finally! a successfull install on my dv6000

[tswaters]

ok, so i must say i've read about a billion topics from this site and others for information on installing osx in my laptop, an hp dv6404ca. i'd like to give shouts to ... well, everyone that posts here with answers over questions. keep on rocking. this includes all trials & tribulations.

 

first off, a few selected copy & pastes from belarc:

 

HP Pavilion dv6000 1.80 GHz AMD Turion 64 X2

ST916082 1AS SCSI Disk Device (160.04 GB)

NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150

NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller

 

that should give you a general idea of what i'm dealing with. my BIOS is incredibly limited, i can basically change the time, boot settings & give it a password. oh, and virtual memory and stuff. i haven't had to change anything there aside from the boot order, going to hard drive and of course setting an admin pass for the BIOS.

 

the machine is running vista and i didn't want to lose the data and, at any point, involve reinstalling/repairing windows. this is mostly due to hassle -- i already have everything like i need it -- that, and the only windows disks i got with the laptop were shoddy recovery disks which (i think) would kill everything and restore to factory defaults ... which i definitely don't want. so, this means i needed to revise the partition setup -- making a bit of room for leopard. i tried off the bat to shrink the volume,

 

diskpart> select disk 0
 diskpart> select partition 1
 diskpart> shrink querymax
 The maximum number of reclaimable bytes is:  0

 

Say what now? The disk had about 85 GB free. It turns out you can only shrink a partition from the end -- if there are any used clusters near the end (i had two used clusters at the very end of the drive), you'll only be able to shrink up to that point. I ended up resolving this by using a program called PerfectDisk 10. It's a really good defragmenter that gives you the option of a boot-sector degrag to move all the boot files to the front of the disk. This had the side effect of both making my vista boot incredibly fast and freeing up space at the end of the disk... so, kick-ass:

 

diskpart> select disk 0
 diskpart> select partition 1
shrink desired=10240 minimum=15360
diskpart> create partition primary id=af size=15360
  diskpart> select partition 2
 diskpart> active
 Diskpart marked the current partition as active.

 

so that's that down. next step was trying iDeneb v1.4, which i won't discuss... i ended up getting into a reboot loop, which i later found might have had something to do with too many kext selections, but by that time i was already on my way to iPC. with iPC i didn't have any difficulties getting into the booter, and into disk utility. from here, i erased the newly created AF partition and gave it a fancy name: Leopard.

 

for iPC customization, after a few tries i decided to go for the bare minimum -- voodoo kernal and nforce chipset. it went through the install, successful (as i had seen many times before) ... quick before it rebooted i went back into disk utility and repaired the permissions on my new parition ( i hadn't received any errors about permissions thus far -- but i read somewhere this was a good step to take ). exited out of disk part and restarted. booting off the new mac partition because it's active, i F8 darwin and set the magical flags: -v -x -f. and it worked! it ACTUALLY WORKED! cutting all the kexts back to just the bare minimum and booting in safety mode did the trick. finally, my very first glimpse of osx running on my machine -- outside of the installer.

 

i managed to find a zip of kexts in my travels that included fixes for the video and wireless card. i decided to go for these instead of the ones off the CD and hurray, i'm running in the beautiful 1280x800x32 and i'm currently editing this post from within osx, so the interweb is working! upon attempting to install firefox, i was greeted with a kernal error when trying to mount the image. after rebooting, i installed the seatbelt fix off the CD, and this seemed to do the trick as i was able to mount it no-problem.

 

next step -- i'll see if i can't get the vista boot loader to go into osx... i've heard that may involve some re-writing of the mbr record in the mac, and going into vista to find that winlogon.exe or some similarly named exe is corrupt and requires a repair disk or reinstall. not sure if you recall from earlier, but i don't have a vista install disk ... so i'm a little leary of writing over anything that might mess with my vista install.

 

at the moment, i switch back and forth between the two by going into fdisk:

 

 sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
  flag 1

 

or from vista, by going into disk part:

 

 diskpart
  select disk 0
  select partition 1
  active

and rebooting. well, that's all for now ... i'll post back here with endless frustrations in the future, i imagine.

 

to all of those that are frantically searching google and finding endless numbers of topics without no happy endings in sight ... well there is light at the end of the tunnel.