Intel DG965WH 10.6.1 retail, remaining issues and how to...

[cwestpha]

Allright I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to get the DG965WH working for my friend. His GPU died so I gave him my old one from my Mac Pro and decided while I am at it I would give him a Snow Leopard Hackintosh. Aside from a few new issues I have it running pretty well and relitivly easily. However there are a few issues I am still having that I need some help with and I am also going to share how I have gotten this far.

 

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Issues Remaining!!!

 

1) First two USB ports are not working. I have DSDT.asm properly installed and it has fixed most of the other problems. Also have OpenHaltRestart, NullCPUPowermanagement, FakeSMC, and DSDT.aml using the EFI partition /w Chameleon 2 RC3.

 

2) Cant find a STAC9271D kext that works with Snow Leopard. I have tried several available from the livedrive share that is floating around and so far none of them work. I need to get this working more then anything else, but so far am at a complete loss. Any help would be appreciated. Before you ask though, yes I did try the old ones that worked under Leopard and no those didn't work.

 

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Breifly what I have done to get this far (I will expand it into a full guide when I have time and have the last issues taken care of). At this point I assume you have already backed everything up and have a destination hard drive with nothing in the MBR (zeroed out basically).

 

1) preparing the drive for Retail 10.6 install

a) take the destination driver an format it HFS+ /w normal options and the GUID partition style.

use Chameleon 2 RC2 installer on newly created disk from a mac or hackintosh. I used my MBP and a SATA to USB adaptor. Select HFS EFI partition style under customize and personally I didn't select only the EFI HFS and themes as I was going to do everything else manually.

c) run the installer and have fun.

d) After it is done you can close the window and open a terminal and type:

su -s
[password]
diskutil list

e) take note of the diskXsY of the partition on the hard drive you are going to install snow leopard on. For me it was disk2s1.

f) now enter this...

mkdir /Volumes/EFI
mount_hfs /dev/diskXs1

g) At this point some people say you have to run Killall Finder but I didn't. Open up your new EFI Device/Drive in the finder and at this point you want to copy the "boot" binary file from the easily available Chameleon 2 RC3. You can find it on almost any install guide or on the official side inside of the binary archive.

h) Now here are some general rules. everything under your Extra folder on the EFI partition is like the root of your current hard drive. So your com.apple.Boot.plist, DSDT.aml, and anything you want overridden and parsed first by Chameleon goes there. All of the low level Kexts (like fakesmc, nullCPUPowermangement, and OpenHaltRestart all go here).

Take notice of how I said low level Kexts. Anything like graphics kexts, networking kexts, etc have dependencies and since OS X will load everything here FIRST they simply wont load because their dependencies will load latter. Confusing huh? You can get around this by copying the dependencies here... or modifying them to not need the dependencies but then you lose some of the advantage of any fixes to the perfectly improvements in say graphics kext updates introduced in patches.

i) Copy fakesmc.kext, NullCPUPowermanagement.kext, and OpenHaltRestart.Kext to Extra/Extentions on the EFI partition. These are the only 3 I needed here but I am sure there are more for little fixes here and there others would recommend.

j) Copy a com.apple.Boot.plist to the Extra folder on the EFI partition from a generic mac. Now add these options, I sugest plistedit pro and made the following changes...

<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>-arch=i386 -v -x32</strings>

 

Note that GraphicsEnabler is only for people with relatively recent Nvidia cards (8xxx or newer) that Chameleon can configure on its own. So no EFI strings or GPU enablers for you! If you have an ATI card you cant use this option and MUST use a Kext enabler.

k) close the finer window and go back to your still open Terminal. now type...

umount /Volumes/EFI

some people say delete the folder too or kill Finder again. Both of these for me were redundant. /Volumes/EFI gets removed on next boot and I never had to killall Finder to make Finder realize it was removed.

l) unmount the hard drive the normal way and stick it into that hackintosh. Time to get to installing Snowy. ^.^

 

2) Retail SnowLeopard install

a) There are two ways to do this. One is just to use the DVD as if it was a normal mac. This wont work if you have a PATA DVD drive or a AHCI enabled SATA DVD drive. Yes there are fixes for both former (JMicronATA.kext and put it in your /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extentions like we did with some other things before) and a few Boot.plist options you can try... but I am lazy.

The way I ended up having to do it was just use a handy 8 GB USB thumb drive and copied an of the disk.

when the Chameleon loader greets you just select either the DVD (if it shows up) or select the USB's Mac OS Install. The fun thing about Chameleon is it is like the Bootcamp menu... but more useful and more powerful. ^.^

c) Run 10.6 install like normal. Remember to select the right hard drive!

d) customize the install options how ever you want!

e) wait about half an hour and it will say it failed. Don't worry this is normal. It is trying to "bless" the hard drive for it to boot, silly OS X we already blessed everything just the way we want it back when we installed Chameleon 2 RC2. ^.^

 

3) Booting up for the first time under your new snow kitty.

 

This section will be worked on at a latter point. Basically all I have yet to explain is how to get the built in Ethernet port working and configure the DSDT.asm to take care of a few annoying issues. Yes I still don't have sound and the first two USB ports on the back are not working but I hope to get some nice people to help me with that. Also if you notice your internal PATA port and external PS/2 ports wont work. I didn't install those kexts because I don't use them and thus they are dead to me. I subscribe to the KISS mentality (Keep It Simple Stupid) and want to install only the bare minimum of modified files to get this working. That way there is a lot less chance of something going horribly wrong with the system.

[dillan]

congrats on getting it working. someone else was reporting success with these other kexts:

 

ALCinject.kext

Intel82566MM.kext

VoodooHDA.kext

 

For the benefit of all would you be willing to share your BIOS settings?

 

Is if possible to use an IDE drive to boot from? What kext would you use for IDE HD support on this board?

[chappatti]

THANKS cwesthpa! Have FULL SOUND, ETHERNET, USB and GRAPHICS on 10.6.3.

 

Thanks to your tip here on using an efi 'partition' install I got this going !!!

 

Install on USB External HD.  Not USB stick.

 

@dillan: if u r still on this, a USB external HD saves a lot of headaches.

 

** For astep by step on efi boot install I used this wonderful guide by munky:

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=127330

 

*** Installed FROM 10.5.8 already on internal SATA HD.  This helped a lot I think, but the efi guide should definitely work from install DVD in -s mode.

 

** Used only kexts listed by cwesthpa:  FakeSMC, NullCPU..., OpenHalt... in Extra/Extensions created using above guide.

 

** Install 10.6 and it booted up no problems.

 

** Use ethernet kext below to get ethernet (wired) then downloaded and installed 10.6.2 combo and 10.6.3 combo updates.

 

** Install graphics.

 

** Install audio using voodooHDA v 0.2.61 from here

 

http://www.projectosx.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=355

 

All is good !! THANKS AGAIN ! and hope it helps someone.

Intel82566MM.kext.zip

VoodooHDA.kext_261_Snow.zip