Installing Leopard on PC trouble solved (helpful tips)

[kavedaa]

I've just successfully installed OSX Leopard on my Intel PC. Here are the problems I encountered and their solutions, for the benefit of others:

 

0) I used the "ToH" install DVD.

 

1) "Still waiting for root device" when booting from DVD. Seems a lot of people have trouble with SATA disks, tried some of the BIOS tweaks, no luck. What worked for me: there MUST be a disk on the Primary IDE channel set to Master, and the DVD drive must be Slave on that same cable.

 

2) Hangs somewhat further into the booting, does not seem related to the last displayed warning messages (something about DNS). My solution: disable the LAN card in BIOS.

 

3) Now, in the install screen, all disks show up, SATA or not. To be safe I choose to install on the mentioned Primary IDE disk. This has an old NTFS partition, to be able to install on it I have to use Disk Utility (from the menu) and erase it and create a new MacOS partition (and name it, see below).

 

4) Install finish, but black screen and blinking cursor at boot. Solution: boot the DVD once again, in the install screen start a Terminal (from the menu) and enter the following command: /usr/misc/script.sh <name of partition>. Then reboot.

 

5) It boots, hahah! Frikkin' impressive. However, when I re-enable the LAN card, sometimes it boots, and sometimes not. And when it works, the network is extremely slow. Solution: this is related to the RTL8139 driver. Replaced Apple's default driver by following the instructions in this thread and it worked like a charm.

 

One further note: the BIOS setting "IDE Operating Mode" had to be set to "Compatible". When I set it back to "Enhanced", it got stuck at the spinning grey wheel in the boot screen.