Lifehacker Guide with GA-EP45-UD3P Motherboard

[CoHPhasor]

Ok, having some issues, this is the second MB they have tried, first one had two bad RAM slots.

 

Second board installed, first time it booted, frooze entering bios (used a ps2 keyboard, if thats an issue)

 

Any ideas? Motherboard again?

 

Same exact specs as the LH guide, to the T.

 

-joseph

 

Honestly, if it doesn't hit BIOS menu, then it's a hardware thing.

RAM could be at fault, mobo, etc.

Troubleshoot it as you would any other hardware.

[j0seph]

Honestly, if it doesn't hit BIOS menu, then it's a hardware thing.

RAM could be at fault, mobo, etc.

Troubleshoot it as you would any other hardware.

 

Yea that's what we figured, we are going to pick up some stuff at fry's to test out hardware problems.

 

Weird that it booted, posted and once entered bios froze and now nothing happens. On power up it starts (lights on mb) then shuts off (no post).

 

I hope I don't have these issues when my parts arrive!

 

Also can anyone confirm you have to make the restore (usb drive) on a 10.5 and up machine? Earlier someone mentioned having problems making the restore drive using a 10.4, but I don't know if anyone else encountered this issue.

 

thanks everyone.

 

-joseph

[MacTech84]

Yea that's what we figured, we are going to pick up some stuff at fry's to test out hardware problems.

 

Weird that it booted, posted and once entered bios froze and now nothing happens. On power up it starts (lights on mb) then shuts off (no post).

 

I hope I don't have these issues when my parts arrive!

 

Also can anyone confirm you have to make the restore (usb drive) on a 10.5 and up machine? Earlier someone mentioned having problems making the restore drive using a 10.4, but I don't know if anyone else encountered this issue.

 

thanks everyone.

 

-joseph

 

I had the same problems with my BIOS, I actually think its a problem with the BIOS or possibly using a USB keyboard. What I ended up doing was making a few changes in BIOS as per the guide, then saving it and restarting it. Once they were set that was it and it boots perfectly. I used 10.5.7 to make my USB drive, and I would recommend 10.5 over 10.4 as there were significant changes in Disk Utility between the system versions. A lot of these were underlying but they are significant as to how images are made and restored. If you can, use a Mac with 10.5 or 10.6 already installed.

[960brick]

Hi , don't meen to sidetrack here but somebody brought up over clocking a while back, I have only been able to bump it up to 3.2 running stable at 46C idle (Identical Lifehacker Guide components). Wondering if enyone else has had good results.

 

[MicahDanielSmith]

Read through the thread, just had a general hardware question. I have purchased most everything like the lifehacker build, but am trying to get the video card now. Does it matter if you get the EVGA card or will the PNY one work the exact same?

 

Best Buy has the PNY card...and no one has the EVGA card. They both are the 9800 GTX+, I just didnt know if the kexts used in this build are specific to the EVGA. I can order the EVGA, but just wanted to get something quick since I have pretty much everything else for the build.

 

Best Buy PNY 9800 GTX+

 

Thanks

[MacTech84]

Hi , don't meen to sidetrack here but somebody brought up over clocking a while back, I have only been able to bump it up to 3.2 running stable at 46C idle (Identical Lifehacker Guide components). Wondering if enyone else has had good results.

 

 

What chip are you using? the reason I ask is that some will have a locked multiplier. If you have a locked multiplier you can still try to overclock by adjusting the FSB but you have to be careful with that, and you will want to get a much better cooling solution for the chip itself. And typically the only chips with unlocked multipliers are the Extreme series chips.

 

Read through the thread, just had a general hardware question. I have purchased most everything like the lifehacker build, but am trying to get the video card now. Does it matter if you get the EVGA card or will the PNY one work the exact same?

 

Best Buy has the PNY card...and no one has the EVGA card. They both are the 9800 GTX+, I just didnt know if the kexts used in this build are specific to the EVGA. I can order the EVGA, but just wanted to get something quick since I have pretty much everything else for the build.

 

Best Buy PNY 9800 GTX+

 

Thanks

 

From one of my previous posts... (tried to link to it, and it was not working for some reason)

 

"Since Stellarola updated the installer to PC EFI v10.5 (Thank you Netkas), the bootloader now detects the Nvidia card you are using beyond the 8 & 9 series of cards with support of the GT200 based cards. This does not require any kind of modification or special installers anymore, i.e. kext's.

 

Now keep this in mind, only the cards available as of when PC EFI v10.5 was released, are going to be supported. I know that Nvidia does have some others coming out that are revisions of the current GT200 die, mostly a shrink in die, but they also support DX11 (meaning a physical change in the GPU). They are the only ones of the GT200 series that will, I do not know the card identifications but as I am aware, all GTS 250/260/275/280/285 are supported. I think the GTX295 is recognized as 2 separate cards so its not worth that purchase. I am using the GTX275 simply because its the same chip as the GTX 280/285/295, 240 SP's and 32 Rop's, with the only difference being the memory size, and bit of the memory architecture (defined by the size of memory for Nvidia) and the price. Got mine on newegg for $230ish...

 

You can definitely say I know my graphics cards as I follow Nvidia closely, I am a die hard fan! Please do not take what I am saying as absolute for every install. The card I have is by EVGA and the reason for that is they stay close to the Nvidia reference designs. This means you will have better compatibility as some Nvidia partners can take a card reference design, and change it so it suits their needs and what they want for an end product. Typically XFX, EVGA, BFG (unless its very radical) and ZOTAC use the reference designs and can swap the cooler, or make a better one for the OC versions of the card."

 

As for between PNY or EVGA, my personal feeling has always been PNY is overpriced. If the EVGA specs are better and a better price, get it.

[MicahDanielSmith]

Thanks for the advice. The PNY in this case is cheaper (by about $30), but is also more readily available than the EVGA card, so I assume that I can purchase the PNY 9800 GTX+ and then just follow the life hacker guide with no issues. Is that what you are suggesting?

[MacWannaBe]

Hi , don't meen to sidetrack here but somebody brought up over clocking a while back, I have only been able to bump it up to 3.2 running stable at 46C idle (Identical Lifehacker Guide components). Wondering if enyone else has had good results.

 

 

I have the Q9550 (stock is 2.83Ghz) and have it overclocked to 3.4Ghz with no problem at all. Idle temps are around 50C, but I'm using V3 installer which has the temps be higher than v2.

 

Under load it gets to about 61C. I think these temps are ok.

 

-Ed

[MacTech84]

Thanks for the advice. The PNY in this case is cheaper (by about $30), but is also more readily available than the EVGA card, so I assume that I can purchase the PNY 9800 GTX+ and then just follow the life hacker guide with no issues. Is that what you are suggesting?

 

That would be correct, you can use either, although I am a bigger fan of EVGA and XFX personally.

 

 

I have the Q9550 (stock is 2.83Ghz) and have it overclocked to 3.4Ghz with no problem at all. Idle temps are around 50C, but I'm using V3 installer which has the temps be higher than v2.

 

Under load it gets to about 61C. I think these temps are ok.

 

-Ed

 

Is there anyway to fix this? I am curious what my temps actually are, and was wondering if this might solver it...

 

http://netkas.org/?p=338

 

From what I can tell its supposed to give more accurate temps, but I cannot find any kind of explanation as to what exactly FakeSMC does, anybody know?

[960brick]

I have the Q9550 (stock is 2.83Ghz) and have it overclocked to 3.4Ghz with no problem at all. Idle temps are around 50C, but I'm using V3 installer which has the temps be higher than v2.

 

Under load it gets to about 61C. I think these temps are ok.

 

-Ed

 

Ed, would you be kind enough to share your bios settings, did you change the dram settings as well ?

[MacTech84]

And to answer my own question, I finally found this...

 

http://prasys.co.cc/2009/08/fakesmc-macboo...lease-for-wind/

 

But in brief...

 

"Firstly some of us may not know what is SMC. SMC stands for System Management Control. What it does on a real mac is that it controls fan levels , tells the system when to wake , how to wake , how to shutdown , which devices to shutdown and basically it controls all other power management related stuff. FakeSMC tries to emulate a real SMC device so that its possible for Hackint0sh users to run several programs and most importantly to fix annoying SMC errors and such during boot up. This makes it one step closer to vanilla and to be closely as real mac as possible."

 

Anyone want to try the FakeSMC from netkas, http://netkas.org/?p=338 to see what happens with your temps before and after, and let us know if you see any KP's...

[MacWannaBe]

And to answer my own question, I finally found this...

 

http://prasys.co.cc/2009/08/fakesmc-macboo...lease-for-wind/

 

But in brief...

 

"Firstly some of us may not know what is SMC. SMC stands for System Management Control. What it does on a real mac is that it controls fan levels , tells the system when to wake , how to wake , how to shutdown , which devices to shutdown and basically it controls all other power management related stuff. FakeSMC tries to emulate a real SMC device so that its possible for Hackint0sh users to run several programs and most importantly to fix annoying SMC errors and such during boot up. This makes it one step closer to vanilla and to be closely as real mac as possible."

 

Anyone want to try the FakeSMC from netkas, http://netkas.org/?p=338 to see what happens with your temps before and after, and let us know if you see any KP's...

 

 

I have a general question about things likes this. In our current install, all the extensions that are added to make things work are in /Extra/Extensions.mkext.

 

For example, in V3 there are the following:

drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 fakesmc.kext
drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 OpenHaltRestart.kext
drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 LegacyJMB36xSATA.kext
drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 LegacyHDA.kext
drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 LegacyATI4800Controller.kext
drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext
drwxr-xr-x  3 ed  staff    102 Nov 10 18:03 Disabler.kext

 

If we want to replace fakesmc.kext, we'd have to extract the mkext, replace the kext and create a new Extensions.mkext is that right?

[cugir]

Oh Man, I broke my hack

 

 

my lifehacker build is suddenly not recognizing my dual monitors but instead only one at a time. It will also not open a jpeg in Preview though the jpeg shows fine in the finder or safari. Chess works fine. The one working monitor is stuck at 1280x1024 and none of the other monitor options or resolutions are available..including 'detect monitors'. If I only plug one monitor in to either slot the results are the same.

Monitors are 22" NEC spectraview LCD and 19" NEC CRT with DVI-VGA adapter.

 

Is my vid card bad already? Do i need to reset the bios? something else to try??

 

 

What caused it I think is I've been trying to install XP on a separate drive for a couple weeks now and was trying the method below...

 

 

cugir - did you get this figured out? If not, I can probably walk you through it since I just did it. I have to have XP for some CAD stuff and have my system running XP off a second physical drive which is also usable in VMWare.

 

Short story:

drive 1 - GUID with OSX and Chameleon on one partition

drive 2 - MBR with Chameleon on an HFS+ 1st partition and XP on an NTFS 2nd partition

 

When I hose my boot config I just go into the BIOS and change the boot order to fix it. Drive 2 is primary boot since XP squawks if it isn't and I use Chameleon to pick the OS to boot and have it set to default to booting the OSX partition on drive 1.

 

 

I didn't touch my startup drive but reformatted and installed camelion on a second SATA drive. My XP install still didn't work but thats not important here. I've since reformatted and disconnected that second drive but the monitor issues remain.

The only other thing I did was change my account password since terminal now requires one, it used to be blank. I also removed 2 startup items from my account while I was there..one was itunes assistant and another was a monitor calibration reminder that I"ve always deleted in the past from startup items.

 

I rechecked the bios and all matches the lifehacker site though the 'init display first' was set on PCI when it should have been on PEG. I'm not sure if it changed itself or if i missed it during install. I've since tried all three settings, PCI PEG and PEG2 with no luck.

 

 

Is this a BIOS issue?

 

SHould I try to restore from my backed up Carbon Copy CLoner version then run the v3 installer on that?

 

WHat a mess

 

edit to add: upon startup, it hangs for about 10 seconds at "ACPI Controller" and then goes into 'verifying DMI Pool'. This is new since the monitors went bad.

[MacTech84]

Oh Man, I broke my hack

 

 

my lifehacker build is suddenly not recognizing my dual monitors but instead only one at a time. It will also not open a jpeg in Preview though the jpeg shows fine in the finder or safari. Chess works fine. The one working monitor is stuck at 1280x1024 and none of the other monitor options or resolutions are available..including 'detect monitors'. If I only plug one monitor in to either slot the results are the same.

Monitors are 22" NEC spectraview LCD and 19" NEC CRT with DVI-VGA adapter.

 

Is my vid card bad already? Do i need to reset the bios? something else to try??

 

 

What caused it I think is I've been trying to install XP on a separate drive for a couple weeks now and was trying the method below...

 

I didn't touch my startup drive but reformatted and installed camelion on a second SATA drive. My XP install still didn't work but thats not important here. I've since reformatted and disconnected that second drive but the monitor issues remain.

The only other thing I did was change my account password since terminal now requires one, it used to be blank. I also removed 2 startup items from my account while I was there..one was itunes assistant and another was a monitor calibration reminder that I"ve always deleted in the past from startup items.

 

I rechecked the bios and all matches the lifehacker site though the 'init display first' was set on PCI when it should have been on PEG. I'm not sure if it changed itself or if i missed it during install. I've since tried all three settings, PCI PEG and PEG2 with no luck.

 

 

Is this a BIOS issue?

 

SHould I try to restore from my backed up Carbon Copy CLoner version then run the v3 installer on that?

 

WHat a mess

 

edit to add: upon startup, it hangs for about 10 seconds at "ACPI Controller" and then goes into 'verifying DMI Pool'. This is new since the monitors went bad.

 

Wow, this is quite a mess, but your hardware is not bad, just conflicting software from what it sounds like. Here is what I recommend doing...

 

There is absolutely no need to install Chameleon on the 2nd drive, could explain the video issue. Since you are installing Win on a secondary drive do this...

 

Set your BIOS to read your primary Mac OS X drive. Since Chameleon is the bootloader, it will see other drives that can boot, and will let them accordingly do so when you select them.

 

At this point, re-install your Mac OS Drive and start from scratch to play it safe.

 

Then disconnect your Mac drive from the motherboard so its not seen in BIOS, and then set BIOS to boot from the Drive you want to install Win on.

 

Make the MBR partition on the drive you want to use, and then Format it with the Win installer.

Install Win, run updates, install drivers, whatever you need to get that going.

 

Then, re-connect your Mac Drive, set it as the primary Boot in BIOS, and if you interrupt the start at boot up, you will see your Win drive as selectable from the options.

[cugir]

Thanks SBMac, You have been very helpful to everyone in this thread, including me.

 

I was coming back to post an update.

I restored my 10.6.1 install from last week to another drive using carbon copy cloner then installed the stell v3 hack to that. I unplugged my 10.6.2 install drive with the bad monitor problem and here I am posting in 10.6.1 with both monitors working perfectly as they did before.

 

I must have done something when installing camelion in terminal or when i deleted my startup item that was the reminder for my monitor calibration software.

 

At this point I will probably just restore this 10.6.1 install to my original startup drive and upgrade that to 10.6.2 instead of starting from scratch. If it remains stable then great, if not I'll start from scratch then.

 

 

EDIT TO ADD: {censored}, i rebooted into 10.6.1 with the 10.6.2 drive plugged in also and now my 10.6.1 install is showing the bad monitor problem as well. Hmmm. Something on that 10,6,2 drive is causing it maybe. I'll run a couple tests then clear that drive and restore it.

 

 

SBMac, as for installing windows..I'm having a hard time getting my XP SP2 CD to install on my SATA drives. I found a few SATA drivers at the gigabyte site and bought a USB floppy drive but the drivers are .exe files and I don't have a PC to see if they will 'unzip' into the needed files. WHen I tried before I got an error that i was missing a txtsetup.oem file from the driver. I also don't have a PC to make a slipstream SP3 disk even if that would help.

Any advice on getting SP2 onto a SATA drive?

Can I plug an IDE drive into the lifehacker machine?

[MacTech84]

Thanks SBMac, You have been very helpful to everyone in this thread, including me.

 

I was coming back to post an update.

I restored my 10.6.1 install from last week to another drive using carbon copy cloner then installed the stell v3 hack to that. I unplugged my 10.6.2 install drive with the bad monitor problem and here I am posting in 10.6.1 with both monitors working perfectly as they did before.

 

I must have done something when installing camelion in terminal or when i deleted my startup item that was the reminder for my monitor calibration software.

 

At this point I will probably just restore this 10.6.1 install to my original startup drive and upgrade that to 10.6.2 instead of starting from scratch. If it remains stable then great, if not I'll start from scratch then.

 

 

EDIT TO ADD: {censored}, i rebooted into 10.6.1 with the 10.6.2 drive plugged in also and now my 10.6.1 install is showing the bad monitor problem as well. Hmmm. Something on that 10,6,2 drive is causing it maybe. I'll run a couple tests then clear that drive and restore it.

 

 

SBMac, as for installing windows..I'm having a hard time getting my XP SP2 CD to install on my SATA drives. I found a few SATA drivers at the gigabyte site and bought a USB floppy drive but the drivers are .exe files and I don't have a PC to see if they will 'unzip' into the needed files. WHen I tried before I got an error that i was missing a txtsetup.oem file from the driver. I also don't have a PC to make a slipstream SP3 disk even if that would help.

Any advice on getting SP2 onto a SATA drive?

Can I plug an IDE drive into the lifehacker machine?

 

You are probably getting the errors on your 10.6.1 drive as its using the bootloader that is messed up on the 10.6.2 drive. Just unplug that, upgrade your 10.6.1 to 10.6.2, make sure V3 installer is on that drive and go into your BIOS, setting the updated drive as the primary boot drive. Be sure that when you plug the other 10.6.2 drive into the computer that the good 10.6.2 install is set as the primary drive to boot from in BIOS. I noticed that when I plug and un-plug, the BIOS likes to revert to the previous boot order.

 

As for XP, I just want this on record that I hate, loath, and would love to kill the engineers that came up with the {censored} that is windows 98/2000/ME/NT/XP/Vista/7 basically the {censored} we have been fed for the last decade, hence why we have threads like this. XP SP2 is notorious for having problems installing onto SATA drives as the SATA interface and protocols had to be hacked into XP for it to work. I might say try an SP3 install disc if you can find one, or heaven forbid, try Vista or 7. I have tried to do the driver off of floppy before, and it is not only a royal pain in the a$$, but sometimes just does not work.

[codymac]

CD/DVD-R - This is where you need to be a bit picky, most any will work but for my experience with many brands I find that Sony, Pioneer, and Plextor give the best compatibility and burning reliability for most media you use

 

Pioneer BDC-2202 (aka BDC-202) working OOB here. It even rips Blurays with MakeMKV!

 

There is absolutely no need to install Chameleon on the 2nd drive, could explain the video issue. Since you are installing Win on a secondary drive do this...

 

True - my config is very much customized to what I want to accomplish with my "Hack Pro."

 

From my experience, chain0 is probably the most straightforward way to boot multiple drives.

 

As for XP, I just want this on record that I hate, loath, and would love to kill the engineers that came up with the {censored} that is windows 98/2000/ME/NT/XP/Vista/7 basically the {censored} we have been fed for the last decade, hence why we have threads like this. XP SP2 is notorious for having problems installing onto SATA drives as the SATA interface and protocols had to be hacked into XP for it to work. I might say try an SP3 install disc if you can find one, or heaven forbid, try Vista or 7. I have tried to do the driver off of floppy before, and it is not only a royal pain in the a$, but sometimes just does not work.

 

Man, you said it! I despise XP on a lot of levels and refuse to code on any Windows platform. Sadly, I've got software that won't run on anything else. I'm not a Win7 fan but will be happy when stuff gets updated just so I can ditch XP's bootloader nonsense.

 

btw - The hot swap has been working fine since I fixed the goofy partition map. I'll admit to not doing it much though since I don't have any of the fancy hot swap drive cages in my case.

[960brick]

I have the Q9550 (stock is 2.83Ghz) and have it overclocked to 3.4Ghz with no problem at all. Idle temps are around 50C, but I'm using V3 installer which has the temps be higher than v2.

 

Under load it gets to about 61C. I think these temps are ok.

 

-Ed

 

OK I have a Q9650 3.0GHz running stable at 3.6Ghz

Replaced the stock cooler with Arctic 7 pro and used the "Easy Tune" utility (running XP)

46C idle and no more than 53C. These temps are with V3 installer, so it can be cooler.

I also used the F11 in BIOS to make presets in case I need to revert back to the old settings

 

[MacTech84]

OK I have a Q9650 3.0GHz running stable at 3.6Ghz

Replaced the stock cooler with Arctic 7 pro and used the "Easy Tune" utility (running XP)

46C idle and no more than 53C. These temps are with V3 installer, so it can be cooler.

I also used the F11 in BIOS to make presets in case I need to revert back to the old settings

 

 

What settings did you change in BIOS to OC the chip? Curious as I have the same one, and I have the new Corsair H50 Liquid cooling system on it.

[960brick]

Did a Windows install just to run the Easy Tune utility that came with the MoBo. and made a preset of the original settings in the bios incase I needed to switch back. Also added 3 case fans right over the cpu cooler and left the cover off.

 

 

 

 

What settings did you change in BIOS to OC the chip? Curious as I have the same one, and I have the new Corsair H50 Liquid cooling system on it.

[huntington]

first, many thanks to adam, stella, & the rest of the osx886 community for the the guidance and tips. i'm working with the exact LH guide parts. i've read all 33 pages of this thread. running into a problem, hoping someone can help me diagnose & solve it. first time builder...

 

twice now i've gotten to the point where i've installed & started up succesfully. i get about 10 minutes of poking around the computer, checking sytem profiler to make sure everything is registering correctly, and then i get the grey screen, multilingual grey screen of death telling me i have to shut down. after i ran into this the first time, i started up from my flash drive & checked the HD - it was so corrupted that disk utility couldn't fix it. i ended up sending it back to newegg so they could send me a new one.

 

completed a successful install today -- everything is registering correctly in system profiler, i double checked my bios settings, they looked correct, but again, after about 10 min of being on the desktop, i get the grey screen of death. started up from the thumb drive, and again, disk utility told me i needed to erase it completely. i'm zeroing the HD right now...wondering what i should try to do differently or what you guys think i could do to help solve the issue.

 

i've checked for common problems, like

-my hdd is connected to the orange sata 0 port

-graphics card is in the top pci slow, nic in the bottom

-ram has been recognized fine both times by system profiler

-bios settings appear to be correct, confirmed cpu is set to 9x

-checked the nic using the network utility, it looks like it's working fine

-monitor (dvi) is plugged into the port furthest from the s-video port

 

any help would be greatly appreciated...

[CoHPhasor]

Thanks SBMac, You have been very helpful to everyone in this thread, including me.

 

I was coming back to post an update.

I restored my 10.6.1 install from last week to another drive using carbon copy cloner then installed the stell v3 hack to that. I unplugged my 10.6.2 install drive with the bad monitor problem and here I am posting in 10.6.1 with both monitors working perfectly as they did before.

 

I must have done something when installing camelion in terminal or when i deleted my startup item that was the reminder for my monitor calibration software.

 

At this point I will probably just restore this 10.6.1 install to my original startup drive and upgrade that to 10.6.2 instead of starting from scratch. If it remains stable then great, if not I'll start from scratch then.

 

 

EDIT TO ADD: {censored}, i rebooted into 10.6.1 with the 10.6.2 drive plugged in also and now my 10.6.1 install is showing the bad monitor problem as well. Hmmm. Something on that 10,6,2 drive is causing it maybe. I'll run a couple tests then clear that drive and restore it.

 

 

SBMac, as for installing windows..I'm having a hard time getting my XP SP2 CD to install on my SATA drives. I found a few SATA drivers at the gigabyte site and bought a USB floppy drive but the drivers are .exe files and I don't have a PC to see if they will 'unzip' into the needed files. WHen I tried before I got an error that i was missing a txtsetup.oem file from the driver. I also don't have a PC to make a slipstream SP3 disk even if that would help.

Any advice on getting SP2 onto a SATA drive?

Can I plug an IDE drive into the lifehacker machine?

 

Think you fubar'ed the boot on the 10.6.2 drive?

Don't complicate it.

Boot from the "Installation" Thumbdrive you made, then rerun the v3 installer

on your 10.6.2 drive.

There, bootloader fixed. ;-)

 

first, many thanks to adam, stella, & the rest of the osx886 community for the the guidance and tips. i'm working with the exact LH guide parts. i've read all 33 pages of this thread. running into a problem, hoping someone can help me diagnose & solve it. first time builder...

 

twice now i've gotten to the point where i've installed & started up succesfully. i get about 10 minutes of poking around the computer, checking sytem profiler to make sure everything is registering correctly, and then i get the grey screen, multilingual grey screen of death telling me i have to shut down. after i ran into this the first time, i started up from my flash drive & checked the HD - it was so corrupted that disk utility couldn't fix it. i ended up sending it back to newegg so they could send me a new one.

 

completed a successful install today -- everything is registering correctly in system profiler, i double checked my bios settings, they looked correct, but again, after about 10 min of being on the desktop, i get the grey screen of death. started up from the thumb drive, and again, disk utility told me i needed to erase it completely. i'm zeroing the HD right now...wondering what i should try to do differently or what you guys think i could do to help solve the issue.

 

i've checked for common problems, like

-my hdd is connected to the orange sata 0 port

-graphics card is in the top pci slow, nic in the bottom

-ram has been recognized fine both times by system profiler

-bios settings appear to be correct, confirmed cpu is set to 9x

-checked the nic using the network utility, it looks like it's working fine

-monitor (dvi) is plugged into the port furthest from the s-video port

 

any help would be greatly appreciated...

 

That definitely sounds troubling.

Quite honestly if you're using the HW from the build I don't see this

as a compatability problem.

Furthermore, the idea that 2 drives have done this is mind-blowing. (If we think it's an HD issue)

Either somehow you've found a terrible batch of drives, or maybe it's the mobo.

Maybe a bad port, or board? Try one of the purple ones this time.

(I use a purple one for my 500GB drive and have never had a problem)

 

Try downloading Western Digital's Drive checking software.

It's bootable and is made to do a full workup on it.

[cugir]

Think you fubar'ed the boot on the 10.6.2 drive?

Don't complicate it.

Boot from the "Installation" Thumbdrive you made, then rerun the v3 installer

on your 10.6.2 drive.

There, bootloader fixed. ;-)

 

Oh man, that is so smart, I should have tried that first.

Instead I wiped the drive and restored from a backedup 10.6.1 install then ran the v3. It's working perfectly but i really should have tried to fix the bootloader first.

This whole bootloader thing is just becoming clear to me.

[CoHPhasor]

Oh man, that is so smart, I should have tried that first.

Instead I wiped the drive and restored from a backedup 10.6.1 install then ran the v3. It's working perfectly but i really should have tried to fix the bootloader first.

This whole bootloader thing is just becoming clear to me.

 

No sweat. It's easier to think of these things when not "in the heat of battle".

;-)

[MacTech84]

first, many thanks to adam, stella, & the rest of the osx886 community for the the guidance and tips. i'm working with the exact LH guide parts. i've read all 33 pages of this thread. running into a problem, hoping someone can help me diagnose & solve it. first time builder...

 

twice now i've gotten to the point where i've installed & started up succesfully. i get about 10 minutes of poking around the computer, checking sytem profiler to make sure everything is registering correctly, and then i get the grey screen, multilingual grey screen of death telling me i have to shut down. after i ran into this the first time, i started up from my flash drive & checked the HD - it was so corrupted that disk utility couldn't fix it. i ended up sending it back to newegg so they could send me a new one.

 

completed a successful install today -- everything is registering correctly in system profiler, i double checked my bios settings, they looked correct, but again, after about 10 min of being on the desktop, i get the grey screen of death. started up from the thumb drive, and again, disk utility told me i needed to erase it completely. i'm zeroing the HD right now...wondering what i should try to do differently or what you guys think i could do to help solve the issue.

 

i've checked for common problems, like

-my hdd is connected to the orange sata 0 port

-graphics card is in the top pci slow, nic in the bottom

-ram has been recognized fine both times by system profiler

-bios settings appear to be correct, confirmed cpu is set to 9x

-checked the nic using the network utility, it looks like it's working fine

-monitor (dvi) is plugged into the port furthest from the s-video port

 

any help would be greatly appreciated...

 

The likely hood of 2 bad drives while possible is almost unheard of. I would definitely try another port on the motherboard and I might also suggest taking off and checking the thermal compound to the CPU. I have seen where the CPU can start to overheat and lock everything up. Do this after you test the ports on the board and see what happens. For your situation it could be a bad board, and hopefully nothing more.

 

Oh man, that is so smart, I should have tried that first.

Instead I wiped the drive and restored from a backedup 10.6.1 install then ran the v3. It's working perfectly but i really should have tried to fix the bootloader first.

This whole bootloader thing is just becoming clear to me.

 

Another way to think about it.

 

Sometimes a re-install of software might not fix the problem. Don't feel bad about doing a restore as it would be better for a clean start anyways. And now you know the system is more reliable.