[Guide] Dell XPS 15 L502X (Early 2011) Snow Leopard Install (possibly L702x too)

[Air]

Everything is this BIOS is broken, lol ... Dell made sure to create the s*bleep*iest BIOS possible..

Haha well I'm glad you guys have modded it to fix most of the issues, when I learned it could not boot GPT I was furious but kept the laptop anyway because it seemed to be one of the more compatible hackintoshes.

 

How much battery life are you all getting on a full charge? I have my NVIDIA card turned off and speedstep enabled but I'm still only getting a little over 2 hours on a full charge...any ideas on what's sucking out the life? I'm pretty sure the battery is in good health. My geekbench score is 7500 though if that's any help...it seems kind of low. I can get a breakdown of the scores if it would be helpful in diagnosing the battery life issue.

 

@jkbuha what edits did you make to doix's DSDT? Would you mind uploading it? I'm using mackyreddy's June 22nd DSDT from page 117, but he has a l702x I believe. Perhaps this is not optimal for the 15z.

 

@dawtaylor, GPT allows you to resize disks, have more than 4 partitions, and are less prone to partition map corruption bc they have duplicate partition tables so that it can self heal if one goes bad. to be honest I just like trying to get my PC as native-mac as possible, but I did find that my system runs faster on GPT. If you have an advanced format drive, you definitely need GPT to run OS X at optimal efficiency, as I can attest to the fact that trying to use OS X + MBR + AF drive results in extremely slow writing to the HD. Also time machine will not work with MBR, and I know it's not the best backup software but I appreciate being able to use it, so GPT is the way to go for that.

[DawTaylor]

@Air, what kind of changes did you do to get GPT to boot up on your system? Actually I'm running kasar modded bios with UEFI boot enabled.

[jkbuha]

 

I've attached a fully functional UEFI archive for you. Just unzip to a bootable USB drive (use clover to setup if you don't know how to do it manually) and the DSDT+SSDTs are fully configured for the 1080p 15z.

 

Re: Geekbench remember that the 15z only has dual-core (not quad like the XPS15). You can increase this though by overclocking the FSB > 100kHz. Read my posts in this topic and elsewhere on the bios mods forum for more details.

 

Hope this helps!

EFI.rar

[Air]

@DawTaylor, I switched from Chameleon to Clover to get GPT booting working. The steps were pretty simple:

 

- I downloaded the installer for Clover and selected the option to install to UEFI motherboards, select  EmuVariable, OSxAptio, DataHub

- mounted the EFI partition from terminal, copied my DSDT/SSDT into the ACPI-->Patched folder and kexts that normally go into the "Extra" folder into the kexts-->10.8 folder

- For the config.plist, I kept mine very minimal...only adding what was necessary to have speedstep working and adding "InjectKexts=true" to system parameters so that your 10.8 folder kexts get loaded.

 

As for the actual OS X installation, it is easier than MBR as you don't have to swap out the OSInstall files and packages. It is very close to a vanilla install of OS X.

[DawTaylor]

I replaced the thermal paste and now my system is running at 45º~50º, I'll stay alert to see how it goes over the days.

@Air,

Is it possible to use something similar to Super Duper to restore my current running system to a GPT partition drive? I already did something like this before, I installed 10.8.4 to a HDD, made it run stable, and then I restored it to my SSD, when it finished, I just needed to install Clover on the SSD. The difference between what I did and what I want to do is that both had MBR partition, now I'm planning to restore a MBR to a GPT.

[Air]

@DawTaylor, unfortunately I'm pretty certain you can't put an MBR image onto a GPT disk. The base installations of OS X are already fundamentally different between the two. It's still definitely worth installing from scratch though just to have GPT, that's what I did.

[DawTaylor]

@Air, I thought so. I guess I'm not going to change this for now, to lazy to start a clean install.

[blaatschaap]

Been following this thread for ages, it's so huge now it's hard to keep track of the current status of hackintosh on L502x.

 

I'm eager to do a clean UEFI install of the entire system (with clover, etc.) since I seem to have read this results in an essentially fully working system, but I'm unsure how to proceed exactly. Can any of you experts provide some instructions? I know my way around the command line and I'm not afraid of flashing modded bioses.

 

I should note that I've replaced the CD/DVD drive with a HDD caddy, if that is at all relevant.

 

PS. could I transfer my licensed Windows 8 from a non-UEFI system to this new system, or would that require a reinstall? It's not a dealbreaker either way... barely ever use Windows anyway, so running it from a VM would suffice.

[DawTaylor]

@blaatschaap,

 

To enable UEFI boot on L502X I flashed my bios with capitankasar advanced modded bios. I'm assuming that you have a L502X system.

 

Installation is basically what is described here. http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/257950-guide-dell-xps-15-l502x-early-2011-snow-leopard-install-possibly-l702x-too/page-11?p=1759951

I guess the only difference is that you should use Clover as a bootloader. Unfortunately I'm not that experienced on Clover tweak / setup. You may read something about it from this post on. http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/257950-guide-dell-xps-15-l502x-early-2011-snow-leopard-install-possibly-l702x-too/?p=1936831

 

I did everything from USB stick, so I guess you can do it too.

 

I guess that win8 won't work without reinstalling.

[blaatschaap]

Thanks for the reply! I'm gonna try it now... :-D Only worry I had about the guide is that the kext package seem to be quite old? Over a year old actually! Are they up to date for 10.8.4?

 

I've seen other kexts posted in a lot of pages here... Do I need to collect all of these as well? For example, updated IOWMI stuff on a few pages back?

[DawTaylor]

I'm using almost all of the Lx02x pkg's kext.

[blaatschaap]

OK, interesting, because I did find updated ALC kext for 10.8.3+, newer FakeSMC, updated SmartBatteryManager and I believe VoodooPS2 is far superior to the regular Apple kexts. Also, there is a new generic USB3 driver that is supposedly much better than PXHCD.

 

Is the modded DSDT as good as the one from the L702x thread elsewhere? I think I read they have pretty much everything working flawlessly for L702x...

[DawTaylor]

I don't know about L702x, I'm also using DSDT from lx02x and is working good.

 

Doesn't works;

Nvidia GPU

Card reader

 

About the kexts,

 

When I came to this thread I already had almost everything working, so I didn't touch then.

[blaatschaap]

Strangely, I'm getting kernel panic relating to AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement, even though I've patched it with AICPM patcher...

 

"P-State Stepper error 18 at step 35"

 

EDIT: caused by faulty SSDT in DoiX's package. Fixed using RevoBoot ssdtgen script. Is this a known issue? Makes me wonder about the DSDT.aml and SSDT-*.aml... if those are buggy too.

[DoiX]

@blaatschaap, first, please post your specs, or even better, update your signature. Second, what are you trying to install ML or Mavericks?  

 

Although the tutorial is old, it's the same process and will remane the same for Mavericks and the next major OS X release, unless Apple changes something. As for the package, the kexts may be outdated, but they work. Updates to them can be found scattered around this thread. Search is your friend

[blaatschaap]

You're quite right, of course! Updated the sig now, should show up under this post. Trying to install 10.8.4 from a manually crafted USB stick (which has Clover on it). I put all needed kexts on it inside the BaseSystem.dmg, etc and it's booting up now.

 

I'm now dd'ing the entire hard drive as is to a backup drive, then, for good measure, I will even dd if=/dev/zero it completely, then I'll proceed with a full UEFI, gpt-only repartitioning. I think I got it covered now, since the USB stick boots completely without any flaws (I even put the patched DSDT, SSDT on the usb stick, allowing Clover to load them). After install reboots, it's just a question of copying over potentially missing kexts, actually install Clover onto the hard drive and I should be golden!

 

Could you post exactly which patches you applied to the DSDT, I'm interested in that.

 

Does anyone know what EFI spec version the XPS 15 supports?

 

EDIT: With this setup, the UEFI setup, with Clover, etc. and the minimal kext patching, upgrading to Mavericks shouldn't be too difficult I imagine.

 

(I predict it will go GM within a week, btw. What are your thoughts?)

[blaatschaap]

Happy to report I'm posting this from a fully installed, fully working (at least, I've checked basically everything and it all works fine) UEFI Clover install of 10.8.4 on my XPS 15! Thanks very much to all contributors for your help.

 

Is there a checklist to see if indeed everything works?

 

1) audio, works, even after resuming from sleep

2) backlight saving across reboot, works

3) backlight keys, works

4) nvidia card disabled, "works"

5) hwmonitor and sensors, works

6) touchpad, works

7) cpu frequency scaling, works (what are good temps under load?)

 

anything I missed?

[TimeWalker75a]

An update regarding legacy boot with UEFI Clover on Tiano 2.0 machines -> I guess it's not happening, every attempt to make it work has resulted in a message coming from BIOS saying "Operation System not found", which some of you may have seen when attempting to boot a GPT formatted HDD...

[DoiX]

@TimeWalker, what laptop brand/model would you suggest for optimal OS X experience (and lesser stupidity BIOS wise)?

 

@blaatschaap, that's pretty much it. You could add to the list booting to windows from OS X, that is, if you have UEFI Windows installed.

 

Anything under 85ºC is rather normal for this machine, without a cooling pad, under heavy load. 50ºC is lesser usage (browsing websites - without flash). 45ºC idle. It all depends on ambiental temperature, humidity, how well the thermal paste was applied... and so on.

 

Oh, about Mavericks, it annoys me, it's mostly bloatware in my opinion, nothing making the upgrade worth (for our XPS' at least). GeekBench scores are the same, the temperatures are bigger for some reason...this was also the case when going ML from L. 

 

Honestly, if it were not for the heavy Cloud implementation, i'd stick to Lion. Which may happen if i decide to dump my iDevice.

[TimeWalker75a]

I haven't researched the market yet as I have no plans to get rig of this machine in the following year or so, but I do know that Asus laptops for the most part do have a properly working AMI Aptio UEFI implementation which they have derived from Desktop boards. Also Asus frequently releases machines with regular graphics (ie. plain 520M nVidia) without actually having a 3D screen on the laptop. Though with Haswell and the goal for power consumption reduction this may very well change in the following year or so. I know Acer does this as well and their Insyde H20 seem to be ok for the most part, but I never liked Acer to begin with, so i'm not looking into buying any of their division machines (Acer, Packard-Bell, eMachines).

[blaatschaap]

@blaatschaap, that's pretty much it. You could add to the list booting to windows from OS X, that is, if you have UEFI Windows installed.

 

Anything under 85ºC is rather normal for this machine, without a cooling pad, under heavy load. 50ºC is lesser usage (browsing websites - without flash). 45ºC idle. It all depends on ambiental temperature, humidity, how well the thermal paste was applied... and so on.

interestingly, trying that Startup disk thing gives an error relating to "bless" (it does not give this error when trying to change the Startup disk after booting from the recovery partition). I don't really care, since I prefer Clover to ask me what I want to boot every time anyway.

 

temps are about 50 degrees celcius when browsing, so that seems to be alright.

[Air]

Can anyone provide a few tips on installing Windows 7 with UEFI booting? I can boot the DVD in EFI mode but when I choose a partition on my GPT disk, it insists that the disk is MBR and not GPT, so it won't install. On the flipside when I boot in non-EFI mode, I can install to my GPT disk, but then I can't boot in UEFI mode. 

[TimeWalker75a]

Windows has to be installed first on a hdd that has been partitioned as gpt from disk utility (or else efi partition will be only 100mb). If you install osx first it will complain that the disk is not suitable for install.

[blaatschaap]

@Air, check your MBR, with fdisk /dev/diskX

 

If it has just one partition with the 0xEE type, it has a simple protective MBR, and Windows will allow installation.

 

If it has various other partitions as well, in particular the Windows partition, Windows will give this error.

 

As long as Clover is set up properly and you don't need the MBR for the other OSes, go ahead and delete the other partitions from the 'legacy' MBR. (Keep the 0xEE partition with number 1!!)

 

Start fdisk in interactive mode on the drive and use d to delete the partitions 2, 3, 4, etc. (Cannot remember the command for interactive mode, should be easy to find out.)

 

Be sure to back the MBR up to a safe location before doing this so you can restore it if this {censored} up your system:

 

dd if=/dev/diskX bs=512 count=1 of=/location/of/backup

 

EDIT: I know for a fact this works, since I ran into this very problem and fixed it like this.

[TimeWalker75a]

He is running on GPT and not MBR or Hybrid partition scheme.