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System Assessment - Snow Leopard on Irwindale Xeon


Jasara
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I would like an assessment on my HP Workstation xw8200. I need to keep Windows for school as I have many projects that will require me to use Visual Studio but I also have XP as an OS so she is getting old. I have 2 hard drives and able to dedicate one of them for OS X. My concern is that HP did not send a copy of Windows XP with this and no recovery partition is available so I want to be pretty confident that I can successfully accomplish the install without losing XP. Thanks in advance.

 

My current setup includes ...

Motherboard: HO 08B4h

BIOS: HP 786B8 v2.10 (05/31/2006)

Memory: 8 x 1G PC2-3200 (ECC, 200 MHz)

CPU:

Dual Intel Xeon 3.2G (Irwindale, bus:200MHz, rated FSB:800MHz)

Video: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (256MB, DDR)

 

Attached is an export from Device Manager (.pdf)Device Manager Report.pdf

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2006, are you serious? I'd try Tiger.

 

The latest version that'll work with your video card is 10.5.5.

 

Forget about recovery partitions and XP.

Buy a second hard drive, then you don't have to worry about losing any data and it makes the install process much easier as well.

 

I wonder why someone would put 32-bit Windows XP on a machine with 8GB RAM. Did you know that you have 5GB RAM that you can never use?

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Hello

@Gringo Vermelho...

I think only FX 5500 work in 10.5.5 and doesn't work in 10.5.6 or high(i have one FX 5500)

But i believe FX 5200 work in 10.5.5/5.6/5.7... in that time i looking for info about my FX 5500 and i saw this info about FX 5200(i think was oldnapalm that said this)... so i think FX 5200 work in these versions... Or not?

 

@Jasara

 

Welcome

anyway... this PC is old, i fact is waste time try install OSX on it... currently you can buy a new PC with a low budget.

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Before doing anything I would suggest backing up your XP, Clonezilla is good at doing this if you have a spare drive to use for the backup, that way if anything goes wrong you still have backup to restore from

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What? If he has a spare drive for a backup, then he should just use that drive to install OS X on in the first place. Then there would be no need to make a backup.

 

Pimentel:

 

Support for the entire 5xxx series was removed as of 10.5.6.

It can work in later versions but you must use drivers and frameworks from 10.5.5

 

It's not a waste of time, he can run OS X, he just has to use an old version. The hardware is good, except the FX 5200 which is a terrible video card even for 2006.

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Hello

 

@Gringo Vermelho

 

hum... i undestand now...

 

In 10.5.5 only work old apps(itunes 7, quicktime7, iwork 8)...in the end him will only install leopard to see the system running...

But if he want proceed with installation... who can stop him?

 

The first question is: where get leopard retail and how make a usb bootable with it?

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Modern Chameleon on a flash drive can boot Leopard. Or you could go old school and do the swap trick with a Chameleon boot CD. I still have a couple of those :D

 

But yes, I think the only legal way to get Leopard is to buy a used copy.

 

We don't know what he wants to do with OS X, maybe itunes, quicktime and iwork is not important.

 

I'd go as far as to recommend the JaS 10.5.4 Client/Server distro, if it's still out there.

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Thanks for your suggestions, I have Macbook Pro that came with Snow Leopard, I also have Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection and Office 2011. I simply prefer Mac over PC and XP support will be gone soon so it makes sense to me to try this out. I have no problem with buying a new video card as long as I can get Snow Leopard, I have the original video card still: NVdia Quadro FX 1400 but I pulled it because I needed VGA. And yes Gringo, I am aware of the fact that Windows cannot use all 8G RAM installed but it was in there when I bought it.

 

What I would like to do is install Adobe CS5.5, Office 2011, MAMP and XCode on the empty drive but I would not be able to use anything less than Snow Leopard because of my software requirements and obviously the version of OS X that I already have.

 

If all I need is a video card, I will pick up one and go for it but I obviously do not want to invest too much in to a machine of this age.

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Something like a Geforce 9500 GT or a 8600/8800 GT will be fine for what you'll be doing. If you were in Brazil I'd sell you my old 9800 GTX+. Please don't buy a crappy card like the 8400 GS :D

Stay relatively period-accurate - don't get anything newer than that, your old PSU probably won't like it. Though I suppose it's a good quality PSU, going by the rest of the components. For sure that PC wasn't cheap back in 2006.

 

The DVD that came with your MacBook Pro is model-specific and will only boot on a MacBook Pro. There's a guide somewhere on here on what you can do to get around that. /EDIT I found it, see link below.

 

Use your MacBook to prepare an OS X installer on a 8GB USB flash drive. Be careful that you don't install the Hackintosh boot loader (or anything else) on the MacBook's internal drive by accident!

It's great that you have the MacBook, this way you can easily experiment with things until you get a good result.

 

Your Irwindale Xeon is based on the Prescott Pentium 4 which means you will not be able to use an unmodified kernel (Intel OS X only supports Core microarchitecture CPUs).

Either try to use the Chameleon kernelpatcher module, or a Voodoo Kernel derivative. If you use a modified kernel, it must match the version of Snow Leopard that you'll be installing.

 

You don't need to do anything to your blank hard drive, just plug it in. Before starting the installation process you'll be able to run Disk Utility and format it first, just like you would on a real Mac.

I hope your PC has SATA. PATA will work but it's a hassle even when it's Intel, usually PATA requires unplugging other drives, changing jumpers, specific BIOS settings, using modified drivers etc.

If you manage to boot into your USB installer but Disk Utility does not show any drives at all, that's your first sign that you need to do some work in this area.

 

Note that I cannot promise you that everything (sound and ethernet in particular) will work. You'll have to look for specific solutions on here for those. If they exist.

Macs don't have PS2 ports. Use a USB keyboard + mouse.

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Hello

I tink doesn't exist Leopard retail...

so also try iDeneb 10.5.5, i used it(i past when i had FX 5500 and Pentium 4 socket 4xx kkkkkk)
This worked great and iDeneb install in almost everything

Note: FX series isn't of 2006. but is of 2003... i remember about this...

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I do not know if it has AGP but it does have an open PCI-E. I do not play games on this and I do not watch movies either so I do not really need an ASUS GTX660, it is basically for school (software engineering) and research but I also do web development on the side so I need Snow Leopard or I cannot install Adobe CS5.5. No CRT monitors ;-) I have Dual 32" LED's. I do not mean to pester you with questions, I am basically wanting to know if I can use a tut like this:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/280756-guide-the-all-in-one-guide-to-vanilla-os-x-including-chameleon-dsdt-for-beginners-updated-for-mavericks/

to get my current configuration running 10.6 or if I will need to make extensive hardware changes (in which case I would probably break down and order a Mac Pro in the spring).

 

Thanks again for your help

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Read my post again, way ahead of you :P . Your board has PCI-E, I edited my post (several times) after looking over your specs pdf again.

 

Your 8 years old power supply would probably burn out instantly if you tried to use a modern video card like the GTX 660. Plus it won't have the required connectors anyway.

 

If you have a Snow Leopard DVD and a MacBook Pro to work from, I highly recommend that you don't follow Pimentel's advice. Don't use a distro.

 

The Snow Leopard DVD is put together in a different way than never, downloadable, versions of OS X. Therefore you cannot use a guide verbatim for newer versions.

 

Use a mix of Snow Leopard installation guides and Mavericks/Lion/Mountain Lion how-to's for creating a bootable installer on a flash drive.

 

With modern guides a lot of steps will not be applicable to your situation because of the age of your hardware and because almost all guides assume a vanilla-kernel capable CPU, which you don't have.

 

A flash drive installer is always preferred, it's much more manageable, as I said before you'll be able to work on it on your Macbook pro until it behaves. You won't be able to do this if you install from a hard drive partition or a burned DVD. You won't be able to do the boot CD swap trick anyway because as I said your install DVD will require modifications before it will boot on anything but your MacBook Pro.

 

Basic procedure:

 

Use Disk Utility to "restore" your Snow Leopard install DVD to a USB flash drive. Once it is there, make the modifications required in order to unlock it from the MacBookPro model identifier. Then Install Chameleon to the flash drive and add required configuration settings and whatever else is needed in /Extra. See if it boots. If not rinse and repeat...

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Great. Feel free to come back to this topic and ask for an opinion once you find a video card that might be suitable. :D

For now, you can follow the guide that shows you how to unlock your Snow Leopard DVD, once you have "restored" it onto a flash drive using Disk Utility.

 

Anyway he can also try SL retail+nawcom modCD

 

No Pimentel..that will not work...if you're going to help, please pay attention!

 

He can't use his DVD as-is because it isn't the retail DVD. It came with his MacBook Pro and it's locked to that machine. He needs to unlock it first, which means he'll have to transfer its contents to another type of media anyway.

 

At that point it makes much more sense to build an installer on a flash drive, especially since he has the MacBook Pro to work from. You get much more control that way.

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Hello

 

@Gringo Vermelho

 

Ok... DVD comes with Apple Computers doesn't work in PCs(to make a hack just booting it+Boot CD)...
 

You get much more control that way.

 

 

You're right... Put/remove kexts from usb stick is better than put/remove from boot CD

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Before doing anything I would suggest backing up your XP, Clonezilla is good at doing this if you have a spare drive to use for the backup, that way if anything goes wrong you still have backup to restore from

Clonezilla looks very interesting, thank you, I will try that out with an external HD.

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If you use a second hard drive for OS X (which I highly recommend) you won't have to back up XP. The drive that holds Windows XP will not be touched by the OS X installer or anything else. It's perfectly safe, Disk Utility cannot write to NTFS formatted drives. The only thing you can do from Disk Utility is to format the entire drive, but that's not really something you can do by accident.

 

You could probably install OS X onto the external hard drive, I guess it could work. It depends how well USB (or your TI Firewire if it's a Firewire drive) works from the get go.

 

Actually, you could probably even install Snow Leopard on the external drive while it's connected to your MacBook Pro, assuming it allows that.

Then make the required modifications when the installation is done (Chameleon bootloader, configuration settings, drivers, kernelpatcher module or patched kernel) and then connect it to your PC and see if it boots.

That's definitely the approach I would take, and what I would have recommended from the beginning if I had known that you have an external drive.

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Hello

 

@Gringo Vermelho...

 

I think only FX 5500 work in 10.5.5 and doesn't work in 10.5.6 or high(i have one FX 5500)

 

But i believe FX 5200 work in 10.5.5/5.6/5.7... in that time i looking for info about my FX 5500 and i saw this info about FX 5200(i think was oldnapalm that said this)... so i think FX 5200 work in these versions... Or not?

 

@Jasara

 

Welcome

anyway... this PC is old, i fact is waste time try install OSX on it... currently you can buy a new PC with a low budget.

It does not really have anything to do with a budget really, regardless of age, this is not a basic desktop pc, it is a workstation that still runs faster than my wife's new $2,200 Windows 8.1 "doorstop", as I have come to call it. If nothing else, it will be an educational experience and at best, I will have a third Mac ... which leads me to another question, I have a dinosaur mac mini here that I use for a media server, it runs 10.4, is it possible that it would have the video drivers I am looking for or do you know where they are located?

 

Thanks again

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