Fully functional Snow Leopard 10.6.4

[knorrhane]

I've just finished installing Snow Leopard 10.6.4 and it works really well!

 

My specs are:

 

Ga-73PVM-S2H (nForce 630i)

Intel Core2Duo E5200 @ 2.91 GHz

GeForce GT 220

SATA Hard drive

SATA DVDRW

 

I'm writing how I did because after a lot of trial and error I finally got it working, also the installation process I ended up using was really easy compared to what I've tried earlier and hopefully someone can use the same process I used. So here's a short summary of what I did:

 

Using my MBP, I restored a Snow Leopard Retail DVD to a 8 Gb usb pen drive (formatted as GUID partition table) and made it bootable using myHack installed (http://osx86.sojugarden.com/installer/). I used a pen drive because it's faster but mainly because my DVDRW-drive wasn't bootable using AHCI.

 

I set up my mobo to boot from the USB (it is important to set the HDD-flash as the first boot priority) and to install Snow Leopard properly I had to partition the hard drive as GUID after which the installation went problem free. When the installation was finished the computer rebooted and I used the bootloader on the pen drive to boot from my hard drive. I then used the guide from tonymacosx86 and started from step 3 (http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/[url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url]-[url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url]-install-mac-os-x-on.html) to make my hard drive bootable and to install 10.6.4.

 

Now, to make the audio, gfx and ethernet to work properly there was quite a lot of fiddling and researching. After booting into SL 1.0.6.4 I started to install my audio, ethernet and gfx. Noticfe that I hadn't installed any custom kext's until this point.

 

GFX:

To get my GFX (GT 220) working properly I had to use EFI Studio 1.1 to create a custom EFI-string for the com.apple.Boot.plist file. Since my GFX wasn't among the ones you could choose from, I found someone who'd use the EFI for the GeForce 9800 GTX and that's what I used and it worked very well.

 

Ethernet:

I ended up using the nForceLAN.0.64.5.kext to get my ethernet working properly, however the first time I installed it I got a kernel panic on boot. Eventually I found a thread about the nvenet.kext causing a conflict with nForceLAN.0.64.5.kext so I had to get rid of that (it's inside IONetworkingFamily.kext) after which the ethernet worked like a dream.

 

Audio:

This also took a lot of research. The VoodooHDA kext that others had used didn't work for me and eventually I found a thread about someone who used the the experimental VoodooHDA and got it working. To avoid conflicts and kernel-panics, I had to delete the native kext's for audio from Apple (AppleHDA.kext, LegaccyHDA.kext and what-not) after which all was well.

 

That's it. It took me approx. two days of fiddeling to get it to work but it was all worth it. I strongly recommend to install the Snow Leopard Retail DVD if you have the possibility, since the earlier versions of Leopard (10.5) I tried didn't work out very well. I've tried iATKOS, iDeneb and iPC and they all didn't work for one reason or the other.

 

I'm happy to share my experiences (even though I'm no expert ) so if you have any questions just let me know!

 

Next step is to install Windows 7 (could be tricky on a GPT-drive) and try to get the CPU up to above 3 Ghz