Windows 7 + Snow Leopard Install without access to a Mac

[Robert B.]

Hello dear InsanelyMac members,

 

my current situation drives me literally mad, as my eyes hurt, reading posts and guides for over 5h. Basically the impression that I have is, that the more I learn about OSx86 and everything that is included (EFI, DSDT, kexts, etc.), the more complicated and obfuscated it gets.

 

My intention is to install Windows 7 and Snow Leopard in dual boot on my computer. I bought the genuine Win 7 Home Premium 64bit DVD and the Mac Box Set with Snow Leopard, just to make things sure. Before that naturally, I informed myself about the possibility to tweak the retail DVD from Apple and with a custom bootloader and "extras" and install it on a non-Apple computer.

The problem is, having gathered more and more information (because I don't want to "trial and error" when installing) it became less and less comprehensive for me. Of course the wiki together with all the guides for 10.6 are existing but the facts, that it seems impossible to install 10.6 on a PC without needing a working Mac during installation and that transferring the installation to non-Apple computers, the install has to be accurately adjusted to the hardware, make me really worried and apprehensive.

 

In the end, before I give technical information, summing up what is said above, I would like you to help me finding a fitting solution how to install a dual-boot system with Chameleon as the only bootloader from the original DVDs (Microsoft 7 64bit+Apple Snow Leopard 10.6) without having a Mac during install, fitting my system.

Of course when everything is running, I don't bother continuing researching my problems and solving them on my own (concerning hardware problems), but honestly speaking, all the MBR/GUID, 7 or Snow Leopard first, EasyBCD+Chameleon, everyone telling it slightly abbreviated, is definitely NOT useful .

 

First of all I give you the hardware specs of my PC configuration:

CPU: Intel Q9650 45nm 4x3,2 GHz (fully supports all virtualisation technologies)

RAM: Mushkin 4 GB High Performance

Mainboard: GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 (Intel X38 chipset - rarely mentioned in guides -> DSDT?)

HDD: 2x Samsung Spinpoint F3, 1 TB each (1 harddisk for every OS planned; HFS+ and NTFS)

Graphics: EVGA Nvidia 8800 Ultra 768MB Superclocked

Optical drives: 1 LG 55L DVD-DL burner (S-ATA) and 1 HP DVD-Reader (IDE)

Software: 1x Windows 7 64bit Home Premium DVD and 1x Snow Leopard 10.6 Retail DVD (+iWork and iLife)

 

Current configuration: 1TB RAID 0 pair (2x500GB old HDD; data backuped; HDD will be replaced with those from above), Windows XP as OS and no access to a Mac.

 

 

If there are any pieces of information missing, please ask. I will try to provide as much information as possible.

 

Of course I fully understand people shouting "use Google or the search in the forum", but it is a sensible topic for me, as there are no answers to many questions to my particular situation.

Thank you very much in advance for helping me finding a clean solution to my problem.

 

Greetings,

Robert

[CurlyCarlos]

I would certainly love a solution to this myself. To make a USB Drive installer for Snow Leopard for Asus Eee PCs, you need to restore the Snow Leopard image to the flash drive, after it's been formatted to Mac OS Journaled, HFS+ and GUID. Then you need to run Netbookbootmaker to patch some files or whatnot. Although I don't understand exactly how these things work, if one were to have a flash drive formatted correctly in the first place, (this, I do think, requires a Mac), they could restore the Snow Leopard image from a Windows computer, if they used MacDrive, a program that lets you read and write to Mac-formatted drives. Then, you would need the contents of Netbookbootmaker on a Windows machine and be able to copy them over manually as well. This is assuming that Netbookbootmaker is purely additional files -- it's probably some patches as well, so that would need to be rewritten to work in Windows + MacDrive.

 

Naturally, this is different than your setup, but I don't yet know of a way to get past needing a Mac at one point or another.

 

Also, sorry if my assumptions above are dead wrong.

[Robert B.]

push - As it is relatively urgent (school holidays at the moment).

[scwhar]

Just use a leopard distro and then wipe it once you have 10.6 installed, you can use the leopard partition as backup for the snow install, it will be less hassle.

[BJMoose]

Of course I fully understand people shouting "use Google or the search in the forum", but it is a sensible topic for me, as there are no answers to many questions to my particular situation.

Thank you very much in advance for helping me finding a clean solution to my problem.

 

Greetings,

Robert

Well first things first. You need to first be able to install SL on a hard drive when you don't have OSX installed to start with. In Windows, download the free iso of Psystar's Rebel EFI. Burn that onto a cd. Make sure your bios is set up as ahci. Load the cd and follow the directions to then remove the Psystar cd and insert SL DVD. Click on the icon that says OSX Install disc. It will take about a minute or so, but it will start to install OSX. You'll have to partition your new hard drive in Disk Utility as a GUID format and set up as many partitions as you want on that drive.

 

After setting your partition info, continue the install process by choosing the partition you want to install it to. Depending on our options, it can take anywhere from 20 to 35 minutes to install the whole OS. You'll have to then reboot your system and switch back to the Psystar cd, load it, choose your OSX drive and finish the setup process.

 

Now that you've got SL running, see what works and what doesn't. You should at least have ethernet running. Then you can ask more questions as to what kexts, plists, dsdt's are needed to build a chameleon type usb thumb disk to perfect your system.

[Robert B.]

Thank you all for your help!

I tried many methods until now, even burned 8 versions of Boot 132 CDs, found one working at last and installed iAtkos on an external HDD. Then I prepared a thumb drive with Chameleon with customised kexts but after boot it didn't recognize my optical drive.

Now I tried a BootCD132 for my mainboard and the Rebel EFI iso as posted above but all of them crash during boot.

All my BIOS settings are set like in lifehacker's guide, AHCI, one SATA DVD drive, PS/2 mouse, keyboard everything fine. But when I boot into -verbose mode, it takes 8min. and a loop appears saying SAM Multimedia: READ or WRITE and apple.fs could not be initialised failed, continuing all the time. When the "Apple / Spinning wheel" phase ends, and the coloured waiting symbol appears, the verbose mode says rapidly: "Failing to load Kext Library .... (40x times); CPU Halted" and the PC shuts down immediately.

 

Imagine I am in rage, I think I go nuts with this computer. However, your help is appreciated as I didn't find a solution with Google to the problem above (only Kernel panics, that were during usage of SL; and why does it take 10min for me until the system crashes and others talk about 1 min until the Install dialogue appears *grr*)

 

Robert

 

EDIT: I will try to install SL now with the OSInstall.mpkg method from my iAtkos install. Let's see what will be...

EDIT 2: I made it! The install went somewhat smoothly and I could boot from the new install without anything. Before that I partitioned my HD with an EFI / Chameleon and a SL partition. Now it runs and I'm absolutely exhausted and off the end. Hopefully I will not run in any kernel panics in the future.

 

NOW next questions:

I used the basic kexts, apple.boot.plist, smbios etc. provided for a P35 Gigabyte Mainboard. How do I change them when the EFI partition is hidden to SL? And what shall I change in them?

1. How can I create my on DSDT.aml - Google and the forum search didn't help a lot as many people rely on prebuilt versions.

2. What do I need to change in the apple.boot.plist / smbios files / and add - delete kexts for my configuration above?

 

Sorry for the chaos, but this is progress to me (after days of endlessness).

 

Sleep well,

Robert

[richtig]

Check this page for updates, after a few days:

http://darwinx86.org/software/darwinx86_software.html

Another site with a similar solution:

http://prasys.co.cc/2009/10/empire-efi/

Side note: for less headaches, don't use any PS/2 or IDE devices.

Find a used Apple USB keyboard on eBay or similar.

Good luck!

[Robert B.]

Hey everybody,

 

up to now nearly everything is working well, Sound, Ethernet, graphics adapter, but my 2 IDE optical drives are not recognized by SL.

So questions would be:

1. How do I know if the graphics adapter is fully working? (those QI ?! Anti Aliasing features)

EDIT: Water effects are fully working when I add a widget to the Exposé widget screen. Ergo, graphics seem to be alright.

 

2. How can I make SL recognize my DVD drives?

EDIT: I tackled the problem and solved it with the following solution:

I had the same problem in my Snow Leopard. The thing is I tried everything like the pcwiz JMicroATA64bit package and other kexts and nothing works.

 

I found in other forum this shared folder of kexts and other stuff and tried as the others kexts and it worked. Folder

 

In this Folder I downloaded the ICHx-Snow and the JMicronATA.kext.AllJMicron.IDE.x86_64 and after reboot the ATA Hard Disk was displayed and with full access.

 

Hope it works for you.

 

Note: I'm using Snow Leopard 64bit

 

(If is there anything you didn't understand say it because I'm portuguese and it's normal to have some typing errors) smile.gif

 

EDIT: In the ICHx-Snow folder that was downloaded I used the AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext from the "updated missing dev-ID by z0r.zip"

I can confirm that it works for my Motherboard and probably all JMicron and ICH 7 - ICH 10 IDE Controllers.

 

3. The Apple System Info shows me "3 GHz Unknown" as processor, but but sysctl -a | grep cpu gives me the right Q9550 processer with 4 kernels as an answer. What has to be done? Some changes in the smbios.plist?

 

 

Thank you very much!

[CurlyCarlos]

I'm jealous of your success, Robert. My problem is that my Asus Eee doesn't have a DVD drive, so I'd have to find a way to boot iAtkos from an SD card without installing Chameleon or something Mac-based.

 

If anyone could help me out with doing that, I'd love you forever.

[Robert B.]

Hi CurlyCarlos,

you see, you can actually make a boot132 sd / usb stick very easily using SYSLINUX.

First format your SD card into FAT32.

Then simply download the Syslinux file, execute the syslinux or boot.bat or whatever in the win32 folder (in the zip you donloaded) in the CMD and introduce your removable device letter.

Then grab a working boot132 iso fitting your specs, unpack it (with WinRAR for example) and change the filenames isolinux.bin and isolinux.cfg into SYSLINUX.BIN and syslinux.cfg. If errors appear during boot, you can replaced the former isolinux.bin you renamed with an original syslinux.bin, that you can find in the archive you downloaded (syslinux from the web).

If everything runs smoothly, you have a working Boot132 USB CD and you can boot into a retail install for example.

I think it works similar for an iAtkos, iCD, Kalyway Install.. but perhaps you should consult some guides floating aroung (forum, google) before.

 

Hope this helps.

Robert

[CurlyCarlos]

Robert, thanks for the help. I'm having a bit of trouble with SYSLINUX: I downloaded 3.81 and unzipped it all, and can run syslinux.exe from my command prompt. However, when I type "syslinux.exe f:", my SD card is unchanged. Can you tell me in a bit more detail how to do this?