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HOWTO: Install osx86 onto an ASUS Pundit P1-AH2


mycroes
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Hi all,

 

I had quite some troubles getting osx86 to run on my ASUS Pundit P1-AH2, so I thought I'd post some information here...

First off: http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelme...l2=3&l3=408.

 

Specs of my machine:

Athlon 64 X2 3800+

1GB PC2-6400 DDR2 (G.E.I.L.)

250GB Samsung Spinpoint S-ATA2 hd

20GB Quantum IDE hd (until sata driver works)

NEC DVD-Writer

 

There's onboard nforce lan, onboard geforce 6150 video, onboard azalia sound.

 

Installing

I used the JaS 10.4.8 install DVD. I actually used the first one, without the ppf patch that was released later, because I already had this DVD. Booting the install DVD worked like a charm, but my sata a harddisk didn't get detected. medevil is writing a driver, it already works for most nforce sata chipsets but not on nforce mcp 51, which is what is used in this machine. So off I was to add an IDE disk. The mainboard in this barebone pc only has one IDE connector, so it had to share the connector with the DVD drive. I hooked an IDE hd and the DVD drive up and tried 2 different cables and various master/slave combinations and I couldn't get the DVD to boot anymore... It would start and do some stuff, then try to boot off the hd but it would never try to boot off the DVD itself. Now there's an IDE cable that comes with the barebone, so I decided I'd give it a last try with that cable. The cable is very short though, so first I had to figure out where to put the drives. When I connected that cable everything worked again. Now the DVD would boot, the harddisk was found.

 

Now I ran into my next problem. I'm not sure what caused it, but it could be a bad harddisk. Anyway, it would show up in disk utility as 7.9 GB hd, but it's 20GB. I booted into linux, fdisked the drive, emptied it, created a new primary partition 1 taking up all the space with partition type af and made active and rebooted. Now the disk showed up correctly in disk utility, I erased it as hfs, journaled and went on with installing.

 

I had to reinstall a couple of times, and the install I'm currently working with I left out everything, except the AMD support. I already tried installing with natit and some other stuff, but that wasn't giving me much pleasure. I assume you do the same and install without any other optional components, though you can install Azalia audio support and other stuff if you like...

 

After the install completed you need to boot to safe mode, so at the boot prompt smash a key and enter "-s" (without the quotes). When it's all booted type "mount -uw /" (without the quotes) and then type "./patcher amd_1048_new.txt" (without the quotes). I know this is not what it says while installing, but the file that gets mentioned while installing isn't there. A lot of stuff will probably get patched. I have no clue if it's needed, but it didn't harm my setup.

 

When I tried to boot after this I'd end up with some text displaying on my screen, perhaps even kernel panics, I can't really remember. I decided I'd best start at removing the Geforce* kexts from /System/Library/Extensions, so I moved them all to another folder and until now didn't do anything with them. I also moved all NV* kexts, but they got back after installing natit (and uninstalling again) and they don't seem to be in the way of anything.

 

If all is well it should boot now, it did for me...

 

More, more, more!

Now you should have a basic osx86 install. I didn't have working networking. I didn't have audio, my screen resolution was 1024x768 and I didn't have access to my sata hd.

 

Networking

This system has onboard nforce network. Linux reports it as 'MCP51 Ethernet Controller', which is good enough for me. In linux I use the forcedeth driver, so I thought the forcedeth darwin port would work. planetbeing did great work at http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=12933. I downloaded the driver from there and was going to set it up for my system. The device ID is 0x026910DE and it's not in the list. So I edited the Info.plist file in the forcedeth.kext and added this device ID to the list of devices already there. I first tried the forcedeth.kext, it detected a 100 Mbps link, but it didn't do much more for me... Then I added my device ID to the forcedeth-nockd.kext and loaded that one, and that did work.

 

Now if you want you can copy this one over to /System/Library/Extensions but it spams dmesg a lot, so I decided to leave it on my desktop and load when needed. I pmed the author and he told me that the spamming was happening because this is the debug version, hence the d in nockd. forcedeth-nock.kext wasn't working right now, but the author told me it was just a matter of recompiling, so it should work very soon. The spamming is no show-stopper though, so on to the next part!

 

Audio

When networking was working there were only a couple of things that still had to be fixed. One was audio, so I decided to see if I could find a bit more about HD audio support in OS X and about the device that was on the mainboard. It turned out to be Realtek ALC 861, or in short Azalia audio. The thread at http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=34075 discusses how to set up Azalia audio. I didn't install the kext for this one, but I already noticed it was in /Backuped-Extensions or something like that, so I copied it over to /System/Library/Extensions and followed the guide. What I needed were 2 device ID's, one for part A, which is 0x10EC0861 and one for part B, which is 0x026c10de. After adding these device ID's to the Info.plist files as described at the thread I just linked too, and rebooting, sound worked just fine.

 

Graphics

As I mentioned above I removed all Geforce* kexts to get my machine to boot. If the kexts are there it'll only boot when using -x, and that also leaves you with a vesa driver and 1024x768 resolution. I'd rather have a normal boot than booting into safe mode with the extensions there, so I left them where I put them. I tried installing natit with the installer from http://installers.dl.am, but that got me stuck with a boot that wasn't working. I tried macvidia drivers in another install, and that way I also ended up with a system that wouldn't do a normal boot, but I still have to try them again. Meanwhile, if anyone can point me to more sources that might help to solve this problem I'd be happy to check them out, but now I'm stuck with 1024x768.

 

S-ATA

I'm testing as much as I can for medevil and bikedude (http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=35985) but we haven't been able to get more than read support on mcp51 sata drives. Eventually support will be there and you can just use a sata hd, for now I have my disks laying on top of my barebone. This is work in progress and I can't say when it'll be done, but again this is not a show-stopper.

 

Other stuff

What else can I discuss? USB works fine, firewire should work fine too, DVD/CD burning should work like a charm, but I haven't tried that yet. If you have any questions I can answer I'd be happy to do so.

 

Credits

This is the most important of this small guide... Credits go out to:

Semthex for doing great work on the kernel

JaS for the excellent installer DVD(s)

Bikedude for starting to work on nforce4sata

medevil for continuing that work

Rammjet for the audio solution

planetbeing for the forcedeth port to darwin

And of course all the ppl that helped me at any time when I had questions on irc!

 

I hope more ppl will buy this barebone and run OSx86 on it, it's a nice stand-in for a real mac!

Greetings,

 

Michael

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