Works on this Dell Dimension 8100

[digital_cowgirl]

Hello,

 

Just wanted to share a success story. After spending a couple weeks of trial and error I finally got it running on my old Dell Dimension 8100 SSE2 system.

 

System configuration as stated from Everest Home Edition www.lavalys.com .

 

CPU Type: Intel Pentium 4 1285 MHz (23 x 99)

CPU Alias P68, Willamette, A80528

CPU Stepping B2

Instruction Set x86, MMX, SSE, SSE2

Original Clock: 1300 Mhz

L1 Trace Cache 12K Instructions

L1 Data Cache 8 KB

L2 Cache: 256 KB (On-Die, ECC, ATC, Full-Speed)

 

Motherboard: Dell Dimension 8100

Motherboard Chipset: Intel Tehama i850(E)

System Memory: 1024 MB (PC800 ECC RDRAM)

BIOS Type: Phoenix (11/30/00)

Video Adapter: ATI Radeon 9200 SE (RV280)

Audio Adapter: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz / VideoLogic SonicFury Audio Accelerator

IDE Controller: Intel® 82801BA Bus Master IDE Controller

Disk Drive: Maxtor 6L100PO (93 GB, IDE)

Disk Drive: DVDRW IDE1008

Optical Drive: DVD-RW 4x/2x, DVD-ROM 12x, CD 40x/24x/40x

Keyboard: Standard PS/2

Mouse: Standard PS/2

Network Adapter: 3Com 3C920 Integrated Fast Ethernet Controller (3C905C-TX Compatible)

 

Upgraded hard drive to 100GB. Upgraded CD drive to DVD drive. Put the hard drive and DVD drive on IDE controller one, and jumpers set as master/slave respectively. Set the BIOS to boot to DVD first. Upgraded video card from Radeon 7000 to Radeon 9200.

 

First try:

 

Loaded Kalyway 10.5.2 pre-patched DVD. Got stuck in Darwin black screen. Could not find com.apple.boot.plist . Turns out only Tiger 10.4 will work on this computer.

 

Second & Third try:

 

Loaded some 10.4.1 pre-patched DVD. Got through Darwin into blue screen with rainbow pinwheel. Then black screen/white text, CPU halted, and computer shut down. No fix found. Trid again with Kalyway 10.4.1 and performed PPF patch. Same result, computer shut down.

 

Fourth try:

 

Loaded generic tiger pre-patched DVD. Got through Darwin and into installation screen. Installtion sucessful. Removed DVD and rebooted to Mac OS X. Get stuck on gray screen with apple icon, then got the black/white or blue/white stripes or monitor shuts off completely. Solution is to upgrade video card. Then runs 100% perfectly.

 

Still working on getting sound and internet setup... will update post later.

 

Moral of the story: always check to see if your computer is SSE2 or SSE3 first, and then check the compatibiliy lists for your computer's motherboard and processor types. That may help you narrow down which version of OS X might work best, in this case 10.4.1. Finally, keep trying different DVD images and patches until you find one that works. Or keep reinstalling with different drivers selected in the Customize screen.

 

Also, it successfully dual boots with windows on one partition and mac on the other partition. I use Acronis disk director suite 10 with utilities for partitions and OS selector.

 

Hope this may be helpful to someone else.

 

Peace out.