Anyone use an Nforce 750a board?

[bonfilio]

First post, I've done a ton of reading and searching, but I haven't found much pertaining to my hardware.

 

I have a Zotac 750a SLI board with an AMD x2 with 2gb (really 8gb, but took out 3 sticks for simplicity sake). AHCI/SATA all works fine.. can see disks, etc.

 

The only 2 distros that work and do not give the 'waiting for boot volume' error are Kalyway 5.2 and the new iATKOS 10.5.7 (ipc, lawless, ideneb - none of them work). I can successfully install either iATKOS or Kalyway, but I can't get a successful first boot. I've gone through too many iterations (and going from memory) to remember what triggered what, but the result was always a KP or grey beach ball cursor screen.

 

If anyone has a 750a board and has been successful with osx86, can you let me know what install/kext options you used? I'm not worrying about audio/video/net yet, just barebones chipset/booting info.

 

 

 

UNRELATED: I have retail Leopard (and a Macbook Pro). Would I have better look attempting to use Boot132 with this board? Disclaimer: I haven't done much reading on Boot132 yet so I'm not sure if this is even a valid question yet.

[bonfilio]

Seems this is how it always works for me.. research something for a month and have no success. Finally ask for help and end up figuring it out mere hours later. I've been able to boot and install from both iATKOS 10.5.7 and real Leopard drive using my own AMD boot-132 disc. Running on retail now.

 

So I've got a nearly perfect OSX system now. Rock solid (so far) and everything just works: Net, SATA, IDE, 9800GT, USB, FW, disc burning, even sound (external usb audio ftw). Zero compatibility issues with anything I've installed so far: iLife, Line6 Monkey/POD drivers, OpenOffice, Alesis io/Firewire audio interface drivers.

 

The only thing that's not working.. full 8gb of memory. I need to maxmem 5gb or below, otherwise I get the blue screen that seems quite common. I'll do some reading on this.

 

 

For anyone with a similar nforce board who stumbles upon this looking for help (not a dual booter, so not sure how these will work with Windows), these fixed things for me.

 

1. Change the SATA mode on your motherboard from IDE to AHCI in your boards BIOS (generally found under integrated peripherals/MCP).

 

2. If you have 5gb of ram or more (I have 8), add the line 'maxmem=5120' at the Darwin boot prompt (either using a premade distro or boot132; no single quotes).

 

3. When booting your Leopard DVD, if you get the 'Waiting for root device' error...

a. If you are using a premade distro, get a new distro. There may be a command line way of fixing it, but I don't know how. (maybe specify the UUID like below? didn't try so not sure). iATKOS .7 worked for me.

b. If you are using boot132 and your own Leopard DVD, your UUID is wrong. You can find your correct UUID by using Disk Utility on an already working OSX install (I know, kind of an infinite loop in logic there for 1st time Mac'rs.. handy that I own an MBP). You can also find your UUID under Linux. Download and burn your favorite Linux Live CD (I like LinuxMint), start a terminal and use 'vol_id -u $DEVICE$' to get the UUID. (device being /dev/sda or whatever your /dev tree looks like).

 

4. For chipset, use only the AHCI-SATA and GenericPATA-IDE kexts. My hard disks are SATA while my DVD drive is IDE. YMMV. If you don't have any IDE ports, you don't need the GenericPATA kext. Do not use the nForceSATA kext (or any others - INTEL, Via, AMD, etc), I got nothing but KPs on boot that traced back to nForceSATA. Maybe it's an Intel only thing?

 

5. I have 9800GTs (2 - no sli on Mac so 1 will automatically disable itself) so I used Natit - seems to work perfectly. All resolutions supported by my monitor are usable, OGL usable, etc. Google ATI enablers if ATI is your GPU preference.

 

6. Don't use onboard sound (truth be told, I never really tried that hard - have a lot of Mac audio gear already). Save up $20 and buy external USB audio. I've got a Behringer UCA that is working quite nicely.

 

7. Google nforce 10/100/1000 ethernet kext for your wired ethernet. Don't have wifi, but if you figure out what chipset your wifi is, google it and see what kext's are available.

 

8. When booting after install, always use 'maxmem=5120' (assuming you have 5gb or more) otherwise you'll be stuck with the blue screen issue. If/when I figure that out, I'll add the solution here.

 

 

Hope that helps. I'm a noob, lots of this info is probably common place already, but it took me a while to figure out. Once I did, everything started working swimmingly.

 

 

Also, for the real Mac experience, google 'DoubleCommand' use it to swap both the Option and Command (windows logo) Keys. On a Mac Keyboard, the command/openapple key is located where the traditional PC Alt key is located.

[ptesone]

The only issue I'm having is using the GenericPATA-IDE kext, while it does allow me to see my IDE drives, they are not using UDMA (quick) mode and one drive is misreported in Disk Utility. I have fixed this problem before by using AppleVIAATA.kext and adding my DEV ID number to the info.plist, which fixes both the for-mentioned problems, however I start to get Kernel Panics, so for now, looks like no IDE drives here. . .

[digitron64]

Bonfilio;

 

Did you ever solve the 5gb max issue? I also have a 750a mobo (XFX) with 8gb of memory, and I also have to use the maxmem=5120 flag to boot normal. The funny thing is, I can boot into safe mode with all 8gb of ram detected with no problems. It's when I boot into normal mode that I get the blue screen... (that's if I don't use the kernel flag). Other than that, everything works perfectly.

 

AMD Phenom II X4 945

8gb (4x2gb) OCZ Blade PC2-8500

MSI Nvidia 9800GT 512mb

 

running iAtkos v7 updated to 10.5.8 using Chameleon 2 bootloader and Voodoo 9.5 Kernel

 

 

Thank you in advance for your kind assistance. Have a great day!

[m4f1050]

First post, I've done a ton of reading and searching, but I haven't found much pertaining to my hardware.

 

I have a Zotac 750a SLI board with an AMD x2 with 2gb (really 8gb, but took out 3 sticks for simplicity sake). AHCI/SATA all works fine.. can see disks, etc.

 

The only 2 distros that work and do not give the 'waiting for boot volume' error are Kalyway 5.2 and the new iATKOS 10.5.7 (ipc, lawless, ideneb - none of them work). I can successfully install either iATKOS or Kalyway, but I can't get a successful first boot. I've gone through too many iterations (and going from memory) to remember what triggered what, but the result was always a KP or grey beach ball cursor screen.

 

If anyone has a 750a board and has been successful with osx86, can you let me know what install/kext options you used? I'm not worrying about audio/video/net yet, just barebones chipset/booting info.

 

 

 

UNRELATED: I have retail Leopard (and a Macbook Pro). Would I have better look attempting to use Boot132 with this board? Disclaimer: I haven't done much reading on Boot132 yet so I'm not sure if this is even a valid question yet.

 

Hi there. I have an Nforce 750a SLI, will the onboard video work? I also have a JMicron 363 (using the onboard SATA for RAID-5 and Win 7 boot drive, installing on eSATA)

 

Onboard network (Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller)

 

AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 6000+ 3ghz, with 4gb of memory

 

Any advise on how to get it working? I have installed 10.6.2 but it stays in the boot screen (apple in middle with spinning circle on the bottom)

 

 

 

Thanks!