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[GUIDE] OS X Lion 10.7.0 on a Dell Dimension e520


nabxf
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Hello all! This is v0.9 of my Dell Dimension e520 guide to installing OS X 10.7.0 Lion. It's also possible that a lot of this stuff will work on other P965/G965 boards (XPS 400 and Dimension 9100 will probably work)

A quick note: most of techniques available here have been harvested and Frankenstein'd from other guides on this forum and beyond. I've compiled them up to make it easy for Dimension e520 users to get Lion running on their system - Please see the end of the guide for the credits!

 

OK, let's get started!

 

Things you need:

  • An e520 (not e521) with a Core 2 Duo / Core 2 Quad processor (Pentium Ds don't work, sorry :P ) with latest BIOS
  • My e520 goodie bag attached here e520_Lion_Bundle.zip. This contains everything you need, and is heavily referenced by the guide
  • Using the integrated graphics, audio and ethernet
  • ATI Radeon HD4850 512mb (optional)
  • An 8GB< USB drive or External Hard drive, formatted Mac OS X Extended Journaled and called USBINSTALLER (the script you'll be running will automatically call it "Mac OS X Base System")
  • A free, blank hard drive titled Lion and formatted Mac OS X Extended Journaled. Feel free to use a dual boot partition, but you'll need to install Windows first and mess about with fdisk afterwards (guides on this forum)
  • A copy of Install Mac OS X Lion.app
  • A friend's Mac or another Hackintosh install, Leopard or Snow Leopard

 

One last thing - you may want to print this guide before you start! You've been warned...

 

Preparing the USB drive

 

Place Install Mac OS X Lion.app in /Applications.

In Terminal, navigate to this folder ("Preparing the Lion Disk/install", a quick way of doing this is to highlight the install folder and drag it onto the terminal window, or:

cd "/path/to/Preparing the Lion Disk/install"

Then, type:

sudo mkboot "/Volumes/USBINSTALLER/"

(this will create the bootable USB, complete with Chameleon et al. It'll take a few minutes. USBINSTALLER will now be called "Mac OS X Base System"!)

 

BEFORE REBOOTING:

 

Copy the Extensions folder in Preparing the Lion Disk to /Volumes/Mac OS X Base System/Extra. This will ensure SATA detection, network detection and audio while installing.

Boot the installer (F12 at BIOS, then select "USB Device") and install like normal.

Reboot BACK INTO THE INSTALLER PARTITION and copy /Volumes/Mac OS X Base System/Extra to /Volumes/Lion/ through Terminal with the following command:

cp "/Volumes/Mac OS X Base System/Extra" /Volumes/Lion

Without this step, you'll get a "Waiting for root device" error.

 

Boot off the USB drive again, and this time select the newly installed Lion disk. The graphics injector in the USB drive's Chameleon will give basic gfx.

 

Post-Installation

 

Welcome to Lion! Run through the set-up (Internet should be fully working at this stage, meaning date, time, and AppleID will be working. This should be really streamlined. Make an account (Create a password to prevent any sudo troubles later on) and you'll be at the desktop.

 

Run "Install Chameleon.mpkg" from the Post-Install folder and select Lion (or equivalent) as your target drive. Remember to tick "Theme" in addition to the main bootloader!

 

(we're nearly done!)

 

Delete the /Extra folder that you copied over from the original USB drive and then copy/move Post-Install/Extra to the Lion root directory. This contains the e520's DSDT, an smbios.plist to spoof an Xserve (my preference, this can be changed very easily later) and a collection of kexts that will make everything work. ---It's highly probable that not ALL these kexts are necessary if you're into barebones installs and like keeping everything clean - however they haven't really impacted my boot times, so i left things like OpenHaltRestart in.

 

Run Kext Utility (included in the download).

 

Finally, reboot.

What should now be working…

  • SATA drives
  • No CMOS reset when rebooting
  • X3000 SHOULD have full resolution and maybe GFX (somebody else please confirm, I have no QE/CI on mine) thanks to theStevo's X3000 kexts
  • Internal Audio (Sigmatel STAC9227) works thanks to VoodooHDA.kext
  • Internal Ethernet (Intel 82566MM) works thanks to Intel82566MM.kext

 

Optional Step for Radeon HD4850 Users

 

This step is obviously only necessary if you have an HD4850... I believe old Nvidia cards (9xxx and lower) will work OOB using GraphicsEnabler (my 8600gt and 8800gs cards do) but with later Nvidia cards I can't help. Netkas has guides for other ATI cards on his website.

 

At this point, following my guide, you should have QE/CI working with resolution change on your first screen ONLY. A second monitor can be seen in Display Settings, but it is actually non-existent and OS X is creating a virtual 800x600 second screen to the right of your main monitor.

 

Ensure GraphicsEnabler is enabled in Chameleon's plist (if you've been following my guide, it will be).

Apple's ATI4800Controller.kext needs to be modified in order for the 4850 to work. It's actually really easy! (NOTE: If you're running 10.7.0 you can just use the Kext I've included in the download)

Go to /System/Library/Extensions/ and copy ATI4800Controller.kext to your desktop.

Right-Click on it and select Show Package Contents. You want to be editing the file Contents/Info.plist with TextEdit.

Cmd-F the following text:

<string>0x94401002 0x944a1002</string>

All you have to do is replace the line with:

<string>0x94401002 0x944a1002 0x94421002</string>

 

That's it! Save the file, and then drag it onto Kext Utility to install it. Then, install EVOenabler.kext from "Post-Install/HD4850 Graphics" in the same way.

 

Reboot… Done!

 

Thanks to...

 

tseug's Lion tutorial. His awesome scripts are responsible for most of the USB preparation section!

scorcho's HD4850 tutorial. Pointed me in the direction of evoEnabler!

thestevo for his X3000 kexts!

the Hazard 10.6.2 team, for I extracted some of the SATA kexts and stuff from their Snow disc!

Kexts.com for all the other kexts!

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Hello nabxf,

 

I read your post in the thread of tseug from wednesday very hopefully.

 

Thank you for your clear and easy to follow guide. To complete your guide I feel free to add my way to enable QE/CI with my graphic adapter.

 

MSI nVidia GeForce 8600GTS

To install my nVidia 8600 GTS graphic card I just added the device properties from MacOSX 10.6.6 in /E/com.apple.Boot.plist to the new one /E/com.chameleon.Boot.plist.

<key>device-properties</key>
<string>....lot of numbers.....</string>

Repair permissions, reboot.

That is all.

Everything is working out, QE/CI is enabled.

 

 

One problem is left.

I have a DualBoot with Windows 7 and SL. Both running in RAID ON mode. Lion, at this time on a test HDD, runs only in Autodetect/ATA mode. Otherwise I get "Still waiting for root device" error.

 

At this time I have no solution to move the Lion partition in my dual-boot system without to shimmy through the Bios to change the operating system.

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Hey glitzerndeminze, thanks for your reply and confirmation of the EFI string cards working under Lion! An easy way to set up cards that use the boot.plist efi string method is to use the program EFIStudio, or osx86tools (more outdated). They both handily contain the appropriate strings for pretty much any card released up to the nvidia 9xxx series and usually enable QE/CI oob!

 

On the topic of RAID ON and ATA/Autodetect, I've been using the latter ever since i put two hard drives in my E520, as the RAID configuration added like 5 seconds to my boot time as soon as it noticed more than one drive. The only solution I can give you for this is to reinstall Windows in ATA mode at some point later down the line. I know it's not ideal, and I'm really sorry!

 

I believe wmarsh wrote an E520 guide that works for SL on RAID mode (naturally you're in that exact position but I don't know what method you used edit: saw your sig :)) but there's a good chance that maybe his guide and my guide can be merged together in some way!

 

Good luck,

nabxf

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...
...By the way, my Dell Dimension E520 doesnt got a onboard video card.

It's also this "VIIV" sticker on my case. Don't know what that stands for?

 

The big question is, Will this guide work on my computer?

 

 

My box also came with a VIIV sticker - in my case this is a intel 6320 dual core processor, which is compatible with this guide. If you are using vista or win7 it'll tell you in the computer properties section. I'm not sure how you would check in XP, as I never had it but I would have thought it'd be the same ;)

 

Does anyone know if this will work with a 6600 quad processor, as I upgraded mine?

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  • 1 month later...

nabxf,

 

I have a Dimension E520 that I've tried several times to set up with Lion, following your guide.

 

It's a Core2Duo 1.83GHz, 4gb RAM DDR2 6400, 80GB HD, Radeon 4670 with 1GB VRAM.

 

Each and every time I try, it boots to a gray screen, allows me to select "Mac OS X Base System" to boot from, runs through the next gray screen where it starts loading kexts up, and then will switch to a black screen (white text) where it appears to be loading kexts etc, and eventually it'll tell me that it's waiting for input from a root device.

 

Then it'll tell me it's still waiting. And keeps telling me that, every three or so minutes. I do not ever get to a point in the install process where I can actually install Lion.

 

I have tried using a 32GB Corsair Survivor (USB Flash drive) for the install, formatted first as an mbr partition, then as GUID (you didn't specify in your guide which partition type to use). I have also tried an 80GB external USB Hard drive with GUID partition type (i'm trying now with MBR), and i've tried formatting the destination drive (the one i'm going to install Lion on) as both GUID and MBR.

 

I've tried setting the SATA Operation from ATA to AHCI and back.

 

I have no idea what to do at this point, other than post the results from my attempt with the 80GB Installer disc formatted as MBR.

 

Can you provide any insight for me? I'm really tired of Windows, and haven't saved enough yet for a new MacBook Pro.

 

Cheers,

meadcd.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 10 months later...

anybody managed to get this to work?

 

i'm not able to do this. is it possible that any of you can make a boot disk or a bootable Lion disk?

 

please help me out.

 

this guide works 100% i had done so in summers last year. only thing i doubt is lion supporting x3000 gma. as it was only supported till snow leopard. well at least i couldn't get my actual screen resolution with the given thestevo kexts.

 

other than that i am using fully working os x 10.7.3 on my dell e520.

 

Update - 8th March- bought Asus en210 and achieved full resolution. QE/CI + OpenCL working after latest official nvidia drivers.

Edited by vigyan
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  • 6 months later...
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