Completely Successful 10.5.4 Install on ECS 945GCT-M v1.0

[jditto_51]

After months of work and frustration (companies sending me the wrong motherboard for instance, and then taking 1 month to return my emails/calls) I finally have what appears to be a completely successful install of Leopard 10.5.4. With all the trouble I had, I decided to post some installation notes to help other people, as this forum has assisted me greatly!

 

My Hardware:

ECS 945GCT-M v1.0 Motherboard

Intel Core Duo E2140 Processor

2 GB Corsair Extreme Ram

PNY Geforce 7300GT 256mb PCIE Graphics Card

Used Two port Firewire Card I had lying around from an old Compaq Computer

80GB Maxtor Sata HD (used one I had lying around)

Lite-On IDE DVD R/RW

Rosewill 450 watt Value Series Power Supply

Multi Card Reader (plugs in to front USB header on Motherboard)

 

The Installation:

When I started this, it seemed like everyone was experiencing successful installs with this board except for me. I did exactly what everyone said and still could not get a stable install on SATA hard drives. (I was able to achieve partial success at first on IDE hard drive). Most people use Kalyway installs for this board, but my final install was from Leo4All Version 2.

 

Bios Settings for this Board:

"Executed Disabled Bit" must be ENABLED

 

There is an option called "bus mastering" or "pci bus mastering" that must be DISABLED (nobody else seems to have messed with this option, but once I disabled it, my install was flawless and my SATA drives work painlessly

 

You may have issues with CPUID being enabled, I did NOT have trouble with this, but if you have issues simply disable it.

 

Setup:

I chose one partition with GUID. (Have not tested MBR) On install I chose "customize" and installed the 9.2.0 vanilla kernel to start with (9.2.2 gave me trouble and had to reinstall), drivers for my graphics card and chipset (ICH chipset drivers), I also de-selected "Language translations" (not necessary) to save the 1.9 GB it takes up (or something like that....over 1GB for sure). I also picked the ALC883 driver for sound (see details on this next) I did not choose any network drivers. I closed out of the customization menu and clicked install.

 

After install the comptuer booted up! Success! I had 1440x900 resolution already set, network worked, the only thing with issues was the sound.

 

ALC883 Sound Issues:

For some reason even though I selected the proper drivers during the install, my sound did not work. I tried many other solutions, but nothing. Finally I found a website that claims this Azalia package will work, not sure if it is the same one offered in the install, but on a prior install I chose the "azalia audio" install and it did not work. Needless to say I downloaded this package and it works great! I have attached it to this post to save anyone needing it the trouble of finding it like I did.

 

Updating the OS:

Once I had all of my components working properly I decided to update my OS to 10.5.4 (I cloned my successful install using SuperDuper! to another drive before attempting this).

 

First I downloaded the Kalyway 10.5.3 Combo Update Package and followed the instructions that came with it. Rebooted with update -v and checked my "about this mac". Success! Updated to 10.5.3 successfully. After, since I have EFI and Vanilla kernel, I updated to 10.5.4 using Software Update successfully as well. So now the OS is completely up to date with 10.5.4!

 

Problems after the update:

After the update I noticed my screen saver looked like {censored}, and lo-and-behold, my quartz extreme had stopped working. After an hour or so, I figured out that if I moved all of the Nvidia and Geforce related kexts from the Extensions folder to a backup folder on my desktop, and then downloaded and ran Nvinstaller v.41, that it fixed that as well. I at first tried the newest version of Nvinstaller and for some reason that one did not work, but after v4.1, I have perfect graphics!

 

Extras:

I had an old Labtec webcam lying around, so I decided to go the extra mile and get that working with photobooth and whatnot. I found a program called "Macam". Its a free download, pretty self-explanitory, and works brilliantly.

 

Summary:

I literally spent $250.00 on this computer. Its not the fastest processor I know (I fix and build computers for a living), but it's definitely a good chance to use the Mac OS in a desktop. I am the proud owner of a Macbook Pro for 8 months now, and I really just wanted to experiment with this and possibly get something for my wife to play around with. The only thing I plan to do now is order a larger SATA hard drive, and possibly down the road buy a faster processor (the overclocking options on this board are slim). Other than that everything is working great!

One More Thing:

I do have one problem, and I think its most likely universal across installs. I have a Rocketfish bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo. Does anybody know about how to get three-button mouse functionality out of this thing?

AzaliaAudio.pkg.zip

[Apache Thunder]

I have a board that is similer to yours. Its a 915PL-A2. It has 2 PCI-E slots and Realtek Audio.

 

My install seems to work with this without any extra drivers. The sound drivers seem to work out of the box (I used iATKOS 4i), and the Nvidia drivers work as well.

 

However the mouse lags horribly. Not sure why, perhaps its the BIOS settings you mentioned. I will make the changes to that. Perhaps it will make the laggy mouse go away.

 

Will making these BIOS changes harm the performance of Windows XP/Vista? I duel boot this along side XP and Vista.