Oshawapilot Posted October 15, 2011 Share Posted October 15, 2011 Hey everyone...long time lurker, first time poster. I have just assembled a core i7 Sandy Bridge hackintosh. Pretty much everything went smoothly except for the display which has me pulling my hair out now. I have used an Asus GEforce 8400GS which I understood was virtually plug and play...however, I am having all sorts of problems getting the resolution up to 1920x1080 which is the native resolution of my monitor. I've tried every single kind of injector, kext, SwitchRes, etc etc etc. The highest I can get OSX to function in (display) is 1280x1024. It almost seems as if it's a physical hardware problem as even the Post screen, Bios setup screen, etc etc all display in a less-than-fullscreen mode - AKA, black bars top/bottom and sides of the display. I've tried every imaginable combination of cables. DVI, VGA, HDMI...HDMI to DVI (both ways). With the VGA cable I can get the entire screen filled but the resolution is terribly low. When I switch to DVI or HDMI I can eventually coax the resolution up, but then the monitor is still running in a higher resolution than the machine seems willing to provide. I even went so far as assuming it was my monitor that was the problem and I returned it for a more mainstream HP model..but no improvement. Help!? I'm pulling my hair out here! All help and suggestions most appreciated! Thanks Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dojomann Posted October 16, 2011 Share Posted October 16, 2011 Just using the GraphicsEnabler=Yes boot option should enable full resolution and qe/ci for that card.. The "not totally full screen" experience with your bios screen is just the way your monitor scales low resolutions, mine does that too. You may be able to change that in your monitor's settings, but as soon as proper video drivers are loaded, they take care of scaling so it shouldnt be an issue. Yeah, so just update to the newest chameleon bootloader (I like Chameleon Wizard, it's a great tool for setting up your settings) and turn on the GraphicsEnabler flag.. you should be sailing smoothly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oshawapilot Posted October 17, 2011 Author Share Posted October 17, 2011 Unfortunately not that easy for me. I've tried every possible combination including the basic graphicenabler=yes (out of the gate, and it's been on since) but nothing helped. I switched back to the VGA cord last night (from hdmi/dvi) and now I'm able to get a full screen display but the resolution is still only 1024x768 in OSX, and no amount of tweaking or changes I can seem to make will get osx to switch to a higher resolution. I'm really stumped. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dojomann Posted October 17, 2011 Share Posted October 17, 2011 hmm, taking a stab in the dark here: pciroot=1 boot flag maybe? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oshawapilot Posted October 17, 2011 Author Share Posted October 17, 2011 Yep, Already in the chameleon boot.plist. I went so far as borrowing a friends old nVidia 8800GT and installing it, and although the machine booted fine as soon as it went to fire up the desktop I ended up with a black screen. I couldn't even remote desktop it from my iMac to try to adjust things, although it *seemed* to be running properly in the background. Switching back to my original card and it came back up no problem, but still no resolution options. I've also tried adding the "Graphic Resolution"= etc etc options in the plist's as well but it still refuses to go above 1024x768 in osx itself. At least with the VGA cable I'm able to get this displaying full screen again, but it's a pretty pissy resolution for a large screen LCD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oshawapilot Posted October 18, 2011 Author Share Posted October 18, 2011 Does anybody else have any suggestions? I'm about ready to go out and buy another video card, but I'm not 100% sure yet if this is an actual video card issue or problem with OS X itself. Last night I tried again with a ton of different options ranging from plist file changes (graphic enabled on/off, nvinject, etc etc) and everything I could think of in between. Absolutely nothing helped, I'm still stuck at 1024x768 resolution. Does anybody have any suggestions for an absolutely positively 100% going to work video card option? At this point I'm ready to try anything, although after my disappointing experience with the 8800 GT (which is admittedly a fairly old video card) I'm not sure that it's going to help. I will buy it from somewhere where I can return it if it doesn't end up helping, although I'm at a loss for what else to try at this point. 1024x768 resolution really stinks on a 24 inch widescreen LCD monitor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dojomann Posted October 19, 2011 Share Posted October 19, 2011 hmm okay, seems as though you might need to do one more thing here: go into your NVDANV50HAL.kext's info.plist and under IOPCIPrimaryMatch add two more lines 0x10c310de&0xffe0ffff 0x0be310de&0xffe0ffff (these are the two i found for your card) or, in the case that you have a very unique card with a different device id 0x to start then your device id (combination of letters and numbers in hex; 4 characters) then 10de (which is nvidia's vendor id) and then all that other stuff (&0xffe0ffff) get all this stuff from windows using GPU-Z Then turn on the use kernel cache option (I like to do this, once again using chameleon wizard. make sure its pointed to the right boot plist file as well) this makes the boot process ignore the mkext files, making boot a tiny bit slower, but fixing more problems that you can have with those pesky mkext files. make sure graphicsenabler is on, and then give it another shot. also, graphics mode only seems to affect the boot gui (assuming a proper video driver works) and nvidia cards seem to top out with the highest vesa resolution of 1280x1024. Now, depending on your screen aspect ratio: if it's 16:9 or 16:10 try setting it to 1280x800 (also, give 1280x720 a shot for the 16:9 displays. some nvidia cards do have this resolution in their vesa mode listings) good luck. tell me what happens. (also, sorry for being slow on the reply.. school and work are keeping me busy... you know how Timmy's is) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oshawapilot Posted October 19, 2011 Author Share Posted October 19, 2011 Last night I did something similar. I edited the nvdan50Hal.kext file with the first part of what you suggested. Fwiw, that is the device ID that my card shows. I didn't however add the second line you mentioned as the tutorials I found online didn't mention that one. I will tackle it again this evening using both and report back. I also tried installing a kext/pre-edit package I found over at kexts.com last night with mixed success. The GOOD news was that the machine booted up properly and reached the grey pre-GUI screen (complete with the mouse pointer visible on occasion) in what appeared to be a MUCH higher resolution. It was full screen at the very least, and without doubt higher than the 1024x768 I had been dealing with. The bad news is that just before it got to the part where the desktop would popup, it got stuck on the spinning-grey-wheel-of-death and seemingly stops. The Hard drive flickered every now and then and the mouse pointer would appear randomly (and even move ifIi persistently jerked the mouse around) but overall it was frozen - the wheel just kept on spinning forever. After a few minutes the screen would go to sleep, but would rewake if I moved the mouse, leading me to believe that it was recognizing my display sleep settings and re awaking. I was unable to connect via remote desktop/screen sharing when in this situation, either. I tried a few different boot arguments when stuck in this situation to no avail. Eventually I had to restore from my backup drive...but back to 1024x768 again...albeit at least functional. I also found some com.boot.apple.plist hex files for both my 8600GS as well as my borrowed 8800GT, but neither had any effect. I had held out hope for the 8800GT being a better working option but the screen just goes to sleep after boot no matter what I try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oshawapilot Posted October 19, 2011 Author Share Posted October 19, 2011 hmm okay, seems as though you might need to do one more thing here: go into your NVDANV50HAL.kext's info.plist and under IOPCIPrimaryMatch add two more lines 0x10c310de&0xffe0ffff 0x0be310de&0xffe0ffff YAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY! It worked! On reboot, blammo, display detected, and it went to a new resolution. Switching it on the resolution prefpane (which actually shows my monitor and all available resolutions now!) instantly upped it to 1920x1080. I spent about 20 minutes totally cleaning out all the {censored} that had slowly worked it's way into my boot.plists over the last 2 weeks of fighting with this..there wasn't much, really, but I wanted to basically re-virginize them and start over. I also reinstalled virgin display kexts as I wasn't sure if some of them hadn't become bastardized as well over the last few weeks. Then I instituted your change above, as well ensuring that graphicsenabler=no was in the boot.plist. Previously I had just been completely removing the entry (instead of changing "yes" to "no") but I left it in and changed it this time. Whatever the magic combination was, IT'S WORKING! I can't explain how happy I am...this was the last stumbling block towards my system being perfect. Now, it's done.... I just checked and I'm getting the ripple effect in dashboard as well, so everything is working perfectly. THANKS! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dojomann Posted October 20, 2011 Share Posted October 20, 2011 sweet! glad I could help enjoy your hackintosh!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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