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So you've got an Inspiron 530 and you want to install Snow Leopard? Well, the existing information on the intertron for figuring this out is nightmarish. You get all sorts of conflicting information, with no explanation for why some things work and others don't. This post is to try and change that.
You can get a vanilla 10.6.3 kernel working on a stock Inspiron 530 with virtually no issues. You don't need to replace the sound, the ethernet, the video card, nothing. If you want QE/whatever, well, then you'll need to get a supported video card. That's outside of the scope of this tutorial; check the compatibility lists for how to get that mess running. I’m also assuming you’re ready to wipe your system; my guide isn’t going to preserve any of your data. I’m basing this on the guide given by Mattisz, with revisions from amzor and from myself. I would have never gotten this working if not for them. Major props.
Here’s the rough outline of what we’re doing: we start with a hacked Leopard install, use that to do a retail Snow Leopard install, and then from within leopard we modify the Snow Leopard install to make it work properly. It’ll make more sense once we get going.
So, let's start with the basics. Here's what you need to make this work:
An Inspiron 530 (dunno anything re: a/b/c/d or s) with an Intel processor
2 - 4 GB of RAM (add more later, for now, keep it simple)
BIOS 1.0.18 (you might be able to make it work with earlier revisions, but why bother?)
USB Keyboard and Mouse
A working Mac running OS X 10.5 or later (sorry, I haven’t found a way around this)
A USB flash disk of at least 4GB. (Trust me, you want this. If you don’t have this, we can use a burned DVD instead, but it’s going to add a lot of time to the process.)
Another external USB drive with at least 8GB of space.
A retail copy of OS X Snow Leopard, preferably 10.6.3. (You will need to rip an image of it, or “acquire” one), and an image of iAtkos v7 (get it from a torrent), stored on your working Mac.
Around 4-6 hours
This package: http://www.kexts.com...ow_at_5:30.html downloaded to your Mac.
You've got all of those? Great, let's get started.
First, go into your BIOS (F2 at startup), go to "Integrated PeripheralsDrive ControllerSATA ModeRAID. This is going to enable all four SATA ports.
For future reference, make sure you have your OS X hard drive (the one you want to install the OS on) in one of the first two SATA ports. On the mobo, that’s the row with one blue, one black. I’d recommend keeping the DVD-drive on the yellow port.
Once that’s done, switch over to your Mac. For this next step, I highly recommend using a flash drive. If you don’t have a flash disk, just burn the iAtkos v7 image to a DVD. Since all of the distros I found were in ISO format, you can do this in Windows or a Mac, it doesn’t matter.
If you’ve got a 4GB flash disk, pop it in, open Applications – Utilities – Disk Utility, highlight the flash drive, click “Partition”, choose “1 Partition”, click “Options”, make sure GUID is selected, click ok, and partition the drive. (It doesn’t matter what you name it—for the purposes of the guide, I’ll assume it’s “Untitled.”) Once partitioned, keep disk utility open, and drag the ISO/DMG of iAtkos to the left hand bottom window of disk utility. It should now show up in that window. Double-click to mount it. Once it’s mounted, go back to your USB drive in disk utility and click on “Untitled.” Click on the “Restore” tab on the far right, and drag the iAtkos image to source and the “Untitled” to destination. Click “Erase” underneath the source/dest prompts, and then go do something for the next 30-40 minutes. Once this has completed, open up the “A chance for snow” archive, go to “Bootloader,” and click on the chameleon installer package. Once it pops up, select your newly formatted iAtkos drive, and install Chameleon on it. Don’t worry if it fails at running post-script; that’s not important.
Ok, now take your DVD/flash disk, pop it in the Dell, turn the machine on, and hit F12 to bring up the boot menu. Select whatever drive you’ve got iAtkos on. If it’s a DVD, it’ll boot to Darwin; just push any key to start the installer. If it’s the USB, Chameleon will boot: navigate to iAtkos using the arrow keys and push enter to start the installer.
Once in the Installer, go to the top of the screen and choose “Utilities –Disk Utility.” Now you need to choose the OS X destination drive. Once selected, you need to partition it into at least 2 partitions in the following order:
1.) Snow Leopard (required)
2.) Windows (optional—full disclosure, I did not set my machine up to dual-boot, so do it at your own risk)
3.) Leopard (required—must be at least 16GB for our purposes)
Once you’ve done this, go to options and select “GUID” as your partition scheme. If you want to dual-boot Windows, exit the installer now, pop in your Windows media, and install it to the Windows partition. Once you’ve finished, come back and continue the guide.
Now that you’ve partitioned your drive, begin the iAtkos installer. Choose to install to the Leopard partition. CLICK CUSTOMIZE before installing! You need to tell iAtkos to install the following things:
System: OHR
Drivers: AHCI, Intel Gigabit (Intel82566MM for network), AppleHDA for audio
And NTFS 3G or whatever it’s called, to read/write NTFS drives.
Also, UNCHECK bootloader from iAtkos. That’s right. You don’t want to install any bootloaders. If you’re curious as to why, it’s because the versions it can install are incompatible with your SATA RAID BIOS setting—but we want to keep SATA RAID so you can use all four ports later on. You’ll be using other means to boot your system in the interim.
Once you’ve selected those, tell the installer to begin. It’ll take a while, so use this time to copy the “a chance of snow” folder and the retail Snow Leopard image to your other external drive.
Once the installer has finished, restart the computer, AND HIT F12 AGAIN. Choose your iAtkos media again. If you used the flash disk route, you’ll boot into Chameleon, and from there you can choose to boot your newly-installed Leopard disk. If you used the DVD, you’ll be in Darwin—hit F8 to use advanced startup options. Now, there’s a chance Darwin won’t display the Leopard drive, and will only show the iAtkos CD-ROM (HD 31,1 or something.) If it does this, grab any old flash drive, stick it in your working Mac, format it in GUID, and install the Chameleon boot loader on it. Use it to boot to the Leopard drive.
Once Leopard has booted, run through the initial setup process. Once you get to the desktop, attach your other external drive and drag over the “a chance for snow” folder and the image of Snow Leopard. After they’ve copied over, push "Apple-Shift-G" (the Apple key is usually mapped to the Windows key on a standard keyboard) and enter "/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/" in the prompt. Find “OSInstall.MPKG” and double-click it.
This launches the Snow Leopard installer. Select your “Snow leopard” partition as your destination, and hit customize. This time, remove *everything* but essential system software. Then let it continue with the install—it should be over very quickly. Now, do not restart yet. We have work to do.
First, open up the “chance for snow” folder, navigate to the bootloader section, and install Chameleon onto new Snow Leopard drive. Once you’ve finished that, go back into the “chance for snow” folder and open tools, then click on “Show All Files.” Tell it to SHOW, Finder will restart.
Now open up “chance for snow” again. Drag “DSDT.aml” from this folder to the root of the Snow Leopard drive. Next, drag the contents of the “kexts” folder to /Snow Leopard/System/Library/Extensions. Once you’ve done this, drag that entire folder onto Kext Utility, back in the “chance for snow” folder. Note: if it can’t create extensions.mkext, don’t worry—that’s unimportant for the time being. When it finishes, drag Kext Utility to Snow Leopard/Applications, since we’ll be using it again soon.
Ok, now you’re ready to restart the computer. If everything went right, you should boot into Chameleon, and be able to select Leopard or Snow Leopard. Select Snow Leopard, and boot up. Out of the box, you should have: working internet, working video, and should see all of your SATA ports. Do yourself a favor and put a copy of the “a chance for snow” folder, with all of its contents, on your desktop here too. You’ll be using it soon.
NOTE: If you installed from the 10.6.0 Gold Media (10A432), you need to go to System Preferences (on the dock): Spotlight: Privacy, and add your Snow Leopard drive.
Now that you’re in Snow Leopard, go to your Applications folder and run Kext Utility again. It should complete successfully. Reboot again, and this time when you’re selecting Snow Leopard, push the down arrow on your keyboard and select “boot verbose.” It should boot up successfully.
NOTE 2: If you installed 10.6.0, you can now reverse what you did earlier with Spotlight.
Ok, now you’re ready to run software update. A word of caution: when you do this, you’re probably going to screw up your sound and a few other things. It’s cool, we’ll fix them if you do. Let Software Update run, then reboot your computer when it’s finished.
Now when you start Snow Leopard up, you’ve probably lost the ability to see your drives, and maybe sound isn’t working. No problem. Copy over all of the kexts to /Snow Leopard/System/Library/Extensions and run Kext utility again. Reboot. Now you should be good to go.
NOTE: Your sound may or may not work at this point. If it does not, you need to install ONE of the following kexts and then run Kext Utility. If you try one and it doesn’t work, DELETE IT before trying the other.
http://osx86.sojugar...10.6.2.kext.zip -- Worked for me.
http://www.kexts.com...8_hd_audio.html -- This worked for leuca.
Once you get sound working, you’re done.
Your display (if using onboard video) is stuck at 1024x768, and your Sleep function won’t work (I’m investigating a fix for that now), but you’ve now got a completely vanilla 10.6.3 Snow Leopard install. You should run ShowAllFiles again and tell it to hide, just so things look prettier. At this point you can either keep your Leopard install (in case you need to do maintenance) or you can just format the partition for extra space.Once again, thanks to everyone who posted in the original Snow Leopard on Inspiron 530 thread (found here: http://www.insanelym...p...&start=120), mattisz, amzor, leuca, and anyone else who posted something useful.
Please reply if you’re having trouble or if the guide forgets something; I tried to install OS X literally twenty times this weekend so I might have forgotten to include something.
