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GIGABYTE GA-945GCMX-S2 with Leopard


jackyyuen
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Hi Everyone, I am new here and this is my first post and looking for help. I did a lot of study in this forum and decide to get GIGABYTE GA-945GCMX-S2 Intel CORE 2 DUO E4500 2.2G Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 IDE or SATA hard drive. I know there is someone get the same motherboard and mention everything’s works right out of the box beside some boot up partition problem. I am going to pick up all the parts tonight and start working on it. There is some question I can think of as followings: 1, This should be a good setup for Leopard, right? 2, Is the partition problem happens on both SATA and IDE? 3, I read a fix for the boot up partition. I don’t quite understand, and I can't find it anymore. Can someone help to link it and explain how to do it in detail? I know normally newbie ask a lot stupid questions. but really looking for help here. please support. By the way, If the motherboard is not a good pick to start for newbie, few free to post suggestion. under $100.00 with or without Video. base on http://wiki.osx86project.org/ there is no HCL for leopard yet. please help. Thanks again

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Hi Everyone, I am new here and this is my first post and looking for help. I did a lot of study in this forum and decide to get GIGABYTE GA-945GCMX-S2 Intel CORE 2 DUO E4500 2.2G Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 IDE or SATA hard drive. I know there is someone get the same motherboard and mention everything’s works right out of the box beside some boot up partition problem. I am going to pick up all the parts tonight and start working on it. There is some question I can think of as followings: 1, This should be a good setup for Leopard, right? 2, Is the partition problem happens on both SATA and IDE? 3, I read a fix for the boot up partition. I don’t quite understand, and I can't find it anymore. Can someone help to link it and explain how to do it in detail? I know normally newbie ask a lot stupid questions. but really looking for help here. please support. By the way, If the motherboard is not a good pick to start for newbie, few free to post suggestion. under $100.00 with or without Video. base on http://wiki.osx86project.org/ there is no HCL for leopard yet. please help. Thanks again

 

I have the same motherboard and am very happy with it. I've installed Tiger and Leopard successfuly on this mobo. Tiger (Uphuck install with koolkal 10.4.10 combo update) runs very stable on it.

 

Leopard (Brazilmac patched method) installs easily, but you also have to apply a patch to make the Leopard partition bootable. Everything on the motherboard is supported by the patched Leopard installer...SATA, USB, audio, GMA950,& ethernet.

 

The only issues I have, with Leopard installed, is I get screen/mouse artifacts on my monitor. I suspect the GMA950 drivers need to be patched or updated. Its just a minor annoyance that I can tolerate for now and it doesn't affect the ability for Leopard to otherwise run smoothly.

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Hi Zoomie,

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I read this motherboard need to apply a patch to make the partition bootable, however, I just can't find it anymore. And last time when I read it, I don't really understand about it. Please help with the instruction.

 

 

Thanks

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Hi Zoomie,

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I read this motherboard need to apply a patch to make the partition bootable, however, I just can't find it anymore. And last time when I read it, I don't really understand about it. Please help with the instruction.

Thanks

 

I think everyone else is having the boot problem...its not just this mobo. Brazilmac has a step by step instructions on how to make the partiton bootable. Here's the link:

 

Brazilmac patched Leopard install method with boot fix

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Hi, everyone.

 

Followed all steps in BrazilMac's tutorial but can't see Darwin when starting from Leopard HD. Applied his patch to make disk bootable with no success. In my opinion disk partition isn't bootable.

Tried also to play with BIOS settings for my IDE/jMicron controller.

The only mode when leopard installs is AHCI.

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Does anyone succeed with 'make disk bootable' patch here?

I am not a newbie with osx86 installs of Tiger, but this one - can't make it. Do exactly what patch says with no error messages but still can't see Darwin after all. Just black screen.

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Does anyone succeed with 'make disk bootable' patch here?

I am not a newbie with osx86 installs of Tiger, but this one - can't make it. Do exactly what patch says with no error messages but still can't see Darwin after all. Just black screen.

 

I was able to make my Leopard partition bootable. I simply followed Brazilmac's guide, which I found to be pretty much straight forward. Its essentially the same procedure that is mentioned in other threads on this website.

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Hi Everyone,

 

Finally I got all the parts and try to install Leopard yesterday, I got in to problem because the SATA drive I used was pull from a unstable system with RAID (with I thought was a bad controller card). Spend me 4Hrs on it to confirm the drive is bad with Maxtor Drive tools error code. What a bad days. Change it to a 20GB old IDE drive everything runs smooth.

 

Almost everything works out of the box beside the sound card. Fix is very easy. I just go to http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?act...ost&id=6740 and download AzaliaAudio.pkg.zip And it was 2am my time.

 

Well, I haven't get in to change the partitation as active yet. But it still works if I boot from the DVD. I will do it tonight. Shouldn't be very hard.

 

Thanks

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Almost everything works out of the box beside the sound card. Fix is very easy. I just go to http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?act...ost&id=6740 and download AzaliaAudio.pkg.zip And it was 2am my time.

 

That's strange...I have the same motherboard and the Azalia drivers were installed properly by the install DVD. I didn't have to do any tweaking except to make the hard drive bootable.

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I have another available hard drive, so I thought I'd install Leopard with the ToH Leopard installer and see how it compares to the Brazilmac method on my GA-945GCMX-S2.

 

With the Brazilmac method, everything on my mobo was recognized and installed. After the installation, I had to apply the post patch and also enter a series of command line entries to make the hard drive bootable. Not at all difficult for a seasoned Gentoo Linux geek like me. The only issue I have is the screen artifacts that I assume are associated with the GMA950 video driver.

 

The ToH method was much simpler than Brazilmac. Everything on my mobo was recognized and installed except the Azalia driver...which was easy enough to install after the system is up and running. Installation was straightforward. The drive was unbootable, just like the Brazilmac installation, but was easier to fix with ToH. I just rebooted into the ToH DVD, then used the terminal app to enter this command:

"/usr/misc/script.sh drivename" (substitute drivename with name of your Leopard partition)

I then rebooted into Leopard goodness. My ToH install also has screen artifacts, just like the Brazilmac install. But the artifact problem seems less severe than with Brazilmac...but take that with a grain of salt, my ToH install is only a couple hours old.

 

Conclusion: Both methods work fine on the GA-945GCMX-S2 mobo, but ToH is more newbie friendly and a more straightforward installation method.

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Hi Zoomie,

 

Yes, I am using the ToH, Thats the reason I need to install the Azalia drivers.

 

Thanks for pointing out the way to make the partition bootable, I was about to go home and try that.

 

 

Actually, I am working for a computer company, I should able to get hold of more different mobo. Hope can help some other newbies in the future.

 

 

By the way, I just get the Asus eeepc, I will surprise if I can fit the OSX in it. haha.

 

 

Thanks

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Got the parts yesterday. Was able to install ToH Leopard but get kernel panic when it boots off of the harddrive, but boots fine when I boot off of cd and use "rd=disk0s1" boot option. Going to mess around w/ it more today.

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The GMA950 driver in leopard now depends on EFI like NVidia drivers. It will need a special version of NATIT to enable it. Paulicat is writing a NATIT version for GMA950 for use in leopard.

 

I have a question. Does the ethernet on the GA-945GCMX-S2 work properly? How did you get it to work? I don't want to install leopard till people figure out how to make it work properly.

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The GMA950 driver in leopard now depends on EFI like NVidia drivers. It will need a special version of NATIT to enable it. Paulicat is writing a NATIT version for GMA950 for use in leopard.

 

I have a question. Does the ethernet on the GA-945GCMX-S2 work properly? How did you get it to work? I don't want to install leopard till people figure out how to make it work properly.

 

I have the same motherboard and the networking works for me just fine without any modification after the OS install. The only driver I have had to add manually is the audio driver. At the moment I am using the ALC888.Audio.6.ports driver I found on one of the Tiger DVDs I had been using. I don't know if it's the best choice but it works ok for now. Others have reported not needing any audio drivers at all, not sure how they did that. I have not tested the GMA950 since I have an eVGA 7600GT 256mb which is working for me with no problems whatsoever(edit: actually changing resolutions causes the monitor to lose sync, good thing I had screen sharing turned on, had to reboot to recover). No other drivers needed and I haven't seen any of the tearing others have reported. Haven't tried Time Machine yet though(edit: Time Machine works). The biggest problem I've had so far is getting my Leopard drive to boot. I managed to get it installed and bootable on one drive and everything works great. I tried a lot of methods so I'm not sure what exactly was the problem and what fixed it so I'm trying to reproduce the procedure on another drive to get it sorted out. So far I'm not having much luck on the 2nd drive. (edit: got the install to the 2nd drive working but still not sure where I'm going wrong, somewhere amongst the fdisk commands.)

 

FWIW I am using a retail Leopard disk patched using the BrazilMac method installed on to a clean drive from a burned DVD. I am using my Tiger drive for any patching and terminal work.

 

The only downloaded files I have been using are the BrazilMac patch and the startupfiletool.

 

 

 

My Hardware

Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2

eVGA 7600GT 256MB PCI-E

a2140 stock clock and cooler

2GB PC2 5300

60GB, 250GB, 500GB Sata

Pioneer DVR-111D

SYBA Firewire PCI card (SD-VIA-FW1E1H at Newegg) (works and has 9-pin header)

Antec P150 case and 430 watt PS

Apple Cinema Display (aluminum 20")

Apple aluminum keyboard (haven't tried special keys yet)

iSight (works)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yo guys. I just bought a system with this mobo in it and will hopefully be setting it up later in the week.

 

What are people talking about with the artifacting using the built in graphics?

I plan on using ToH to install... what do I need to know before doing this?

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