Falcon4 Posted August 3, 2009 Share Posted August 3, 2009 I'm having a lot of trouble with this one. I've got a Dell XPS 400 system, Pentium D 920, 1gb RAM, 160gb HDD, GeForce 8600GT, that's bootlooping and driving me insane with iPC 10.5.6. Funny thing about this XPS 400, because I've searched all over the internet and these forums, and have found not only nothing resembling this problem, but I've also found nothing but success from anyone with an XPS 400 system (except the occasional complaints of audio problems, which there is a topic dedicated to solving on this model). I'd used this exact iPC image to create my picture-perfect Hackintosh with a Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L motherboard and Pentium Dual Core, but I had to disassemble that computer and repurpose it as my media center PC/server, instead of my workhorse PC as before. I put the OSX hard drive, and my Windows hard drive, both into the new PC. A few system tweaks later, and Windows was up and running. Mac OS, not so much. It just bootloops - right from the "Darwin/x86" screen back to the BIOS screen as soon as the countdown timer expires. Nothing I could do would get it to boot. I figured it was because of some kexts that were loaded that I don't understand (OSX is a huge mess under the hood... *shudder*) So I wiped my Windows drive and tried loading it on there (it's backed up nightly to an incremental image, so I just set a manual backup point and wiped it). It did something different - it just hung at the grey Apple screen indefinitely (I waited hours because I fell asleep). I didn't bother checking the -v output, maybe I should've. A subsequent reinstall with fewer kexts/options, caused it to start looping again. I figured I should be putting it back on my main Mac drive again anyway. I reformatted the Windows drive again, and from the iPC setup DVD, I imaged the main OSX drive with all my data, into a file on the ex-Windows drive. I deactivated that drive in the BIOS to protect it, and I reinstalled iPC again on the main Mac drive. Still bootloops. Tried -f, -x, -s, -v, cpus=1, and various other switches, to no avail. Nothing improves or changes the condition, but -x does blare off a huge list of loaded kexts before rebooting. The reboot occurs just milliseconds after what I believe is "Starting darwin/x86" appears on screen, barely enough time to see the flash of the characters on the LCD before it blacks out. Any ideas? I'm pretty geek, but not so great OSX-wise. I was really getting into OSX86 because I need to learn Macs for my job, yet don't have nearly enough money to afford a real one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Falcon4 Posted August 4, 2009 Author Share Posted August 4, 2009 The rich text editor is broken as hell.. ugh. Thanks for swallowing my post. Note to self: create topic about that in the suggestions forum if there is one... Anyway, guess I've gotta retype that post... grr. Okay, sorry for the bump, but the topic seems to have slipped to page 3 after only 1 day of posts. Wow. So... bump. Can someone give me something to help diagnose this problem further? Right now it's just a brick sitting on my desk because I nuked the Windows drive to try getting Mac OS working, and now that drive's holding the main drive's backup image. I'm literally stuck right now. I really do need someone to point me in the direction of the problem, or at least help by bumping this topic until someone that does know comes along... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Falcon4 Posted August 6, 2009 Author Share Posted August 6, 2009 *Sigh* Bump? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Falcon4 Posted August 16, 2009 Author Share Posted August 16, 2009 Wow, thanks for all the helpful replies... Seriously though, if anyone would have read this, it would have been a quick and easy one to solve. I finally found out that I just needed to switch on the Voodoo kernel, and the thing works like a charm. The problem was that the Pentium D isn't supported by the vanilla kernel, and I didn't know that (I thought it just needed the appropriate instruction sets). After doing that, I now have an OSx86 Dell. Which is good. Except for one thing, I still can't figure out how to get sound (Sigmatel 9220) to work. I guess I'm on my own for that one (the only topics addressing the 9220 are for OSX 10.4), or at the very least, would be a subject for another topic. Ah well... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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