MightyLedZepp Posted June 2, 2009 Share Posted June 2, 2009 Ive spent the past 2 weeks reading through these forum extensively, so I figured I should give something back, so that the next person wont have to. This guide will show you how to set up OSX on a dual Xeon, Asus Z8PE-D12 based system. Apologies in advance for any typos or mistakes. My Hardware: 2x Xeon E5520 2.26GHz Processors Asus Z8PE-D12 Mobo 24GB Crucial DDR3-1333MHz PC-10600 Registered ECC Memory Sapphire ATI 4870x2 Graphics Card Turtle Beach Audio Advantage USB Sound Card Belkin F5D8053 v3 USB Wireless Network Adapter 1TB Western Digital SATA HDD SATA DVD Burner (Use a SATA drive. Installation wouldnt work on a IDE drive.) Logitech Wireless Mouse and Keyboard. For this install you will need the following items: 1. OSX License - Buy one. 2. Kalyway 10.5.2 OSX Installation Disk v. 1.1 (A legitimate OSX installation dvd based on the 10.5.7 kernel would probably also work, using the Boot-132 method. I do not have an OSX install disk based on 10.5.7, the one I have is 10.5.6, so I could not test this theory). 3. Mac OSX 10.5.7 Combo Update from Apple's website. 4. Chameleon v2 5. Universal OSX86 Installer 6. EFIStudio 7. Ralink RT2870 USB Wireless Driver and Wireless Utility 1. BIOS Settings Once you have everything ready to go, we first need to change some BIOS settings. Otherwise the installer will not work. These will be changed back once 10.5.7 and Chameleon are installed. I. On the Main menu, select IDE configuration. Configure SATA as AHCI. II. On the Advanced menu, select CPU configuration. Disable HT Technology, disable Intel C-State technology, and set Active Processor Cores to 1. III. On the Advanced menu, select PCIPnP configuration. Set Plug and Play OS to Yes. IV. On the Boot menu, select boot device priority and make sure the DVD drive is set to the first boot device. 2. Installation With the BIOS changes made, save your settings and reboot with the Kalyway installation DVD in your drive. The installer will load and you will eventually come to a menu. If not done already, partition your hard drive. This can be done from Disk Utility in one of the menus up on top. I split up my 1 TB drive into: a FAT32 partition (to be used later on for Windows, reformatted as NTFS), an OSX Journaled partition, a second FAT32 partition (to be used later on for Ubuntu, reformatted as Ext4), a third but very small FAT32 partition (to be used as a swap partition later on for Ubuntu), and finally a fourth FAT32 partition to be used as a shared storage location between all of the OSes. Once partitioned, continue with the installation wizard. When you are presented with the opportunity, select the option to Customize the installation. You can safely uncheck everything in the menu. The one and only item you need to choose is in the Kernel menu: select the Sleep Kernel. Otherwise everything else is unnecessary. Continue with the installation (should take about 15 minutes) and reboot. Remove the DVD from the drive. 3. Starting OSX for the 1st Time After the system reboots, you will reach a black and white PC_EFI / Chameleon boot menu. Press F8 to specify some options and type the following: "cpus=1" Press enter, and OSX will begin to load. Follow the on screen directions. Eventually you will reach the OSX desktop. 4. Chameleon Install Chameleon v2. It is much better than the version Kalyway installed. If you need to reboot, dont forget to use the "cpus=1" boot option to get back into OSX. 5. Vanilla 10.5.7 Now that the OSX base system is installed, we need to update to 10.5.7, and replace the Sleep Kernel installed by Kalyway with the real 10.5.7 kernel. I. First, we have to prevent a certain extension that is known to cause instability / kernel panics from loading. Open up a terminal window. Type "sudo su", and enter your password. Next, run the following script: while sleep 1 ; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext ; done II. While the script is running, launch the 10.5.7 Combo Update installation package. Watch your script as the install progresses. If the script aborts or errors out, just quickly relaunch the script. When the installation finishes, you will be asked to reboot. DONT. III. Edit /System/InstallAtStartup/scripts/1 with vi or change the permissions on the file and use textedit. Scroll down near the bottom, and replace "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext" with "dsmos.kext". Save your changes, and reboot. 6. Enable CPU Settings When the system restarts, enter the BIOS menu. Its now safe to enable the features that were previously disabled: HT, C-State, and all cores. Change the boot order if you like, and restart. When the Chameleon bootloader comes up, you dont need to use any boot flags. 7. DSDT Patch I dont know if it is necessary or not, but I applied a DSDT patch at this point. Grab the Universal OSX86 Installer from ######.com. In the Extra folder, there is a DSDT patch generator. Run DSDT Patcher, and you will end up with a file called dsdt.aml. Move this file into the root of your OSX partition. 8. Fix CPU Clock, FSB Speed, and USB Sound It is likely that your system does not correctly report the CPU speed, and your sound stutters terribly every second. This is caused by an incorrect reading of your CPU clock and front side bus speeds. OSX was reporting 3.6GHz CPU speed when in reality mine is 2.27GHz. Create a plain text file named smbios.plist in /Extra (if it does not already exist). You can use mine as a template, just change any appropriate values. SMexternal clock is your "FSB" speed in MHz (so 133 for Xeon 5520), and SMmaximalclock is the CPU speed in MHz (2266 for Xeon 5520): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>SMbiosvendor</key> <string>Apple Computer, Inc.</string> <key>SMbiosversion</key> <string>MP31.88Z.00C1.B00.080209154</string> <key>SMmanufacter</key> <string>Apple Inc.</string> <key>SMexternalclock</key> <string>133</string> <key>SMmaximalclock</key> <string>2266</string> <key>SMmemspeed</key> <string>1333</string> <key>SMmemtype</key> <string>24</string> <key>SMproductname</key> <string>MacPro3,1</string> <key>SMserial</key> <string>W88261E7YP4</string> <key>SMsystemversion</key> <string>1.0</string> </dict> </plist> Now your USB sound card should work properly, so plug it in. 9. Fix Onboard Ethernet The Z8PE-D12 motherboard has an Intel 82574L ethernet controller on it. This is the same controller used in the new Mac Pros, and as such, Apple generously provides the kext for us. We just need to add our Ethernet controller's device id to the list of supported devices in the kext itself. Open /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/Intel82574L.kext/Contents/Info.plist and edit the following lines: <key>IOClass</key> <string>Intel82574L</string> <key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key> I. Change <key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key> to <key>IOPCIMatch</key>. II. Add your Ethernet Controller's uid to the list in the line right after the <key>IOPCIMatch</key> line. My id is 0x10D38086 and the simple way to find out what it is is to use Windows Device Manager. III. Remove the line that says <key>IOPCISecondaryMatch</key>, and also remove the line immediately below that. Once complete, open a terminal and "sudo su" again. Then do the following: rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/Caches ; rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext Restart the system. When you get to the Chameleon boot screen, use the boot flags "-f -v". This will force OSX to load all kexts, and will spit out verbose system messages. You should see Ethernet adapters en0 and en1 now show up in Network Preferences. 10. Fix Hard Drive Icons You may have noticed that your internal hard drives have orange external drive icons. Open /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage/Contents/Info.plist. Find the two lines that say: <key>IOProviderClass</key> <string>IOAHCIDevice</string> Add the following immediately after those two lines: <key>Protocol Characteristics</key> <dict> <key>Physical Interconnect</key> <string>SATA</string> <key>Physical Interconnect Location</key> <string>Internal/External</string> </dict> Once complete, open a terminal and "sudo su" again. Then do the following: rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/Caches ; rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext Restart again, and use the "-f -v" boot flags. The drive icons should now show as internal drives. 11. Fix Time Machine Use EFIStudio GUI to add your Ethernet controller's EFI String to com.apple.Boot.plist. The change will be applied to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist. Open this file, and copy the line <key>device-properties</key> as well as the long <string></string> line immediately below it into the /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist. Restart the system. This should fix Time Machine. 12. Wireless Networking The Belkin F5D8053 v3 uses the Ralink RT2870 USB Wireless Driver and Wireless Utility. http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Supp...Macintosh.html Reboot. Plug it in. Simple enough. 13. Accelerated Graphics Card See http://netkas.org for instructions specific to your card. Reboot. Known issues I have not attempted to resolve. Feel free to identify any other issues or provide solutions: 1. Sleep and shutdown (sometimes) dont function. For shutdown, just select Restart and manually power off the system when it attempts to come back up. 2. Screensaver does not work properly. If you would like to triple boot, I recommend installing Windows next. Use EasyBCD to add a entry for OSX to your Win7 / Vista / 2k8 bootloader. Then install Ubuntu. When installing Ubuntu, dont install Grub to the MBR, just install it to the Ubuntu partition. Again use EasyBCD to add the new OS to the Windows bootloader. Hopefully I have not left anything out. I will update this if I did. Enjoy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tpb7463 Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 Thank you very much for this guide! I have a Z8PE-D12X and will try this out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rschultz101 Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 ASUS Z8NA-D6 , anybody up and running ? first, thanks for the guide! thought this s8na board cought my eye,... regular form factor, regular power supply, E5520 min,... maybe even an L processor, questions: can you run a dual xeon , with just 1 cpu ? ( just to strech the budget,...) what your xbench,.... any comparisons, to an i7 920 ? sata ports, are those hotplug ? hmm this is sas support,..... not going to buy sas drives, but a sas controller , does support hotplug correctly .. the z8pe seams nice,... but larger, want to slap it into an 3U case, so I don't have to part with it,... aka, drag it to work in an SKS case, where on a pro, I hate to throw it on the backseat, and have it bounce / scratch driving over potholes,.. my thoughts,.... - old lga775 core duo,.... is old - lga775 quad is too hot - i7 with ddr3 is getting there but hot, tdp,... like it quiet - running out of sata ports,... - got an lsi esata card,... so I could finally hotplug, the old drives, - so stumbled on nehalem-ep, 2x qpi,... oops mac pro was there first,... ok.. still want 3u, not desktop, and not 1u hairdryer - if I build a new one,... might as well have 2 qpi - what about OC, overclocking this dual xeon ? any luck ? for this doe,... a litle would help,... 3ghz, be plenty, for the timecrunch,.... otherwise, maybe even downclock,... - is the sleep/wake working ? - does the cpu's support speedstep ? - only has 2USB ports on the server board,.... can you wake the computer ? - boot time,... heard with the bios,... it's,... slow ? config : ASUS Z8NA-D6 1 +1 E5520 or L5520 2x 6GB 1x 60GB SSD boot, apps, - usb sound - usb keyboard - 3U case - coolers, ninja, LP,.... maybe 2U watercool - front PSU 550w - nvidia 7300 start, 9500 later, 2x dvi-d,+hdmi - FW 800 card - USB card - esata bracket - 5 x GBE switch in drive bay - mobile racks, 4x 2.5, 3x 3.5 appreciate any suggestions. thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tpb7463 Posted June 17, 2009 Share Posted June 17, 2009 Can I run 1 processor in a dual-socket board? Yes, most server-class boards support this. By the same token, you CANNOT overclock server boards. Mfgs. would not enable the user to push the system into instability when uptime is the primary deciding factor in selecting a motherboard. About the only thing you can do is push extra voltage down the processor and memory. (Kinda pointless) SATA is hot-swappable if you configure the drives as AHCI in the bios. (Assuming the drive controller supports it). The ICH10R does support AHCI. Yes, the E5520's support speedstep. Yes, the wake via USB works. Sleep works too. (Windows tested only. I'm at school, and the machine being worked for OSX is at home. I won't have the chance to test it under OSX until another week or so. Same for the Xbench scores) Search around for Xbench scores, I'm positive someone has benched them already. Boot time...that's an...interesting subject. I don't have the exact time, but it seems like its on the order of 20-30 seconds just to POST. After that, its about the same as any other board, depending on how many other BIOS functions you enable (RAID, Legacy modes, etc.) I will say though, be wary of using "extreme" coolers on server boards. I had some trouble mounting my heatsinks to the board because components were in the way. These boards are intended to be matted with the retail-branded Intel heatsink. Bottom line about the coolers: even though it might say "compatable with LGA1366", it is NOT compatible unless it specifically mentions the Xeon 5500 series of processors. Don't worry though, there are some nice, third-party coolers with fans rated under 20dB. Only 2 usb ports you say? NAY NAY There is a dual-usb header on the motherboard and a discrete connector on the board as well. (Total of 5) Hope this helps! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ben10 Posted May 11, 2010 Share Posted May 11, 2010 Howdy, and thanks MLZ for taking the plunge on this one. Just wanted to confirm that was able to install Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on this board. I installed 10.6.3 from retail to my boot hard drive on a Mac I already had set up. I then installed Chameleon bootloader and a few kexts (Disabler, fakesmc, dsmos, one or two others). I tried booting a few times on the Z8PE-D12 but it would always hang after some network output. I could never get this board to boot from the OSX retail CD so I then went back to my existing Mac and set up a USB drive to boot Snow Leopard (very easy, just copy DVD to .dmg then restore .dmg to USB then install Chameleon on the USB along with an Extras folder with a few kexts required to boot). I then booted into Chameleon on my Z8PE-D12, booted from the USB, installed 10.6.3 again, and from then on its been working. I had to edit the smbios.plist for the correct info, but no big deal. I havent gotten the onboard network working, because I have a 10Gb Chelsio NIC in there that is working great with our 10Gb switch at work. This machine is a true storage server, I have a Areca RAID card in there with 16 1TB harddrives in a Chenbro enclosure and it has an internal file transfer speed of over 1.4GB/s In other words, if anyone is interested in utilizing OSX as a server for some real performance oriented stuff, this machine looks like its going to be a beast of a file server. Here are the parts that are running on this board with Snow Leopard right now: RM31616 - 3U 16-Bay High Density Storage Server Chassis (with DVD-ROM) http://www.spectrumservers.com/ssproducts/...p?idproduct=234 ASUS 1366 LGA Motherboard z8pe-d12 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131373 Intel Xeon 2.26GHz E5520 x2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...7-185-_-Product 6GB DDR3 (3x2GB) x2 (total of 12GB ram) - KTA-MP1066K3/6G http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...4-925-_-Product Areca 1680ixl SAS/SATA RAID ARC-1680ixl-16 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...=ARC-1680ixl-16 areca Battery Backup Unit ARC-6120 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816151019 Hitachi 1T 7200RPM x16 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...5-304-_-Product 1 internal boot hard drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822145304 Internal SFF-8087 cable x4 CBL-SFF8087-06M http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx...N82E16816116094 Chelsio 10gb card N320E http://www.buy.com/prod/chelsio-n320e-serv.../209884889.html 10gb SFP+ cables http://www.colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/shows...eyword=tapcable Enjoy!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaminmc Posted November 1, 2010 Share Posted November 1, 2010 Howdy, and thanks MLZ for taking the plunge on this one. Just wanted to confirm that was able to install Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on this board. I installed 10.6.3 from retail to my boot hard drive on a Mac I already had set up. I then installed Chameleon bootloader and a few kexts (Disabler, fakesmc, dsmos, one or two others). I tried booting a few times on the Z8PE-D12 but it would always hang after some network output. I could never get this board to boot from the OSX retail CD so I then went back to my existing Mac and set up a USB drive to boot Snow Leopard (very easy, just copy DVD to .dmg then restore .dmg to USB then install Chameleon on the USB along with an Extras folder with a few kexts required to boot). I then booted into Chameleon on my Z8PE-D12, booted from the USB, installed 10.6.3 again, and from then on its been working. I had to edit the smbios.plist for the correct info, but no big deal. I havent gotten the onboard network working, because I have a 10Gb Chelsio NIC in there that is working great with our 10Gb switch at work. This machine is a true storage server, I have a Areca RAID card in there with 16 1TB harddrives in a Chenbro enclosure and it has an internal file transfer speed of over 1.4GB/s In other words, if anyone is interested in utilizing OSX as a server for some real performance oriented stuff, this machine looks like its going to be a beast of a file server. Here are the parts that are running on this board with Snow Leopard right now: RM31616 - 3U 16-Bay High Density Storage Server Chassis (with DVD-ROM) http://www.spectrumservers.com/ssproducts/...p?idproduct=234 ASUS 1366 LGA Motherboard z8pe-d12 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131373 Intel Xeon 2.26GHz E5520 x2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...7-185-_-Product 6GB DDR3 (3x2GB) x2 (total of 12GB ram) - KTA-MP1066K3/6G http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...4-925-_-Product Areca 1680ixl SAS/SATA RAID ARC-1680ixl-16 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...=ARC-1680ixl-16 areca Battery Backup Unit ARC-6120 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816151019 Hitachi 1T 7200RPM x16 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...5-304-_-Product 1 internal boot hard drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822145304 Internal SFF-8087 cable x4 CBL-SFF8087-06M http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx...N82E16816116094 Chelsio 10gb card N320E http://www.buy.com/prod/chelsio-n320e-serv.../209884889.html 10gb SFP+ cables http://www.colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/shows...eyword=tapcable Enjoy!! Hey, is there any way you could post your DSDT for your board? I am getting this motherboard in a couple of days, and it would be nice to have a DSDT to start with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
projectALEP Posted November 28, 2010 Share Posted November 28, 2010 Hey, is there any way you could post your DSDT for your board? I am getting this motherboard in a couple of days, and it would be nice to have a DSDT to start with. Have put DSDT on kexts.com under board name and have got system running on 10.6.5. guide here I love this board. Mucho thanks to MLZ and ben 10. used same network fix as 10.5.7 install. Extracted DSDT using Ubuntu CD and used MAcLoader_SL EFI with own DSDT to sort out EFI. Latest sleepenabler.kext and Chameleon help as well! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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