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Snow Leopard on an AMD PC (ECS A880LM-M mobo)


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Even though I am a "newb" here, I have viewed this forum a few times over the years looking at the progress of OSx86 and how different users have been able to install Mac on PCs. I have been able to do this for an HP Pavilion running Leopard 10.5.1, but now since I have upgraded, I wanted to try Snow Leopard on the mobo posted in the topic line.

 

Additional specs include 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 500GB SATA HDD, AMD Phenom X4 820 Processor @ 2.10GHz, NVidia GeForce GT 240 card at 1GB DDR2...

 

As I looked around the forum, I saw a step for installing at http://www.insanelym...howtopic=227592, so I am currently going through that...

 

My first steps to install was with the Hazard 10.6.2 and before loading the installation, I had to change a few settings: First in the BIOS, I had to change from IDE to AHCI in order for this to run properly. Next, I had two DVD-RW drives: one SATA and one IDE, so I had to boot from the SATA drive first. Last and more importantly, I have the 500GB HDD as a second drive...My initial drive is used for other OSes.

 

After those settings are made, I used Kabyl Bumby CD to boot up, then replaced it with the Hazard distro. After that DVD stopped spinning, I pressed F5 and selected the disk, BUT before I pressed enter, I typed -v maxmem=4096 busratio=20 for the installation to start. After that loaded up, I formatted the 500GB drive and then started the installation with the kexts selected for install like AppleAzaliaAudio, LegacyAppleRTC, AMD, Legacy_kernel (couldn't load properly without this) and NVinject (NVenabler is better for NVidia cards, though).

 

Installation did not take long (about 30 minutes) and on first boot I loaded Nawcom's CD again and used the -v maxmem=4096 busratio=20 to load Snow Leopard with 4GB of memory. I have not been able to start with 8GB yet as increasing the value of maxmem did not work.

 

I have the Chameleon bootloader installed and have upgraded to 10.6.5 but I can't get it to load without the CD yet. I will continue to follow the instructions given in the link to see if I can do so. For any further details, let me know. I'm not sure if I can post YouTube links here or not but there is one that I used to go step-by-step to install properly on my AMD system...

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Update...

 

I am able to load 10.6.5 after going through the instructions on the other thread. However, I still would have to type in -v maxmem=4096 busratio=16 in order to load up the system...

 

Also just ran into some bad news: I just installed the basic 10.6.6 update...can't boot directly from HDD it seems...I have to use Nawcom's CD. I hope I would not have to modify the boot file again...

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Update to 10.6.8,use the legacy kernel installer from nawcoms blog,boot with arch=i386 -force64.

 

I will try that...I think once I tried to use the 10.6.8 combo update and then tried to install the kernel installer but I hit a kernel panic before it installed...I will send an update when I finish the attempt

 

Thanks

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Well I was able to update to 10.6.8 and boot using the CD and then without...thanks for the tip!

 

Now I just have to get my ethernet working and I am set...Plus the audio isn't working correctly...if I'm not mistaken, that has been a common problem with the updates...

 

Also, could I add those commands to my boot.plist file?

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Glad to hear it helped you.Yes,add them to the plist if you already haven't used the options in the installer package.Just check and add if they're not there..So im guessing the 8 gigs of ram is okay now?Hope you get the ethernet and the sound going.

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Glad to hear it helped you.Yes,add them to the plist if you already haven't used the options in the installer package.Just check and add if they're not there..So im guessing the 8 gigs of ram is okay now?Hope you get the ethernet and the sound going.

 

Well I don't know how to incorporate the 8 gigs as 4 gigs is all I could use to start properly...anything over that freezes the boot screen...

 

I have a Realtek ethernet card (PCIe FE Family Controller) so I will try the kext that comes from nawcom's site...

 

Update:

 

Well, I tried to boot with arch=i386 maxmem=8192 -force64 and when it booted, the OS was able to recognize a quad-core processor and all of my memory... :wink2:

 

I have a Property List Editor program, but it never loads right...If I had that working then I would be able to add those lines to the boot file...doing it via Terminal doesn't go well...

 

Update again...smh

 

I figured out why Property List Editor and Kext Helper did not work...I was in 64 bit mode...they don't work in that mode for me so I will modify the bootloader and then see if I get everything working properly...

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Figure your way around that and you're good to go.

 

It's taking me a good amount of figuring it out lol

 

For some reason, the way that I modified the boot.plist file isn't working when I try to boot. Here is what I added to the file:

 

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>arch=i386</string>

 

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>maxmem=8192</string>

 

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>-force64</string>

 

If I try to boot with this added, the system will shut down. I would have to type that in before booting in order to get to the OS....

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