Dell XPS 8700 haswell system - 10.9 Mavericks

[illuminarok]

Had a little bit of trouble with another 8700 that's identical to mine when upgrading 10.9.1 to 10.9.2 because the upgrade installer was "stuck" at less than one minute remaining for a little over 7 hours and I finally pulled the plug. Ended up hosing the install for good. I had to download the Mavericks installer again and for some reason the myHack installer didn't like the 10.9.2 version as I kept getting KP on boot despite replacing the mach_kernel with the one from my working 10.9.2 system. Finally had to use UB on that 10.9.2 installer and went with their FakeSMC plugins set, their ALC898 driver, along with the 14,2 smbios and Bootloader config. Used Kext Wizard to install the RTL8111 kext, and we have another working 10.9.2 XPS 8700.

[tunga]

Hey guys! Thank you for all your work trying to get this system working.

 

I have a Del XPS 8700 with the following:

i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GH

32 GB RAM

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series Graphics card.

Bios version 015.041.000.000

 

Would like get it to work with Mavericks. If possible step by step instructions would be great... I am a hackintosh newbie.

Cheers!

[slave-zeo]

Hey guys! Thank you for all your work trying to get this system working.

 

I have a Del XPS 8700 with the following:

i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GH

32 GB RAM

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series Graphics card.

Bios version 015.041.000.000

 

Would like get it to work with Mavericks. If possible step by step instructions would be great... I am a hackintosh newbie.

Cheers!

 

Yes, i'll work out a guild tonight and have it ready very soon. I think things are ironed out enough to warrant an official guide.

 

Also, I see you have 32GB of RAM. That's awesome, I was worried the xps 8700 wouldn't accept that much.

Had a little bit of trouble with another 8700 that's identical to mine when upgrading 10.9.1 to 10.9.2 because the upgrade installer was "stuck" at less than one minute remaining for a little over 7 hours and I finally pulled the plug. Ended up hosing the install for good. I had to download the Mavericks installer again and for some reason the myHack installer didn't like the 10.9.2 version as I kept getting KP on boot despite replacing the mach_kernel with the one from my working 10.9.2 system. Finally had to use UB on that 10.9.2 installer and went with their FakeSMC plugins set, their ALC898 driver, along with the 14,2 smbios and Bootloader config. Used Kext Wizard to install the RTL8111 kext, and we have another working 10.9.2 XPS 8700.

 

Sadly, I had to use UB to make an 10.9.2 installer thumb drive too. Wish one of the other utilities would have worked out. The XPS 8700 is really a quite capable OS X box after we figured out how to get it working properly. My only complaint is the WiFi will probably never work, it'd be nice for completeness' sake. 

[PlutoDelic]

Hi guys,

 

I've been going through the procedure you were succesful at, unfortunately i cant get mine to work that easily.

 

The only difference on the system i have is the AMD Radeon HD 7570 gpu card.

 

What i did is, i had a UB ready with 10.9.1, all i did is overwrite the mach_kernel with the one attached in the first pages, it booted up fine with dart=0 and installed properly.

But booting to the fresh install through UB has not been that succesful.

i've tried everything, dart=0, GraphicsEnabler=Yes/No, IGPEnabler=Yes/No, -x -v and even -s, it straight away reboots after a split second when it shows the apple logo. I even combined all of these options with each other, and then i even switched to the built-in HDMI and tried everything agian, no luck.

 

I even overwrited the 10.9.2 patched mach_kernel to the UB 10.9.1 just for the testings sake, dart=0 would not load it up but -x did, and i reinstalled with that and still nothing.

 

Any sugesstions lads?

 

Cheers

[PlutoDelic]

Just tried MyHack v3.3.1 for the first time ever. Made the USB using the Mavericks app which had 10.9.1. After all the procedure, again i copied the patched mach_kernel to the root of the flash drive. No luck on getting it up at all this time, the only time where it didnt reboot straight away was booting with -x -v -f, and it halted at "Pthread support ABORTS when sync kernel primitives misused"

 

i guess it's all about reverse engineering stuff with proprietary boards.

[jzmax22]

Hey guys, 

 

 So i just recieved my XPS 8700

 

i7 

8gb ram

Nvidia n635m 

 

I tried to install Niresh Mavericks 10.9 with the kernel you recommended.  I am able to to get to the install screen without any boot flags. The install finishes just fine. Although when i reboot after install it flashes the White apple screen for a split second and then reboots. I have tried multiple boot flag variations with no luck. Im just curious what distro/version of mavericks you are using. Any help would be great! thanks in advance. 

 

Edit: So i was successful get it up running in the wee hours of the night. Turned out to have some boot flags i didnt need, and i had back up all graphic kext. now hoe do i get my video card going full?

[PlutoDelic]

hah, you might want to share those unneeded boot flags

 

10.9.2 Booted and Installed fine with dart=0, though it wont boot it from the drive, am really stuck on that one.

 

btw, did you update the bios to A06, im starting to doubt that it could be my problem maker.

[jzmax22]

it does have the A06. i dont remember the boot flags unfortunately. now i back to square one. had a working install and messed it up some how and tried to do a fresh install and no dice..... i would really like to know how slave got this to work;

[PlutoDelic]

Yup, slave's our last hope.

 

i've tried all the standard boot flags for Intel HD but they didnt work, whether the ones Chameleon or any other bootloader. I already gave up and unmounted the AMD Radeon HD 7570 GPU as it seems not to be supported, booting with Intel HD would be just enough for me.

[jzmax22]

i dont know if mine has the intel hd graphics or not. 

[PlutoDelic]

Well, if we have the same machine than you do. Our board has a HDMI and DisplayPort, and i think using the display port u need a few extra bootflags. Those ports link to the internal gpu on the cpu.

 

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/75122/Intel-Core-i7-4770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz

 

Processor Graphics ‡ Intel® HD Graphics 4600 

Graphics Base Frequency 350 MHz
Graphics Max Dynamic Frequency 1.2 GHz

 

Heres the back of our machine, notice the video ports on the board interfaces.

 

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/dell/cnet_dell_xps8700_gallery_04_lg.jpg

 

PS, today during the chat, i was suggested to copy the patched kernel to the setup. What i did was only copy it to the root of the USB installer, and i thought the installer will copy to the drive what's already inside. I will do this test as soon as i get home, it seems like the last resort to me (unless Slave comes like a hero back)

[PlutoDelic]

Great success lads, i've finally made it.

 

What i did was as follows:

Installing, i had to use UB since MyHack does not seem to work with 10.9.2 atm. After all the procedures done, i copied the patched kernel (page 2) from slave-zeo to the root of the thumb drive. This allowed me to boot in the drive with dart=0 only

 

and i repeat, dart=0 solves a lot of issues here. and just in case if u mess up like me, it is case sensitive and Dart=0 wont work.

 

I did have some hangs while using disk utility and terminal before installing, so i ended up using dart=0 -x to install, and believe it or not, even -x wouldnt boot without dart=0, as i understood from earlier posts, -x should feature dart=0 inside, but what is happening here is a myth to me.

 

After everything was installed, you have to copy the patched kernel again but on the disk drive Mav is installed, not on the thumb like before. I've never done this since i thought the installer would feature it during the setup, again im mystified by this too. I did this through booting to the thumb drive installer, loaded the installer and opened Terminal through utilities:  

 

(CAPS may differ in your machine)

cp /Volumes/THUMBDRIVE/mach_kernel /Volumes/MAVERICKS/

after all this done, i ended having the issues with booting drives with 4K blocks, which seems a problem with OS X on large drives (boot0: error GPT), again i booted on the thumb drive installer

 

 

First you need to unmount the Mav partition in Disk Utility, then you need to enter this in the terminal: 

dd if=/usr/standalone/i386/boot1h of=/dev/disk0s2

disk0s2 is my partition with mavericks, you can either find out in Disk Utility with Info if that is yours as well, do not mess up the wrong partitions. also the command "diskutil list" will list you the volume names with the disk mount name.

 

 

After those modifications, i could boot the drive, and again i booted with dart=0 -x, it works without -x but i had freezes and assumed they are done from incompatibility, which will be sorted with post-installation.

 

It booted fine and i installed the Ethernet kext Slave-zeo provided on his 2nd post. Unfortunately i do not have well knowledge for post-installation optimizations, so i depend on tools that do it for you, and since i've used a bootloader from another forum, i've used their post-installation tool as well.

 

This is what i installed:

 

3rd Part Sata (not sure if needed)

FakeSMC v6.0.1123 (definitely need it)

USB 3.0 - Universal (i think it is needed(

AppleRTC Patch for CMOS Reset (yup, needed)

System Definitions iMac14,2 as suggested by Slave-zeo

 

I used Kext Wizard to install the Ethernet kext, Audio i have disabled since i have a Professional Sound Card.

 

After all these modifications, i could boot with dart=0 only, so you might want to add it on the org.chameleon.Boot.plist

 

just open /MAVERICKS/Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist with a text editor and search for the Kernel Flags line and add this to it:

	<key>Kernel Flags</key>
	<string>dart=0</string>

That was it, all fine now, i will welcome any tip as i have done this by using the Internal GPU from the i7 rather then the AMD Radeon HD 7570 that came with it. I would love to make the Radeon work and i am tease to try everything again with the card installed, but i doubt it'll work, or should it?

 

EDIT: just mounted back the Radeon 7570 and did a few moves to isolate what is going on.

 

First, i booted through the on-board/built-in HDMI though i put GraphicsEnabler=Yes since it was not detecting anything with No.

Since i am booting from the Intel HD GPU, it doesnt seem to cause any trouble, and i took a screeny of OS X detecting the Radeon (weirdly as a 7570M, probably due to iMac 14,2)

 

http://i58.tinypic.com/2lsw56u.jpg

 

However, things changed when plugged the display/tv to the Radeon HDMI port.

GraphicsEnabler=No results in a 1024x768 resolution and does not use most of the display, but it boots.

GraphicsEnabler=Yes results in a hang at some blue tooth controller thing which people link with Intel HD, meaning they dont seem to like co-existing. sometimes mixing it with the npci values would just hang after the bluetooth thing with IOCatalogue resetted, whatever that means.

 

Then again, i am being told to stay away from the Radeon 7570 since it is problematic. I dont mind getting rid of it for as long as the Intel HD 4600 performs well, ant it really isnt, not that it is underperforming, but one can tell the graphics are {censored}e.

 

[jzmax22]

Very nice write up. worked perfectly for me. only problem im having is shutdown. When i shut down it turns of video but system never shuts down. any suggestions?

[PlutoDelic]

Hmmm, actually i was amazed by the Power Management, the system falls in to sleep perfectly silent and wakes up in split second. I did not have any shutdown problems.

Post your org.chameleon.Boot.plist....

 

I am wondering what can we do to tune the Intel HD 4600, the IGPlatformID might impact probably.

[jzmax22]

So i figured it out. It was the kext for my usb wireless adapter that was preventing out from shutting down. As far as tuning the 4600, i actually got my gt635 to work. Now to figure out the wireless adapter problem. Its 8188cus chipset. Could only find a 10.8 kext right from realtek. But it prevents shutdown.

[slave-zeo]

A new patched kernel has been released for use with the 2014-002 Security Update. 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hrl3stmb9xkciqe/mach_kernel_patched-10.9.2.2014-002.zip

 

enjoy!

[albert E]

I have managed to get installed OS X 10.9.3(first at 10.9.2) working on my Dell XPS 8700, Intel i7, 16gB ram, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 with 1536 Video Ram. I used all the kext mentioned in this topic except:

1.) Audio doesn't work, my audio is a SB Recon3D PCI-e. Solution:  Added VoodooHDA.kext (trashing AppleHDA on S/L/E) and leaving HDAEnabler1.kext too!

2.) Internal Wireless doesn't work, Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235. Solution: Installed a USB Wi-Fi N

3. No restart/shutdown yet.

 

Does anybody had a solution for item #3 (restart & shutdown fix)?

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Update: June 4, 2014

1) Restart/Shutdown miraCUOUSLY works but takes time to about 30s to restart and/or shutdown. As long it works, will investigate why in the next chapter.

2) Memory card reader also works. No Kext. it just works. :-)

3) Will try to install OS X Yosemite but I doubt it'll work.  Watch in this channel/forum.

 

Update: June 23, 2014, 9:40am

1. I was successful in installing OS X Yosemite DP1 (now DP2) using the Clover method describe in: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/298521-easy-yosemite-1010-usb-installer-updated/

 

although I have to use a USB drive (as first boot) to boot the OS. At this moment, it is stable, everything works except as described from previous OS X Mavericks installation (above). 

[slave-zeo]

Stupid me. I had Intel Multidisplay enabled in the BIOS. I disabled it and then smooth sailing.

 

For some strange reason when I tried to reinstall my system from an USB installer of 10.9.3 It won't boot properly. The USB drive was made form the 10.9.3 app store download. It installs fine using dart=0. It even boot into safe mode. But on normal reboot it hangs on the command right after the one where it throws a bluetooth error. I'm not sure what the offending command is since there's no output after the bluetooth error. I do not believe the bluetooth error is the problem, though.  I'll post a pic of the error screen if I'm fast enough to catch it.

 

You can get away from not patching the kernel by using the clover bootloader's KernelPM setting, setting it to true in the clover.config file. I've migrated from using chameleon to clover in the past couple of weeks. It has a lot of really nice features. Sadly my install does the same thing regardless of using a patched kernel/chameleon or clover.

 

Has anyone else used the 10.9.3 download to install OS X on their 8700s. Just curious.

 

Machine's specs are in my signature.

I have managed to get installed OS X 10.9.3(first at 10.9.2) working on my Dell XPS 8700, Intel i7, 16gB ram, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 with 1536 Video Ram. I used all the kext mentioned in this topic except:

1.) Audio doesn't work, my audio is a SB Recon3D PCI-e. Solution:  Added VoodooHDA.kext (trashing AppleHDA on S/L/E) and leaving HDAEnabler1.kext too!

2.) Internal Wireless doesn't work, Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235. Solution: Installed a USB Wi-Fi N

3. No restart/shutdown yet.

 

Does anybody had a solution for item #3 (restart & shutdown fix)?

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Update: June 4, 2014

1) Restart/Shutdown miraCUOUSLY works but takes time to about 30s to restart and/or shutdown. As long it works, will investigate why in the next chapter.

2) Memory card reader also works. No Kext. it just works. :-)

3) Will try to install OS X Yosemite but I doubt it'll work.  Watch in this channel/forum.

 

I managed to install 10.10 DP1 on my 8700 but I'm getting the same boot error problem I get from 10.9.3. No boot, hangs after bluetooth error. Let me know if you figure anything out.

[illuminarok]

What is your Clover setup like? I haven't used it but I'm interested in the unpatched kernel trick you spoke of. 

[slave-zeo]

This is the start of the Dell 8700 Mavericks Guide. Please check here for further updates.

 

First thing I did was take a look at the BIOS of the system. You can get to the system BIOS by pressing F2 at boot time.

 

Make sure to Set the SATA to AHCI. You do this so OS X can read your hard drives. It should be set to AHCI already but make sure just in case.

 

Next up make sure you set the Boot Mode to [Legacy]. This is so the bootloader can load. It's possible for Clover to work in UEFI, but I haven't been able to figure it out. So for now change it to [Legacy].

 

 

<The next part of the Guid will go here. Have patience, please.>

 

 

What is your Clover setup like? I haven't used it but I'm interested in the unpatched kernel trick you spoke of. 

 

Honestly, I just installed Clover and it did its thing. I don't recall doing anything special. But if it automatically reboots when booting (normal unpatched haswell behavior) you can use the keyboard to go to settings on the Clover boot screen. Under Settings is Binary Patches and under it is a KernelPM option, make sure it's checked. But if I recall clover had it checked by default. Below are some photos to illustrate clover's boot time options for the kernel.

 

Default unthemed boot screen, the gear is the Options button

 

In the Options select 'Binaries patching menu'

 

Finally, Make sure 'Kernel PM patch' is checked. This eliminates the need for a patched kernel.

[jaleung]

Guys thanks for the effort and write up, really appreciate it!

 

I'm new to hackintosh and I'll be having an xps8700 soon, just wondering if anyone has got any luck in dual booting the maching with win 8?

 

cheers.

[slave-zeo]

Guys thanks for the effort and write up, really appreciate it!

 

I'm new to hackintosh and I'll be having an xps8700 soon, just wondering if anyone has got any luck in dual booting the maching with win 8?

 

cheers.

 

I've not had luck dual booting from the same hard drive, but if you have 2 drives (HD+HD or SSD+HD) it should be cake. Put OS X on one drive and Windows 8 on the other. Of course I've not had luck dual booting form the same drive on any system with clover. I've got it to work with chameleon, but you kind of need clover to patch the kernel to keep our system from rebooting at boot time.

 

It's a bit tricky to set up (at first, until you learn the ropes) but the xps 8700 is a great hackintosh. 

[jaleung]

thanks for the quick reply!

 

so which bootloader in the end will I be using if - fingers crossed - installation is successful for dual booting?

 

pardon me if I'm asking dumb questions....

[blonny]

Guys thanks for the effort and write up, really appreciate it!

 

I'm new to hackintosh and I'll be having an xps8700 soon, just wondering if anyone has got any luck in dual booting the maching with win 8?

 

cheers.

I have yet to actually give another go at this, but in the early days I was trying with a dual boot and I'd highly recommend against it.  I found that trying to work through any issues I had were always tainted by the fact that the dual boot was sabotaging my efforts.

 

Most of the forums I've read say its a no go and ultimately for 60$ or 80$ for a separate drive, you'll save yourself a lot of time.

 

Also thanks to everybody on this post. Can't wait to give this another go.

[slave-zeo]

I have yet to actually give another go at this, but in the early days I was trying with a dual boot and I'd highly recommend against it.  I found that trying to work through any issues I had were always tainted by the fact that the dual boot was sabotaging my efforts.

 

Most of the forums I've read say its a no go and ultimately for 60$ or 80$ for a separate drive, you'll save yourself a lot of time.

 

Also thanks to everybody on this post. Can't wait to give this another go.

 

Exactly, Blonny! I totally agree with you.

 

If everything weren't running so damn sweet on my system I'd put some effort into figuring out same drive dual booting with Clover. I really don't want to wipe and reinstall a system running so well. 

 

Also, on a side note (i'll integrate this into the guide when I have time) the hard drive that came in my 8700 uses 4k blocks, I had to manually install clover to the mbr (I forgot to mention this earlier). Otherwise I got the boot0-something error when rebooting after installing Clover.

thanks for the quick reply!

 

so which bootloader in the end will I be using if - fingers crossed - installation is successful for dual booting?

 

pardon me if I'm asking dumb questions....

 

Clover. You NEED Clover for the boot time KernelPM patching for Haswell CPUs. AFAIK Chameleon doesn't do this (yet).