Need Help With Install!

[Richboy455]

Hey everyone!

 

I just built a new PC with the hopes of being able to install iAtkos 2.0i on it. the specs are as follows:

 

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 Ghz

2GB DDR 2

XFX nVidia Geforce 8600 512 MB

320 GB SATA HD

SATA DVD-RW

SATA Blu-Ray Drive

Asus P5N-E SLI MoBo

 

Whenever I boot the dvd it hangs and gets this little slash symbol over the apple boot screen. I am pretty sure the hardware i am using is supported. Anyone have any ideas?

[skumar]

Dear Friend,

Try by writing the DVD image again with a lower speed.

 

S.Kumar.

[krrr]

Also, try to browse Asus sections at http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2 regarding your mobo and some tips.

[Richboy455]

ok i will try and do that. also when i boot with the iAtkos dvd with the nforce_core -v prompt it goes through the dialog and i notice one of the last things it shows is somekind of error for the applenforce ata or somthing like that. could this be what is causing the error in the boot sequence and if so how do i avoind this. as far as i know it should work with sata drives. any ideas?

[Richboy455]

Bump

[Richboy455]

after downloading a fresh copy of kalyway, i brned it at a slow speed and tried to boot. in the text that comes up i get an error in the applenforceATA section. there are three items that work fine (the hard drive, the dvd burner and the blu-ray drive), but another that gets an error saying that somehting cannot be read or somthing along those lines, and it says it it is going into secure mode or somthing and then it just hangs. i have no idea what to do. i built this machine specifically to run osx (and so i dednt have to buy a psystar) and now im at a roadblock.

[shady28]

Your setup is very similar to mine, and I just got it working yesterday (took 2 days). In the end, the steps to get everything working were pretty easy. I'm listing what I did below, but I think your problem is simply this :

 

MAKE SURE YOUR OS X PARTITION IS ONE WORD.

 

In other words, "OS X" will not work with MBR booting (note the space between OS and X) but "OSX" will!!!

 

 

 

First, I'm using iATKOS 1.0i (10.5.1).

 

My setup :

P5N-E SLI (650i chipset)

2GB DDR2-800

Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm *IDE* drive

2x 320GB Caviar II SATA Drives

1x 150GB Raptor SATA

External USB DVD/RW

Internal IDE DVD/RW

1.44MB Floppy

GeForce 7950GT 512MB PCI-E

 

First and most importantly, as far as I can tell the SATA drives don't work for the installation on 650i chipsets. You will be able to see them after the install, but not install to them (except maybe doing a disk image, not sure).

 

What I did :

BIOS Stuff (prep)

1 - Disable the floppy drive

2 - Disable the JMICRON controller

3 - Disable all SATA drives

4 - Set the IDE target drive to primary master (I also disabled the internal IDE DVD/RW drive)

5 - If you have a 512MB graphics card, you may need to do a BIOS flash. Do this BEFORE you install. There are docs here and other places on what needs to be changed (basically, save your ROM, hex edit 4 values, save it and write it to your card). This may not be necessary for an 8800.

6 - Make sure you burn the iso image to a DVD-R or +R, NOT an R/W

7 - NOTE I BOOTED THE INSTALL DVD FROM THE USB DRIVE

 

 

Selections in iATKOS :

1 - The main thing here is to keep it simple!

2 - Selected two kernels, the SSE2 / SSE3 - Intel kernel and the SSE2 / SSE3 without the timer thing (forgot its name)

3 - Selected Natit for video

4 - Select remove the speedstep kext

5 - Select Darwin MBR booting

6 - Everything else is default

 

Disk utility :

1 - Before installling, I setup two partitions on my drive using disk utility.

2 - Make the first partition OS X journaling filesystem

3 - Made the second a DOS FAT filesystem (for sharing files with windows)

4 - MAKE SURE YOUR PARTITION NAME IS ONE WORD, NO SPACES.

5 - Continue with install.

 

Rebooting issues :

 

If you reboot and it works straight up, congrats. You're one of the lucky few.

 

For the rest of us :

 

1 - The first reboot will most likely not work. This is ok, just boot off the DVD image and DO NOT HIT A KEY. Wait for the timeout (usually 8 sec). The DVD image will look for your OS X install and launch it automatically rather than trying to do another install.

2 - If your system failed to reboot on its own, but did boot from the DVD, go into a terminal session and rewrite your MBR to the correct disk. I *think* the command was fdisk -e /dev/rdiskX where XXXX is your drive. There are more detailed docs on how to do this, just search for osx86 mbr, plus you can just do a 'man fdisk' in OS X and read instructions there.

3- Once you've got your MBR fixed, remove the DVD and reboot. You can always start over at step 1 with the DVD if more changes are needed.

 

Crash on boot :

 

1 - This is usually due to graphics drivers. The easiest way to fix this is to hit space at the darwin startup, and use the -s (single user) option.

2 - After the bootup to single user ends, use the two commands listed just before the prompt. fsck and mount. This gives you access to the root filesystem.

3 - type cd /system/library/extensions This will take you to where the kernel extensions for graphics cards is located.

4 - Type 'mv NV* /users/<your user name>/documents' This will move all the NVIDIA stuff out of the extensions and into your documents folder, where you can work on them later if needed.

5 - If you used natit, find the Natit.kext and move it to.

6 - If you are using something else for graphics specific card (ATI, NVinject, whatever) move that instead.

7 - What this does is let OS X use default VESA graphics which, while not fast, tends to work on almost anything.

8 - I'll point out here that while this may get you up and running, customizing those kext files is a long road. This will at least give you the opportunity to use OS X to do further research and experimentation without constant rebooting and being limited to single user mode text.

 

 

Another good thing is if you can list where your system locks up when using -v option on startup.

 

As a quick aside - EVERYTHING here works now. I can see the SATA drives, the network card worked right off, sound worked right off. The 7950GT was the toughest part - but it's fully enabled now with Quartz extreme, core, and rotation all fully supported.

 

 

Hope this helps someone!

[Richboy455]

Thanks im definately going to try this and ill let you know what happens. Im guessing that you did this with a dual boot with windows xp/vista?

[Richboy455]

So i tried disabling the sata drives in the bios and what do you know! it boots into the installer with iAtkos 2.0i. I install and it seems everything goes smoothly but when i reboot it hangs at when it asks me what to boot. i hit enter, type in -v, everything it just sits there.

 

So then i tried to use kalyway with disabled sata and it worked. i got it to boot after the install (and enabling sata), the only problem is that it has no network support. when it asks during the initial install i tell it that it connects through LAN, but i dont have and of the dchp info. anybody know what do to fix this?

[shady28]

So i tried disabling the sata drives in the bios and what do you know! it boots into the installer with iAtkos 2.0i. I install and it seems everything goes smoothly but when i reboot it hangs at when it asks me what to boot. i hit enter, type in -v, everything it just sits there.

 

So then i tried to use kalyway with disabled sata and it worked. i got it to boot after the install (and enabling sata), the only problem is that it has no network support. when it asks during the initial install i tell it that it connects through LAN, but i dont have and of the dchp info. anybody know what do to fix this?

 

Looking back on this, I left out something on my setup. I have a realtek PCI ethernet card installed. I actually did that long ago when my onboard ethernet kept whacking out on me. The on board LAN is disabled in the BIOS as well. The RealTek cards are supported, and you can pick them up cheap (like 20-30 bucks).

 

I do have 'dual boot', but I didnt do any fancy bootloaders or such. WinXP is installed on SATA drive 1 (the raptor), while OS X is installed on the 80Gig EIDE drive. I just use the P5N-E F11 'select boot drive' option to switch, although by default OS X loads up OS X can see everything though - I even copied my iTunes from an NTFS drive to one of the 320GB drives that I formatted as OS X journaling fs.

 

Glad to see you got Kalyway installed. I didn't have much luck with it, but it was the first thing I tried and I learned a lot between there and trying iATKOS.

[Richboy455]

well im still trying to get the ethernet working. i disabled the onboard lan and got a linksys card (the basic 10/100 card, not the gigabit). i tried updating to 10.5.3 but the system ot screwed up so im trying again. if i cant get it to work im gonna try iatkos 4.0, which apparently just came out, so maybe that will yield better results.