Hi Kellis and others,
Excellent. I have the HP dv8t-1200 and the configuration is identical to yours. I'm using Mammoth's Boot CD 1.10 and it comes with a dsdt.aml specfically for dv8t notebooks. I'm running into the following issues:
I think Mammoth is feverishly working on these issues but thought I can ask you or anybody here while he's working on it.
a. Brightness control is not visible at all in the Display preferences. I added Device(PNLF) just above Device(PWRB) and was able to display the Brightness slider but the slider has no effect and it moves to the end when I try to drag it.
b. Power Management (Fan seems to be constantly running, slightly higher on the warm side).
c. Audio - tried VoodooHDA.kext and it gave me KP.
d. SD Card reader
e. Fn keys
I'm a absolute n00b on DSDT and my first question is "Can dv7t or dv8t boot without a dsdt.aml at all". If I remove the dsdt.aml from the Chameleon partition that the Mammoth Boot CD needs, can SL 10.6.4 boot without any issues? I read somewhere that if I remove or mess with dsdt.aml, then chances are my notebook might fry and not be usable at all. Is this true? I'm really scared on this.
Where do I begin? Do I need to first generate a fresh and original dsdt.aml/dsl file out of the Insyde BIOS? I have F.24 version of the BIOS. Is sleep, Energy saving settings work without a kernel panic?
Appreciate your feedback.
Thanks.
a) same here but with an nvidia chip.

fan works fine here on my dv7 3180us. even without any dsdt.aml
c) audio works, i got the latest voodoo's kexts. (even the mic works)
d) sd card works! I had to add some kexts for it, (look at kexts.com, for some jmicron one)
e) the FN keys do work, but they are all messed up, (the assignement), for example, instead of FN 6 for brightness, it will be set in FN HOME, or something, FN 4 makes it go to sleep, so the FN do work, but only a few of them and mis-assigned.
f) the only reason you'd fry your machine with the dsdt is that you tell it to do something not so good, voltage for example, or FAN control, it would overheat. but i feel it would have to be extreme and on purpose.
Know that if you have a DSDT.aml that fails, just reboot with chameleon flag DSDT=none
no problem, it will ignore your DSDT.aml, no need to delete it from the file system.
As far as the cpus=1 etc, the only way you gonna get all the cores working fine, you HAVE to use the legacy_kernel.
The best for our machine is to get it to install with crappy settings (low memory removed from the machine), then boot with cpus=1 busratio=12 etc. (not good, but good enough to install). then install snow leopard 10.6.4 and install legacy_kernel, a lot of things will then work.
Also, use 32 bit.
With the legacy_kernel, (see on kexts.com) all the cores will work and no KP.
Also, for your voodoo audio, if it crashes when you 1st install it, try to reboot again, sometimes it crashes if i install a new kexts, but rebooting again a few times fixes it (something to do with caches?).
Hope that helps.