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DFI Blood Iron P35 Updated w/ How To for all P35 and similar Mobo's

strangedaze
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strangedaze
strangedaze
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UPDATE NOVEMBER 12th 2008: Hey everyone I just wanted to give you an update on how the Blood Irons are doing. One word GREAT! I've been doing OSX86 for quite a while now and have built my friends/family and myself quite a few different machines, but out of all the set-ups I've used I still enjoy using my DFI Blood Iron the most (Note I haven't tried any of the new 45 mobo's with osx86). Here's a few tips for anyone that's planning on picking up a DFI BloodIron and I'll have a couple links at the bottom. NOTE THE INSTALLATION METHOD DESCRIBED BELOW SHOULD WORK ON ALMOST ALL MAC COMPATIBLE HARDWARE, and should give a good idea to anyone not familiar with Boot132 and custom installs.

 

My Current Set-Up:

* DFI BloodIron Motherboard P35-T2RL

* Intel E5200 Wolfdale CPU 45nm overclocked to 3.8ghz

* Evga 8800GT

* 2 Samsung 250GB HD's, 1 Seagate 250GB....All Sata

* LG IDE DVD, and LG DVD IDE Burner

* Coax Digital Out to DAC hooked up to studio monitors, All sound works along with Mic. In.

* Dell 3007WFP-HC

This is kind of elaborate set-up and by no means you need all this, but I would suggest a 45nm CPU, Sata HD's, and LG IDE DVD drives, and a 8800GT or 8600GT

 

Install for anyone that wants the newest latest greatest install method: Remember I'm posting this on Nov. 12th 2008, in a couple months this might not be the "latest greatest" so be sure to check out the Leopard Installation Forum once in a while

 

What you need:

-Spare HD or Partition that can be temporarily used (must have HFS+ format support, Disk Utility is the best for this)

-About 3-4 hours of free time maybe less or more depending on how good you are with computers.

-Mac OS X Leopard Retail Install Disc, preferably the latest one...10.5.5 older ones will work though.

-Computer with osx86 compatible graphics card and CD/DVD drive

 

1st: You need to download a copy of boot132 and burn the image to a CD/DVD correctly ie. Disk Util. for mac MagicISO for windows. If you don't have a copy of Boot132 download it here: CLICK

 

2nd: This step has 2 choices, either you can use a Spare HD and clone your Mac OS X Retail Install Disc onto that HD making sure it's mac format OR you can pick yourself up a DVD DL and burn the Mac OS X Retail Install Disc onto that.

 

You might want to print the rest of these steps or write reminders down since you are about to restart your computer.

3rd: Place Boot132 Disc into CD/DVD drive and restart your computer make sure you have CD boots first set in bios. While in BIOS you want to also want to check a couple things. Make sure AHCI is enabled under HD/Disk options. Also make sure your HD that you wish to install Mac on is set to 1st priority on the HD boot options. Note this option is not the same as the option for setting your boot devices, you still want 1st boot device on CD/DVD. OK so your bios is fine and ready to go. The Boot132 disc you just burnt should take you to a black screen that says a few things then says something like Boot:_ if it doesn't boot into the CD chances are you burned it wrong.

 

IF YOU USED A SPARE HD USE THIS METHOD

4th: At the black screen with white lettering "boot132 screen" you want to push enter here. Next screen with ask for a number 80 and up. You'll want to do this type "80" press enter if you don't see your Mac OS X Retail Clone HD name here you'll want to push esc. and try "81" enter if it's not here keep repeating. After you get to 85 you either have a {censored} load of HD's and Partitions or you didn't clone your disc to HD right. OK so once you find your HD with the Install Disc on it, you want to push enter to boot into it. The familiar Apple screen should be coming up now.

 

IF YOU USED A DVD DL USE THIS METHOD

4th: At the first black screen with white lettering "boot132 screen" you want to take your Boot132 disc out and insert your DVD DL Mac Install Disc. Push enter and you should see the familiar install screen.

 

THE REST OF THE STEPS APPLY FOR BOTH DVD AND HD METHODS

5th: Once your install screen loads you want to install leopard like normal to the HD of your choice (MAKE SURE THE HD IS CLEAN AND GUID, if it's not you can select disk utility from the top menubar and prep it. Also before you finalize and install leopard to your HD you want to customize the install and uncheck X11 (glitchy with all macs.... osx86 or real) and all of the unnecessary printer drivers, I normally uncheck everything except the printer drivers I'm going to need. Install.

 

6th: Once it's done install your going to need to boot from the Boot132 disc to access your new leopard install. On the first Boot132 screen press enter on the second screen you should have to type "80" and press enter this should show your HD's name that has Leopard now installed on it. If it doesn't press esc. and try 81 and so on. BTW if your install isn't on "80" your going to need to go into bios and set your HD priorities right so that the next steps will work properly.

 

7th: OK so great your able to boot into leopard without problems. If your not able to boot into leopard at all it's most likely due to a graphic card problem and you'll have to use the simple method listed below.

 

8th: Install your graphics drivers with EFI Studio found at in "BloodIron Package" the bottom of the page. Note you must be logged in to download. If you don't see your graphics drivers on the EFI Studio list you'll need to use Natit or NVinject.

If you never used EFI studio it's real simple, here's a quick run down: Open EFI Studio, under Device choose "Display" then under that change "ATI Radeon HD 2400-256MB" to your current graphics card. Click "Add Device" then click "write to com.apple.Boot.plist" Thats it, real simple and great results for video cards :P

 

9th: Install your sound drivers, by using AppleHDA Patcher v1.20 (download found at bottom). And the sound card dump.

If you haven't done this before here's a quick rundown. Place the unzipped "AppleHDAPatcherv1.20" on your desktop and the unzipped "ALC_885_Codec By MikeInNS" txt file on your desktop. Simply drag the txt "ALC_885_Codec By MikeInNS" file onto your "AppleHDAPatcherv1.20" (frog guy) it will automatically open run and say you can now restart your computer.

DO NOT RESTART YOUR COMPUTER HERE YET THOUGH. If your using this install method for a different mobo you'll need a different dump .txt file that corresponds to your mobo.

 

10th: Install Chameleon v1.0.11 you can download it by clicking here it's the first result and you'll want to download the .zip file found on the right hand side of the page, it wouldn't let me post a direct link here and I didn't want to risk posting a hot-link to the file and getting this taken down, sorry about that. Open up Chameleon and install it.

 

11th: Take your Boot132 disc out and boot up Leopard. FYI it will not boot right if your Leopard install disc wasn't set to first boot priority. And you'll need to use boot132 to start up leopard to fix any issues.

 

12th: Congrats, hope that didn't take to long :P You should be able to install leopard updates now without problem. If you have any problems your best bet is to troubleshoot in the boot132 thread found here.

-----------------------------------------------

SIMPLE INSTALLATION METHOD

 

1st: Grab yourself a copy of iDeneb v1.3

 

2nd: Boot into CD

 

3rd: From drivers list you'll want to make sure these are what's checked the rest are up to you.

*I would suggest Vanilla kernel.

*ALC883 (not the same as ALC885 but should work if not refer to step 9 of the complex install)

*You Video Card Drivers

*You shouldn't need any chipset or network patches

*Remember less is more as far as patches go.

 

4th:Install and boot into leopard. This method won't be as good as the Boot132 method but will perform very well, make sure to troubleshoot in the Leopard Installation thread if you have any issues (please also check if updates mess up your install or not before installing them (you only have to check major updates which come out every couple months and most the time they're fine to install without patching first you want to be safe rather then sorry)

 

 

Hope that helps :D I'm not on Insanely Mac very often anymore but feel free to trouble shoot in this thread. Good luck and enjoy Leopard! :)

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BloodIron_Pack.zip

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^_^
^_^
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Hi, thanks for the infor.

I am thinking of building a Hackintosh myself if i don't see anything i like at Macworld 2008.

 

Just wondering if the sata, ide, firewire, sleep, restart, shutdown works?

 

Might just give it a shot as it is cheap,

but DFI website looks cheesy tho, a bit of quality concern.

And wondering if anyone else used it, hope to get more feedback if the next OSX update comes.

 

Thanks in advance ;)

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strangedaze
strangedaze
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Yep all those work. Frankly this board is flawless I mean EVERYTHING works with ease. And the only extra driver needed was the audio which has full support. To find the audio driver google ACL885 osx86 drivers, you'll find a text document codec on insanelymacs website then download AppleHDA 1.20 or the latest version for leopard, and then drag and drop the text document "codec" and wallah. GL with your build kunijp

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shishnit
shishnit
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Yeah I would like more input/opinions as well. I was pretty set on the bad axe 2, but for half the price and not going to be outdated soon, this may change my mind.

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Onetrack
Onetrack
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Right on Strangedaze - I just bought a Blood Iron for the penryn support - been investigating and this seems like a great board.

 

I've got 8 gig of ram and hunting for a quad, going to make a killer system with it :)

Great find on the board man ( I sold your Badaxe btw ! ha)

 

 

Looks like a very compatible mobo. I think this may be my next choice. The specs look good all around, great choice.

 

-Stell

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shila
shila
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Hello,

 

I also think this could be my next choice!

 

@strangedaze:

Is it a "BloodIron_P35-T2L" or a "BloodIron_P35-T2RL" which you are using?

 

thanks in advance. I´m also interested in hearing about other success story´s.

shila

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Wall Flower
Wall Flower
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Well, I came across this lovely little thread here when searching about google. I thought "Oh hey. I'm using that exact same motherboard right now." and thought that it might be nice to give this here idea a try.

 

So right now I'm torrenting kalyway leopard and thinking about what I'll need to prepair. I'll download the ALC885 driver mentioned in the first post and probably a display driver.

 

One thing bothers me, though. I'm using the onboard raid controller for a level zero array. I remember when I installed windows I had to use a program to place the driver needed into my windows install image. I forget why, but it only wanted to accept the driver via floppy disk and I have no floppy disk drive. Am I going to run into similar in order to get my RAID working? Will mac's built-in partitioner be able to deal with this? Anything else I should be concerned with?

 

Thanks in advance for the advice.

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Team Scream
Team Scream
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Well, I came across this lovely little thread here when searching about google. I thought "Oh hey. I'm using that exact same motherboard right now." and thought that it might be nice to give this here idea a try.

 

So right now I'm torrenting kalyway leopard and thinking about what I'll need to prepair. I'll download the ALC885 driver mentioned in the first post and probably a display driver.

 

One thing bothers me, though. I'm using the onboard raid controller for a level zero array. I remember when I installed windows I had to use a program to place the driver needed into my windows install image. I forget why, but it only wanted to accept the driver via floppy disk and I have no floppy disk drive. Am I going to run into similar in order to get my RAID working? Will mac's built-in partitioner be able to deal with this? Anything else I should be concerned with?

 

Thanks in advance for the advice.

 

I would not count on the onboard RAID working with OSX, Apple likes to use it's own RAID tools/config for RAID.

The reason you had to use the "F6" method (and your floppy drive) when you installed windows to get RAID working is that Windows does not include native raid drivers so that F6 method allows you to install those drivers during the installation process.

 

I have an 8 core set up now and I am running a very stable raid but I created it after I installed Leopard.

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Wall Flower
Wall Flower
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I would not count on the onboard RAID working with OSX, Apple likes to use it's own RAID tools/config for RAID.

The reason you had to use the "F6" method (and your floppy drive) when you installed windows to get RAID working is that Windows does not include native raid drivers so that F6 method allows you to install those drivers during the installation process.

 

I have an 8 core set up now and I am running a very stable raid but I created it after I installed Leopard.

Ah, okay then. I'm not all too suprised there or anything. So if I were operation outside the existing array, this would be resolved then? I might be willing to get a third hard drive if I can make this work. I'd like to try to avoid reformatting my current raid if possible. It's just a pain in the ass to back up and re-install everything.

 

I tried installing unsucsessfully a bit ago. I'm not sure if it's related to the array It begins the initial loading and I get to a grey screen with the apple logo and a little load wheel. It keeps going and going until a little veto appears in the middle of the screen. Nothing happens. When I boot using single user and safemode commands or in diagnostic mode, then it loads for a while normally until it reads "Still waiting for root". It repeats that message every couple minutes and gets no further.

 

Also, something I forgot. I've never done this before so I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but I'm running an ATI Radeon hd 3550, not an nvidia card like the original poster listed having.

 

Thanks again.

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strangedaze
strangedaze
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One question: By full audio do you mean output and input? Stereo or multichannel, SPDIF, anything like that?
Full audio. spdif and coax both work ! sorry for such late replys. This mobo's fantastic everyone. I sold my badaxe2 for it and I'm not the only one that did this :)
Hello,I also think this could be my next choice!@strangedaze:Is it a "BloodIron_P35-T2L" or a "BloodIron_P35-T2RL" which you are using?thanks in advance. I´m also interested in hearing about other success story´s.shila
Sorry for double post, I'm using the TRL I believe one 2 versions is a DDR3 one. I have the other one the DDR2 which I'm pretty sure is the only one around right now for the most part.

 

 

Also for full raid support you can even boot off this card. you can use this rosewill 21 dollar pci-e card. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816132008

 

If you want to software raid with this (I have 4 HD's and 2 disc drives installed all working) Make sure you set AHCI in bios for multiple HD's first and set your boot drive as first boot order as well. Then once you boot you will see all your other HD's on your desktop, if you want to soft raid them just go to diskutility and select one of the hd's you want to raid (not your boot drive) and then select RAID and drag all your other HD's to the white box and click raid (this will delete all data on the raiding HD's) wallah you will now have one HD on your desktop (whatever you named it) the size of all your HD's combined. 90% chance you will not be able to install osx86 on the softraid and boot it properly.

 

Hope this helped everyone.

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Chrismo
Chrismo
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strangedaze:Is it a "BloodIron_P35-T2L" or a "BloodIron_P35-T2RL" which you are using?..

 

I'm using the TRL I believe one 2 versions is a DDR3 one. I have the other one the DDR2 which I'm pretty sure is the only one around right now for the most part.

 

Sorry to ask again strangedaze, but that sentence above confuses me.

Which do you have?:

a] BloodIron_P35-T2L (has 4 SATA ports)

b] BloodIron_P35-T2RL (has 6 SATA ports)

c] BloodIron_P35-TRL ?? Havent found this anywhere. Someone did mention a "Dark board" is that it?

None of these boards Is DDR3 that I have seen.

 

I've been searching around for DFI BloodIron Boards, here is what I've found.

DFI BloodIron mfg P35-T2RL info

DFI BloodIron P35-T2RL $127

DFI BloodIron_P35-T2RL $124

DFI BloodIron_P35-T2RL $127 CAD

 

 

 

The DFI LanParty Boards SEEM to have much the same chipsets as the BloodIron, but have 3 PCI Express x16 slots instead of 1, and a firewire Port (chipset = VT6307)) It also uses a bernstein Audio module for sound - (I dont know what that is)

DFI LanParty_ P35-T2R $251

DFI LanParty UT P35-T2R $239 NewEgg

 

 

Any more success stories with these BloodIron boards? I'm debating getting one insteadof a BadAxe2

 

Chris

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strangedaze
strangedaze
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The Blood Iron manual it came with is ment for 2 different versions of the blood iron, one of those runs DDR3. Anyways I have 6 sata ports. So that would be, B. BloodIron_P35-T2RL

 

Both of the lanparts use a PCI sound card called the bernstien (probably spelled that wrong) and no onboard. You wouldn't have any sound with those boards. I know the lanparty DK has a 885 which works sound and all.

i know that newegg says the 885 is used on the lanparty UT/LP but it's a typo if you look at the pictures close you can see the soundcard used.

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Chrismo
Chrismo
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Thanks Strangedaze

 

Here's what I could find about the Bernstein Audio Card that is on the Lanparty Mobo. In short, the audio is kinda isolated from the mobo, to keep out noise. Maybe thats why it looks different than just the ALC885, even though it contains an ALC885 chip? Perhaps it will work... I might give it a shot since a local shop has this card and not the BloodIron. Info on this at TechPowerup

incase anyone cares. :)

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