Melancholique Posted May 21, 2009 Share Posted May 21, 2009 Alright fellas. A friend of mine and I have spent a week relentlessly constructing a Hackintosh, getting the OSX to work, etc. Tonight we had a major break-through, and we have indeed obtained operational status. (I'd like you all to take a moment to fondly revisit that point in time, where you were officially in, on your Hackintosh. Good stuff.) Some quick specs for anyone generous enough to help; Motherboard: Gigabyte-G31M-ES2L Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16 GHz Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Some basics as to where we are, at the moment: Installed using a [custom?] Boot-132, downloaded, and then the 10.5.6 Retail DVD. Just about everything works perfectly. We followed a great guide with mostly success. Onboard audio works, keyboard and mice work, ethernet's just fine. Restart, Sleep, and Shut Down did work, but I hit a few snags. Now, down to the nitty-gritty, where I am in desperate need of some (likely easy) answers. Before I ask away, I must also ask you - the reader - to bear with me a tad. Entirely new to the OSX86 scene... we've been wrestling with this thing for the past 12 hours straight, and are so close to sweet victory. If I'm asking blatantly stupid questions, it's because it's... late. I'm not an idiot -- I've read through guides and searched through countless to tutorials, but the following is where I'm stumped. I will be eternally grateful for anyone who can help. It may look like a lot of questions, but I can assure you that they're very basic "double-check" questions. Don't be intimidated! ================================================ 01 Natit / Resolution 1920 x 1200 I'm currently stuck with a 1024 x 768 screen resolution, being outputted in VGA. I would absolutely love to connect my monitor via DVI, and take advantage of it's full resolution. Here's what OSX86's 10.5.6 HCL has to say about my GFX card: " Radeon HD 3870 Sapphire Works perfectly with Natit driver, dont use the specific 3800 series driver, use natit All Resolutions up to 1920x1200 working perfectly, rez changing works fine " • Can someone please walk me through the installation of Natit, as a kext? • (Should I be installing kexts through OSX86 Tools?) • I believe, during my initial installation, I accidentally used the 3800 driver. (As suggested to do through this guide. Looking back on the Wiki, it says I shouldn't have. Is there a way to uninstall this driver, if need be? • Once the Natit is installed properly, will I just be able to adjust the resolution from System Preferences? • Will I need to adjust anything in my BIOS? 02 Clueless on Chameleon Of course I downloaded Chameleon and gave it a go. (ver 1.0.11, for what it's worth. I figured that since it was recommended in the guide, it was the tried'n'true "stable" choice.) I opened the .pkg file, went through the appropriate steps, and it would seem that everything took. However, whenever I load without the Boot 132 disc, I am taunted with the gray Apple load screen. After a brief moment, both the Apple logo and the loading icon vanish, and I'm stuck with a gray void. I've given it plenty of time; it simply doesn't load up. What am I doing wrong with Chameleon? Do I need to install additional kexts to get it to work? Simply running the app and clicking a few times seems a bit too easy. At the moment, I have to boot using the Boot 132 CD, each time. • Is there an appraised "Chameleon for Newbies" guide anyone knows of? • Does anyone know, off hand, how to properly get Chameleon up and running, based off of my install? (Retail 10.5.6?) 03 Uninstalling Kexts This one's pretty simple [i hope]: what is the best way for uninstalling Kexts? I added a Natit.kext in hopes of solving my resolution issue, but not only did it do no good, but now, whenever I select "Shut Down...", I get an error message insisting that I need to restart my machine. This did not happen prior to installing Natit.kext. • I've heard that Pacifist is a good investment, in terms of finding kexts and removing them via the Terminal. Is this true? • Otherwise, does anyone know of any other reliable methods in extracting kexts without ruining the system? • Any ideas on how to resolve the "recommended restarting" error after selecting Shut Down...? 04 Updating to 10.5.7? Since we did a retail install of 10.5.6 - the safe way, supposedly - is it alright to update to 10.5.7 through Apple's site? ================================================ I believe that concludes all my questions. Like I mentioned, I would be absolutely thrilled if anyone could help me smooth out these last few wrinkles. A functioning screen, no "restart" error, and a bootable Chameleon would make this a perfect setup. So, so close... it's beyond tantilizing. Can anyone help a guy out? I'd be beyond grateful. Thank you for your time! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/167213-so-so-close/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Melancholique Posted May 26, 2009 Author Share Posted May 26, 2009 Whoa. The torrential amount of advice has pretty much left me speechless. You guys are crazy -- let's not all dive in at once. In the fashion of actually helping out the community, I'm going to go ahead and clue in any future sap who was as clueless as I, in installing OSX 10.5.6 on a G31M-ES2L. I figured the following out through redundant trial and error; I only wish it will help out future Hackintoshers. A1: Natit / Resolution The big thing to remember is, when following this guide, to completely disregard the bit about EFI Strings. That is, steps 26-31 should be Completely Ignored. So you're essentially skipping over the; "# Click 'Add EFI Strings/Boot Flag' # Click on the 'GFX Strings' button, select your card (or custom) and click the 'Import into Boot Editor' # In the 'Please enter timeout' area enter a number - I enter 1 personally, but this is the number in seconds the Chameleon bootloader will wait before loading OSX # In the 'Please enter the graphics mode' enter your resolution. I enter 1024x768x32 and then change it via the control panel later. # Click 'Apple changes to com.apple.Boot.plist' It is writing a new Boot.plist now. It creates a backup one. # If asked to reboot, click Cancel" Once that's ignored, go ahead and install Natit.kext (found in this post; first item to download on first post) via OSX86 Tools. Obviously, cancel the request to reboot. Also make sure you check the Set Extensions Permissions, and Clear Extensions Cache boxes. Then click "Run Selected Tasks". You're almost there. You'll need to shut down/reboot... and as it's starting up, I'd highly recommend entering BIOS. I don't know if this is mandatory for everyone, but my max resolution could only be achieved through activating the output through my GFX card, in the BIOS. Once I established which audio should be displayed, as a priority (that is, my DVI connection via the Radeon), the next boot up was in glorious 1920 x 1080 resolution. A2: Getting Chameleon to Work Perhaps I'm an idiot, but the guide I've been linking to did not allow me to set up Chameleon properly. In fact, the version of Chameleon you obtain through the author's "download" section was missing some valuable components you need. (I'm assuming it is of an earlier build.) Instead, I'd recommend following this very basic, straight-forward guide. In fact, it even links to a working Chameleon app. Pretty sweet. Getting Chameleon to work is simple. A direct quote from the above guide [forgive the author's English]: 1. Open Chameleon that you download’s early. 2. Copy the contents of the Extra directory from the Generic.iso CD* by drag & drop in to the Extra Contents folder in Chameleon by following this simple procedure . Open the Generic.iso CD* from your desktop. >>> Double-click on the INITRD.IMG file. >>> Double-click on the Extra folder. >>> Drag the Extensions folder to the Extra Contents folder in Chameleon 3. Double-click the Chameleon_DFE_for_Hard_Disk.pkg file and install to your hard disk. 4. Remove the BootCD and reboot. 5. You should now be able to boot into Leopard without the BootCD. * For clarification purposes, the "Generic.iso CD" references to your Boot-132 CD, which you should still be using, assuming Chameleon isn't up and running. A3: Uninstalling Kexts Still not entirely sure what the best method for this is, but I've heard good things about KextHelper. I'm not sure about simply dragging the .kext file into the Trash, but I've heard it works in some instances as well. I've yet to have to delete one, but from what I understand, it's best to do through some simple Terminal/delete commands. A4: Updating to 10.5.7 Assuming you install via the guide linked several times through the post, your update to 10.5.7 will be hassle free. Your sound is apt to be broken after the update -- simply reinstalling the ALC883 patch, and ALC883 kexts will fix that up just fine. ~++~ At the moment, my setup is running completely perfect. I love how cheap the ES2L mobo was, and how smoothly everything has gone with it. Major thumbs up. The one flaw that voids my "perfect" system is a Kernel Panic during Shutdown. Restart and Sleep work without a hitch, but I get the infamous "You need to restart..." message at the end of a Shutdown. [i've pinned it down to a problem regarding the AppleHDAController corrupting a registry, but no such luck in remedying it.] Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/167213-so-so-close/#findComment-1163315 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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