 update does not fix the 2GB memory limitation.

EDIT: Upgrading to 10.5.8. I successfully updated using the combo update. Before starting the combo update, install AppleDecrypt.kext (don't forget to repair disk permissions) from the link below. This works better than DSMOS.kext and after running the combo update you just reboot. No need to install DSMOS.kext again and no hang on restart or booting from the bootCD. As with all the combo update you will probably get the "you must shutdown and restart" gray screen. I did not have to re-appy the AppleHDA.kext after the update(but audio is still off after resume from sleep). If you use the nForceLan kext, OpenHaltRestart.kex, or OrangeHDicon.kext you may need to re-apply. Some people are undoubtedly hoping this fixes the 2GB ram limitation and I confess to having been too lazy to try it. I also doubt the 10.5.8 update will fix the problem. Eventually I'll try it and let you know.

Necessary Files

- UIinstaller (I used V1.2) look HERE (thanks PCWiz!)
- Koalala's BIOS -e7aumd2hf3x.zip from Koalala's post 403 in this forum HERE (thanks Koalala!)
- NEWISO.ISO, DSMOS.kext and SMBIOSenabler - get the NEWISO.zip HERE (thanks Wingrunr21!). After you install OSX open the iso by double clicking, double click on initrd.img navigate into Extra->Extensions and pull out dsmos.kext and SMBIOSenabler.kext onto your desktop.
- AppleHDA.kext - pull it out of ALC889A_1056_fix.zip from HERE. (thanks tmongkol!). You don't need the other kext thanks to Koalala work getting dsdt into the BIOS (also don't need NVkush or any other graphics injector).
- AppleDecrypt.kext -from wingrunr21's dell laptop guide HERE. You can use this instead of DSMOS.kext and save yourself some trouble.

Optional Files
- nForceLAN.pkg - get it HERE be sure to install using the pkg.zip.
- OpenHaltRestart - get it HERE
- OrangeHDIconFix - (only if you have STATA hard drives) get it HERE (thanks PCWiz!)


Any help with the sleep issues and 2GB limit welcome.


Part 2: Installing Snow Leopard using a retail 10.6 DVD on the GA-E7AUM-DS2H

Last Updated: 11/17/09

Snow Leopard regresses a bit from Leopard on this board. You need a Sleepenabler.kext and the 64bit nForceLan updated for SL currently doesn't fix the resume from sleep issue for LAN, so don't update to SL if you need a 100% working rig. I'd like to thank Jon55 for posting his work patching Roisoft's DSDT to Gigabyte's F3a BIOS and SL kexts. I'ld also like thank Blueknight, Genzai, and Olegischinski for their help testing and fixing the new Gigabyte BIOS which is still a work in progress.

Edit: I've added steps for copying Jon55's kexts into /Extra/Extensions. and setting the UUID so that restart will work. I culled the content from the nice doc that rbonon pulled together in post #165 HERE. Read that doc if you want to use an MBR partitioning and dual or tri-boot. Thanks rbonon!



WARNING - follow this guide at your own risk. I take no responsibility if you bork your board. That said, I have done the install several times while working it out so it is pretty low risk.

KNOWN ISSUES
1) You can ONLY install SL with 2GB of ram or less. Once installed you can use adidasprince's patched chamleon to get more ram working. Also if you have a graphics card, you should be able to get more ram working without the Chameleon patch AFTER you install.
2) Audio with Jon55's legacy HDA and it works but does not work after resume from suspend.
3) LAN is not working after resume from sleep. nForceLan doesn't fix the problem. Eno, who authored it has not looked into SL resume issues.

STEPS
1) Acquire the necessary files listed at the end of this post, and prepare a boot CD with the image also listed at the end of this post (unzip and use BootCD.iso).

2) Flash your BIOS with Jon55's patch of Roisoft's DSDT into Gigabyte's F3a BIOS. You must do this. Flashing the bios on this mobo is low risk due to its dual bios feature. Just unzip it and copy to a FAT formatted USB stick. Reboot and hit 'End' to go into Qflash when the BIOS comes up. Just so you know, I haven't personally tried this BIOS and it works. I have been working on a different one based on changes from Gigabyte. Anything patched for SL that is based on Koalala's should also work just fine. Jon55 says his isn't based on Koalala's but works fine for both Leopard and SL, however I had an IDE Leopard install and had some problem with Jon's BIOS on Leopard.

2a) After updating the BIOS, reboot and hit 'delete' to go into the BIOS. Pick "load optimized defaults" and type "Y". Now go to the "Integrated Peripherals" menu. Set both "Onboard IDE controller" and "NV SATA controller" to enabled. At this time, this guide (and all other SL guides I've seen) require that you have an all SATA (DVD and hard disk) set-up so set "On-chip SATA mode" to AHCI. If using a USB keyboard, be sure to enable it. Hit f10 to save and exit.

3) Make sure you don't have more than 2GB of ram installed. Boot from the BootCD.iso CD you burned. When the chameleon appears and BootCD is the icon in the middle of the screen, remove the boot CD and put in the Retail SL DVD. Wait a couple of seconds and hit f10. The icon in the middle will be replaced with the SL Retail cd. Hit enter and the install will start.

4) Once the retail disk boots, pick your language and then before proceeding, open the disk utility from the utilities menu bar. If you don't see your disk listed on the left hand side, you didn't get your disk cabling/jumpers done properly.

5) Select your disk from the left hand pane and pick partition from the right hand pane. Create your partitioning scheme however you like but be sure to click on the option button and make sure it is GUID partition otherwise you can't install a retail DVD. If you don't know how to do this look HERE for a reasonable guide. Also make sure to take the default format (Mac OSX Extended journaled). If you find yourself reinstalling, erase the partition you are installing to before proceeding.

6) Exit the disk manager and continue with the installation. When the installation is done, it will almost certainly put up an error screen saying it can't start Mac OSX on this disk. DON"T WORRY, just ignore it. Press the Restart button, and you'll have to do a hard shutdown of the computer. Start it back up and as it boots put your boot CD back in and press F12 to get the boot device options screen. If you miss this step it will hang verifying the DMI pool. I struggled for a long time before I figured out that you have to pick YOUR dvd device from the boot menu (mine was at the bottom) using any of the rest of the options causes it to hang on verifying the DMI pool. When you see the chameleon, pick the disk you installed on by using the tab key and hit enter.

7) After OSX has booted and you've done all the account creation stuff, get the following onto your desktop either via ethernet or a USB stick (get them at the bottom of this post). The Chameleon V2 RC3 installer package, sleepenabler.kext and optionally nForceLan.kext and the kexts from Jon55's post too.

8) Open the chameleon installer by double-clicking and run through the install. After it finishes, go to your finder and click on the disk you installed on. You'll see an Extra folder. Open another finder window and the double click on the BootCD.iso icon on your desktop to mount it. When the finder window opens on BootCD, click on the Extra folder to open it then click on Preboot.dmg to mount it. When the finder window for the Preboot.dmg opens drags the Extra folder inside the Preboot.dmg onto your desktop.

9) Now copy all of the contents of the Extra folder you just dragged onto your desktop, into the Extra folder that you opened when you clicked on the disk you installed SL on. Also drag the Sleepenabler.kext into the Extensions folder in that folder.

10) Open the disk utility, in the finder under Applications->Uitlities. Select your OSX volume in the left pane and click on "Repair Disk Permissions". Wait for it to complete, it will take a few minutes.

11) Remove the boot CD and Shutdown (not restart).

12) After rebooting get the following kext from Jon55's "Kext 64bits.zip" file: LegacyHDAPlatformDriver.kext, OpenHaltRestart.kext, PlatformUUID.kext, Sleepenabler.kext and Extra/Extensions folder on the disk you installed on.

13) Open Disk Utility, select your "Mac" partition, right-click to get "Information", and copy the Universal Unique Identifier number

14) Edit the /Extra/com.apple.boot.plist file as follows:

CODE

<key>Kernel</key>
        <string>mach_kernel</string>
        <key>Kernel Flags</key>
        <string>rd=uuid boot-uuid=YOUR UUID NUMBER HERE</string>

15) Edit the /Extra/Extensions/PlatformUUID.kext/Contents /Info.plist file as follows:

CODE

<key>PlatformUUID</key>
        <string>YOUR UUID NUMBER HERE</string>

16) Repair permissions on the directories BEFORE you regeneratte the extensions cache. In a terminal window:

CODE

sudo chown -vR root:wheel /Extra/
      sudo chmod -vR 755 /Extra/Extensions

17) Rebuild your Extensions.mkext file running the following commands in a terminal window (thanks to rbonon/zhell):

CODE

sudo rm /Extra/Extensions.mkext
     sudo kextcache -v 1 -t -l -m /Extra/Extensions.mkext \
        /Extra/Extensions /System/Library/Extensions

18) For good measure, repair the disk permissions using the disk utility

19)After rebooting you can experiment with the nForecLan.kext to try to get LAN working on resume from sleep. EDIT: nForceLan had no effect for me and I screwed around trying to delete nvent.kext and go into trouble, be careful I recommend using OSXTOOLS to backup your extensions. If you get into trouble you can boot the BootCD (you may need to use f12 again). You can also experiment with removing some of the kexts from the BootCD.

20) Audio. After install the default output is set to headphones. Be sure go switch to line out if you want to use speakers, etc.

EDIT: Upgrading to 10.6.1. I successfully updated using the System Preferences->Software Update app. Since the kexts are in /Extra/Extensions, update shouldn't touch them. My update was that simple.

EDIT: Upgrading to 10.6.2. By following the instructions from netkas HERE, I successfully updated using the System Preferences->Software Update app. Essentially you need to make sure there is a NullCPUPowerManagement.kext in /Extra/Extensions and you must delete SleepEnabler.kext or replace it with the patched one from Netkas, if you don't do this you will get a kernel panic. My update was that simple.


That's it! Enjoy. I welcome any constructive suggestions for improvements and also as always any help getting things working better.


Necessary Files

- Chameleon V2RC3 installer HERE
- Jon55's patch of Rosisoft's DSDT work into the Gigabyte f3a BIOS and kexts - in post #89 of this thread HERE
- BootCD.iso.zip attached. I didn't create this, got it from one of the other Gigabyte motherboard threads.

Optional Files
- nForceLAN.kext.zip - attached. This is the 64 bit version. I have NOT tested this and it does not currently work.
- adidasprince's Chameleon patch for using more that 2GB of ram (look toward the end of the thread). Thanks adidasprince!!

Attached File(s)

 BootCD.iso.zip ( 835.66K ) Number of downloads: 403
 nForceLAN_SnowLeopard.kext.zip ( 63.16K ) Number of downloads: 187

 

[adidasprince]

Hi all,

I have a GOOD NEWS...

Yes, yes, yes!

I got my >2G problem solved,

really.

at least at my e7aum@10.5.8.




My solution is "patch Chameleon",  to tell osx with the memory map we want.

I uploaded

1. patch file for Chameleon 2.0 RC3 r658
2. my patched Chameleon package for GMEM:256M,MEM:2Gx2(which i got)
3. Chameleon's memory info before/after patching
4. "About this mac" and "Active Monitor" after patching
5. memtest which checks mem up to 4G

Future works:

1. change hard-coding to configurable
2. still missing some usable memory for unknown reason

AND finally greate thanks to dlach, for his(i'm sorry, if i'm wrong:-) awesome contributions in this topic.

Attached File(s)

 256m_meminfo.patch.txt ( 3.35K ) Number of downloads: 58
 Chameleon_2.0_RC3_r658_256m_patch.pkg.zip ( 622.91K ) Number of downloads: 80
 256m_chameleon_meminfo_be4.JPG ( 119.57K ) Number of downloads: 39
 256m_chameleon_meminfo_aft.JPG ( 100.5K ) Number of downloads: 38
 about_this_mac.png ( 160.29K ) Number of downloads: 62
 mrosxn00b_memtest_max4g.zip ( 2.5K ) Number of downloads: 37

 

[dlach]

Hi all,

I have a GOOD NEWS...

Yes, yes, yes!

I got my >2G problem solved,

really.

at least at my e7aum@10.5.8.




My solution is "patch Chameleon", to tell osx with the memory map we want.

I uploaded

1. patch file for Chameleon 2.0 RC3 r658
2. my patched Chameleon package for GMEM:256M,MEM:2Gx2(which i got)
3. Chameleon's memory info before/after patching
4. "About this mac" and "Active Monitor" after patching
5. memtest which checks mem up to 4G

Future works:

1. change hard-coding to configurable
2. still missing some usable memory for unknown reason

AND finally greate thanks to dlach, for his(i'm sorry, if i'm wrong:-) awesome contributions in this topic.

NICE WORK!

How did you get this to work? Are you patching SSDT with Chameleon?

PS.

his(i'm sorry, if i'm wrong:-)

You are most definitely right.

[adidasprince]

Sorry for the less of information in last post (i was starved :-)

How did you get this to work? Are you patching SSDT with Chameleon?

No, i patched Chameleon itself, the part of reading memory map from BIOS.  From patch file i uploaded, you can see some memory address is hard-coded in the source code that belongs to Chameleon.

Every OS read memory map from BIOS.  I digged into DSDT&SSDT@ACPI and i don't think it's easy (or safe, or even possible) to reset memory map after kernel is loaded which is required by dsdt patcher execution (Correct me if i'm wrong).  So the hardcoding idea came to me: Maybe >2G problem is just the overlapping in GIGABYTE's memory map (the overlapping can be confirmed from Chameleon's memory info, and this also explains why everything is ok if GMEM is mapped to 0xB0000000).  BTW, my thinkpad's memory map is clean which is sorted and without overlapping (NO OFFENCE to GIGABYE, i'm a chinese and i love taiwan).


Here is what i did:

1. Find the part of reading memory by calling INT E820h
2. So i got my target: biosfn.c
3. Add a function in biosfn.c to do that
4. 1) Split overlapped memory map (0x00100000:0xafdf0000)
5. 2) Sort memory map
6. Then, re-compile-package-install patched Chameleon

Everyone who has XCode can reproduce my procedure pretty easy on 10.5.x or 10.6.x, i think.  And, it's possible to migrate my code for GMEM:512M or MEM:>4G.