Dell Vostro 1500 Mega Thread

[shaasH]

Well... the install worked and I'm now able to boot off the Hard Drive... but the Dell 1390 Wireless Card was/is NOT detected for some reason and I'm hesitant to proceed further without getting that to work... it's important to me. I suppose I can use a USB wireless thing, but my first choice is getting the internal wireless to work.

 

Time to tool around some more.... any suggestions would be welcomed.

[stangri]

Well, I've installed Leopard a different way, so not sure if my experience is relevant, I did however use one of the Dell CDs to remove the MediaStart (or whatever it's called, the hidden partition which has a copy of XP install with the basic media functions and which starts up if you press that smaller Home button next to the Power button when the machine is off) partition. Not sure if that MediaStart partition is messing things for you guys, but imho it's a useless feature so I've decided to get rid of it anyways.

 

When partitioning Dell HDD (hooked up the Dell HDD to the macbook running leopard thru the USB-SATA adaptor) I've used one partition, guid, then before doing anything else enabled owners on the partition:

sudo /usr/sbin/vsdbutil -a /Volumes/<your HDD name here>

I have then installed PC EFI v8, then rebooted and installed from vanilla leopard DVD.

 

BTW, when I've used the sound files linked from this topic I've got the sound working minus the mute button. On the second attempt I've used the other kext/patch-file and the mute now works. Unfortunately I don't remember where did I get this other set of files, but I'll try to attach the DMG with the HDA patcher, the patch and the kext I've used.

[shaasH]

...turns out the mistake with the non-working Wireless is mine once again. I don't have a Dell 1390 Wireless card, I've got a 1395. I must have mis-read or forgotten what my Dell order and invoice said... I could have sworn I had the 1390... and of course the 1395 isn't compatible and I don't think there's a fix or patch for it. Oh well, $10 on ebay and a week's wait for delivery and I'll have a 1390 to swap in the place of the 1395. Hopefully when I swap the 1390 in, Leopard will recognize it and Airport will work right away, but I'm willing to re-install if necessary.

 

But otherwise, I'm up and running so far and got the graphics and sound working now with the help of Hexi's step-by-step... I'm using working LAN port to post via Safari until I get my parts. I'm telling you, just add a note to the walk-through about choosing MBR over GUID during the partition stage, and this would be the most user-friendly Vostro guide on the site... easiest to follow by far. Thanks again for writing it.

 

I may hold off on the 10.5.2 updates until I get the 1390 installed, or I may push forward now that I've gotten by that initial boot problem. I also want to see if I can do the battery meter and time machine fixes. And then on to trying to get XP Pro installed and execute the dual boot. Yay !

[shaasH]

any one get time machine to work with their vostro 1500....................i have a vostro 1500 and battery meter works with iatkos then upgraded to 10.5.2 and the new vanilla kernel everything works except reboot shutdown and sleep and time machine

 

How did you get the battery meter to work ? Which instructions or patch did you use ?

[Hexidecimal]

Wow, I'm glad so many people have found this guide useful.

 

shaasH you should be able to dual boot with XP Pro 32-bit but you'll have to use an MBR Partition scheme, only XP 64 Bit recognized GUID/EFI installations. Also yes sadly with this laptop the 1390 got kicked right before I ordered which is why I went to the 1490. Thankfully the 1390 is still on ebay and works very well. Good Luck!

[stangri]

I've used the bundle from the attached file to get the battery status working and then enabled it from the SysPref. Just replaced the original with what's inside the archive.

PowerManagement.tar.gz

[Noom]

Hi Hexidecimal or Stangri,

 

Could you please help me answering my posted questions?. Thanks in advance.

 

Anyway, Stangri, where should I replace the orginal one with your attached file?.

[shaasH]

I've used the bundle from the attached file to get the battery status working and then enabled it from the SysPref. Just replaced the original with what's inside the archive.

Thanks for the suggestion and file, but no dice for me... I had to repair drive permissions first, then I used your bundle and replaced and rebooted and still no battery meter or option to turn it on in system preferences.

 

I also tried the patch in this thread with no luck :

 

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=80425

 

In that thread there is a suggestion that ' AppleACPIPlatform v 1.0.5 ' will work with iatkos... mine appears to be AppleACPIPlatform v 1.1.0 - I'm not sure where I go about finding v 1.0.5

 

 

Anyway, Stangri, where should I replace the orginal one with your attached file?.

System/Library/SystemConfiguration

[Pnut500000]

I've used the bundle from the attached file to get the battery status working and then enabled it from the SysPref. Just replaced the original with what's inside the archive.

 

I tried this. Downlaoded it, replaced the original, and repaired drive permissions. After that I attempted to reboot and now all I get is a black screen that gives me a couple boot options and says

 

boot:_

 

With a blinking cursor and anything I type does nothing.

What system do you have that this worked on, or can someone fill me in on what I did wrong?

 

I have almost the exact config of original post, but mine is a Inspiron 1520 with a 1.6ghz core 2 duo, and a webcam. The whole hackintosh thing started for me at the very beginning of January and I'm happy to have working audio now. Graphics are much more functional and that was a big one for me since I like to play WoW.

 

Since I'm still a bit of a newb.. Is there a better way than starting over everytime I get a screw up. Its not so much reinstalling Leopard that gets me, but installing WoW is a pain. How about this "Time Machine" that I hear doesnt work? Whats the verdict on that and does it restore like Windows System Restore? I'll probably have to go read up on something to image my hard drive so I dont have to deal with this everytime I try something new and it takes away all functionality.

[gkrangers]

Ok, I solved my problem. I dumped the audio codec from Sidux LiveCD (Ubuntu LiveCD would not detect the card). The codec on my Vostro 1500/Sigmatel 9205 was DIFFERENT from the others floating around. That's why it wasn't working.

 

This is a Vostro 1500/Sigmatel 9205 codec dump. It is different from all of the others (I think) that have been posted on this forum so far.

 

Stac9205.txt

[stangri]

I tried this. Downlaoded it, replaced the original, and repaired drive permissions. After that I attempted to reboot and now all I get is a black screen that gives me a couple boot options and says

Oops, I'm very sorry it did that. Could be that you've downloaded and extracted on a windows machine and then copied to Mac or could be that you didn't set owner/permissions (chown -R root:wheel <bundle name> and then chmod -R 755 <bundle name>) -- not sure if Disk Utility does that.

 

I should probably stop interfering with this thread tho, I've used a different method of install than what's described on the first post, and I'm running as much Vanilla stuff as possible, that could also be the reason some of the things which worked for me do not work for you.

 

Ok, I solved my problem. I dumped the audio codec from Sidux LiveCD (Ubuntu LiveCD would not detect the card). The codec on my Vostro 1500/Sigmatel 9205 was DIFFERENT from the others floating around. That's why it wasn't working.

Uhm, you mind sharing with the community? I have a lousy connection and still can't upload less than 2Mb file containing HDA patcher, the patch and the kext which worked for me, including the working mute button.

 

A BIG QUESTION I have -- the sound control buttons when pressed work fine and cause the OSD with the sound volume meter. The screen brightness buttons even tho they work do not bring up the OSD (like the do on my Mac). Has anyone got the screen brightness OSD working?

[Ericb410]

Can someone help me with the gparted live cd? I get a screen and I select auto configure which brings me to some menu and I make sure my partition is flagged as a boot drive, is this correct? after that I get a blinking cursor on start up, I am almost positive I did everything correctly, I am going to try again if anyone can help me with the Gparted live cd id appreciate it...

[gkrangers]

Can someone help me with the gparted live cd? I get a screen and I select auto configure which brings me to some menu and I make sure my partition is flagged as a boot drive, is this correct? after that I get a blinking cursor on start up, I am almost positive I did everything correctly, I am going to try again if anyone can help me with the Gparted live cd id appreciate it...

Did you install OSX on a GUID partition table or MBR partition table? You need to select MBR. Try reinstalling it on a MBR partition. When you partition in the Leopard Disk Utility, you can click Options and select MBR. This might be the cause.

 

Also, you may consider doing a search for the "R3" version of iATKOS. This update claims to have fixed a lot of issues with the blinking cursor on boot.

[shaasH]

Just another update on my build... received the 1390 card in the mail today (record shipping time to boot!) and swapped it into my Vostro 1500 in place of my 1395. Windows had no problem recognizing and installing it... and neither did Leopard ! Once I booted into Leopard, the 1390 was recognized as an Airport card right away... I enable it, connected to my router and am happily browsing on Safari via my airport connection in Leopard.

 

SEAMLESS !!!!!! I'm loving this... I was convinced I'd have to re-install Leopard to get the 1390 to be recognized as an Airport card, but no worries !

 

So thanks again to Hexidecimal for the kick-ass guide...

 

My only challenge remains the power management (shut down, restart, sleep and battery/charge meter). If I could get those to work in Leopard, my Hackintosh would be truly complete... I hope someone comes up with a solution.

 

I noticed that the battery/charge meter worked fine in the iatkosir2 installation screens... it's not until after install on the harddrive that it stops working... if I decide to re-install iatkosir2, is there an option in the install screen that I can select to make the power-management stuff work ? And will that make it so I can't use the kalyway 10.5.2 update and kernel update ?Thanks again for all the help...

 

Can someone help me with the gparted live cd? I get a screen and I select auto configure which brings me to some menu and I make sure my partition is flagged as a boot drive, is this correct? after that I get a blinking cursor on start up, I am almost positive I did everything correctly, I am going to try again if anyone can help me with the Gparted live cd id appreciate it...

 

When I started GParted the first time I installed iatkosir2 correctly (on an MBR partition, not GUID), GParted said the Leopard partition already had the boot-flag enabled. So I changed nothing, shut down and restarted the Vostro and got that dreaded blinking cursor you speak of... What I did next was go back into GParted, and disable that boot flag on the Leopard partition... (Manage>Flags>Boot). Then I shut down and rebooted right back into GParted once again and went ahead and enabled the boot flag back on again on my Leopard partition... I then shut down, restarted with the Gparted disc out of the drive, and the dreaded blinking cursor was gone, my Vostro finally booted into Leopard on it's own, without the help of the iatkosir2 DVD-R.

 

iatkosir2 must create a boot flag on the Leopard partition that isn't compatible with the Dell bios or something... but once you remove that flag, reboot into gparted, enable the flag, reboot again, the blinking cursor problem was gone.Hope that helps.

[malka_aria]

I dont know why this is happening, I had working dual boot: vista ultimate/10.5.2 kalyway MAC

but i never could make the batt. to show up and also after updating to 10.5.2 my LAN stopped working, I had only the wireless working

so i decided to try iAtkos to see how the things will go, since i have same vostro 1500 described in the 1st post here.

I tried the same steps you guys did 5 times

and I was getting allways the same error after trying to boot into OSX 86:

 

HFS+ Partition error

 

any suggest please?

[Quizy101]

Hey Guys,I have to say I followed the guide and everyone worked liked promised, thank you so much Hexadecimal for your very informative guide. I also got the battery meter back but not being able to shutdown, reboot or sleep is a pain in the neck, let us know if someone figures it out. Again Thanks!!Hey Guys,I have to say I followed the guide and everyone worked liked promised, thank you so much Hexadecimal for your very informative guide. I also got the battery meter back but not being able to shutdown, reboot or sleep is a pain in the neck, let us know if someone figures it out. Again Thanks!!

[stangri]

From what macgirl told me, the problems with the reboot/shutdown are due to the NV* kexts. If you remove them, the reboot/shutdown work, but you lose QE/CI.

 

If anyone finds the properly working NV kexts, I do hope they'd share the findings.

 

PS. Not sure if sleep will ever work.

[Ericb410]

Just finished the install, works great... just a few things, it is important that when you are using the gparted live cd, that when you go to flag your leopard partition for boot, you uncheck the boot box, then go back in and recheck the boot box, I got hung up here for about an hour and even reinstalled once. Also, I ran into a problem after putting a office 2007 disk in by accident (windows disk) I am not sure if the disk is related, but the cd drive kept spinning and the only way to stop it was to do a hard shut down, which I did, but then the darwin boot loader wouldn't work anymore, I tried rewriting permissions through the install disk and disk utilities, but a simple fix was to just reinstall the boot loaders.

 

 

Also.. what is everyone's average time on the white apple screen during start up? mine is about 3-4 minutes, anyone else experiencing this long of a wait?

[nervegrind3r]

hey all, I will probably be buying a vostro 1500 today, and want to install osx. Should I have any major issues with the hardware I picked out? I am most curious about the wireless card, bluetooth, and web camera option I have selected:

 

Vostro 1500 Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)

 

Operating System Genuine Windows® XP Professional

 

LCD Panel 15.4 in Wide Screen SXGA+LCD Display w/TrueLife™ (1680x1050)

 

Camera Integrated 2.0 mega pixel Web Camera

 

Memory 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 DIMM

 

256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GT

 

Hard Drive 120GB 5400RPM Hard Drive

 

Optical Drive 8X CD/DVD Burner w/ double-layer DVD+R write capability, w/ roxio Creator

 

Integrated NIC and Modem Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem

 

Wireless Cards Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Wi-Fi Mini Card

 

Bluetooth Wireless Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate), WinXP

 

Primary Battery 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery

 

Sound Card High Definition Audio 2.0

 

 

thanks for any feedback

[Ericb410]

Just adding some of the "bugs" I have encountered so far with my install... some ofcourse have been mentioned here but I will mention them anyway...

 

 

Battery Meter... tried installing the new bundle and editing the ktext, but once I went to save the ktext it said I didn't have permission to do action even after i enabled read/write in get info for the file.

 

Screen Saver- Screen saver is currently set to start at 3 minutes, takes about 20 minutes to start and it doesn't require a password like I have checked off.

 

Shut Down- Known issue... we will have to wait for a fix...

 

 

Boot Time- My computer seems to spend a longer then usual time on the white apple screen about 3-4 minutes.

 

If anyone has fixes to this problems for the vostro please let me know.. thanks

[stangri]

hey all, I will probably be buying a vostro 1500 today, and want to install osx. Should I have any major issues with the hardware I picked out? I am most curious about the wireless card, bluetooth, and web camera option I have selected:

From what I've read the Intel WiFi card won't work, but you can pick a broadcom one on ebay for next to nothing.

Bluetooth (355) works, however there's no option on the menu to switch it off. The WebCam works, however on the system I've seen it looks like it's way below 2 megapixel, looks like it's a cheapo webcam from last century.

[stanzilla]

thank you so much Hexadecimal ,

i follow your guild i got my Vostro 1500 working.

i have been try a few times install in difference partition but none can boot Leopard

finally wipe all partition and install partition 1, and Leopard can boot up

Right now restore my old xp to partition 2 .

using Darwin boot loader and i can dual boot fine

hey all, I will probably be buying a vostro 1500 today, and want to install osx. Should I have any major issues with the hardware I picked out? I am most curious about the wireless card, bluetooth, and web camera option I have selected:Vostro 1500 Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)Operating System Genuine Windows® XP ProfessionalLCD Panel 15.4 in Wide Screen SXGA+LCD Display w/TrueLife™ (1680x1050)Camera Integrated 2.0 mega pixel Web CameraMemory 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 DIMM256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GTHard Drive 120GB 5400RPM Hard DriveOptical Drive 8X CD/DVD Burner w/ double-layer DVD+R write capability, w/ roxio CreatorIntegrated NIC and Modem Integrated 10/100 Network Card and ModemWireless Cards Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Wi-Fi Mini CardBluetooth Wireless Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate), WinXPPrimary Battery 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary BatterySound Card High Definition Audio 2.0thanks for any feedback

i have almost same spec

difference is i have 1400x900 screen

and 3G RAM

my wireless card (the 1390 one), and web camera work, bluetooth(havent test)

sound card cant mute(known issue)

shutdown (known issue)

[stangri]

sound card cant mute(known issue)

It sure can. Use HDA Patcher version 1.18 and the patch/kext from the attached file. Not sure if it'll work on Kalyway, but it should on iAtkos/Vanilla installation.

Sound.dmg

[Pnut500000]

Had to give this thread a quick bump to keep it alive. Any updates for anyone?

 

My inspiron 1520 mute button shows on screen that it works, but it doesnt actually mute sounds. I haven't tried version 1.18 of the HDA Patcher, but I'm still content as of now. Hopefully there will be a fix on the reboot/shutdown and even possibly sleep soon. Has anyone done any comparisons of operating temps in OSX vs Windows? I dont know if i'm just overly concerned, but I feel like the laptop is warmer and the fan is running less. Its probably just me.

 

Very good thread. Lets keep it going.

[huntz]

How to add a second display/screen to your Vostro/OSX

 

Disclaimer:

this little guide is made for Dell Vostro, but you can use the same procedure with other hardware (you must have a Nvidia video card).

 

The problem:

you have a working OSX installation (with QE/CI) but when you plug the VGA cable then you go to System Preferences > Displays > Detect Displays all goes black (the main screen - laptop - and the second one) and your computer will freeze.

 

The solution:

if you are using the NVinject kext to load the graphic drivers you have to remove it and use the NVinjectGo instead. Then, you have to find your correct NVCAP string. NVCAP is a string present into the info.plist of your NVinjectGo kext. The wrong string used, makes your notebook crash.

To get your NVCAP, you have to download the nvflash utility, reboot in DOS (nvflash will not work correctly from Windows) then run:

# nvflash --save video.rom

Keep the video.rom file and come back to OSX; with the NVCAP Maker application and the video.rom file you can generate your NVCAP string.

When you have the NVCAP string, open the info.plist file from your NVinjectGo with Property List Editor and replace your correct value here Root > IOKitPersonalities > NVinject > entriesToAdd > NVCAP.

You have to use Property List Editor (an utility from the xcode suite) or PlistEditPro to edit the info.plist file; other plain text editors will not work.

Repair permissions, reboot with -f -v flags and you will have a working second screen.

 

Software used into this how to:

• NVinjectGo - link
  
• nvflash - link
  
• boot in DOS problem? (go to BOOTABLE CD paragraph) - link
  
• NVCAP Maker - link
  
• xcode - link
  
• PlistEditPro - link
  

Notes:

I have a 8600 GS with 256mb, only VGA output.

 

 

 

Thanks to this post for the initial idea.