Tale of Two Boot Loaders

[tamorgen]

Hello All,

I'm been trying for since Monday of this past week to get a "perfect" installation of Snow Leopard. I've had various levels of success.

 

I've been using two different bootloaders:

 

• Boot-132 from http:\\www.MacYourPC.com, which is specifically designed around a Dell Inspiron 1525. For the record, I have a Dell Inspiron 1720, which it's larger brother (two bays and numerical keypad)
  
• SL Dell Preboot CD - Can't remember where I found it, but it works rather well, for the most part.
  

 

Anyway, here's the scoop. Boot-132 works great, except I cannot get Ethernet to work properly. I use a AppleBC44xx.kext to get ethernet working on both disks. On Boot-132, it always returns a self assigned IP address (169.x.x.x) when I tell it to use DHCP. Even when I hard code an IP address, I get nothing. On the plus side, restart & shutdown work properly.

 

Using the SL Dell Preboot CD, I can get everything working except Restart, Shutdown & sleep. This is the flavor I am using right now, but I really want to fix the shutdown issues.

 

I looked at the kext that it loads in the Extras folders, and I'm trying to figure out what the differences may be

 

Dell BL:

AppleACPIPS2Nub.kext

ApplePS2Controller.kext

IOATAFamily.kext

Natit.kext

NullCPUPowerManagement.kext

PlatformUUID.kext

VoodooBattery.kext

VoodooHDA.kext

VoodooTSCSync.kext

fakesmc.kext

 

Boot132 BL:

IO80211Family.kext

IOATAFamily.kext

IONetworkingFamily.kext

NullCPUPowerManagement.kext

OpenHaltRestart.kext

PlatformUUID.kext

VoodooBattery.kext

VoodooPS2Controller.kext

fakesmc.kext

 

I have tried to install the OpenHaltRestart.kext onto the Dell BL install, but it doesn't seem to fix it. Does anybody have any suggestions that may fix my problem?

[geiman]

First, I would make sure you installed the openhaltrestart.kext correctly (using kext utility (or is it kext helper?) makes this easy).

 

If that doesn't work, I'd take out everything network related from the cd that gives you everything but networking, and then add everything network related from the one that actually gives you a working NIC.

 

If neither of those work, you should look at putting together a custom boot loader that is for only your hardware.

[tamorgen]

First, I would make sure you installed the openhaltrestart.kext correctly (using kext utility (or is it kext helper?) makes this easy).

 

If that doesn't work, I'd take out everything network related from the cd that gives you everything but networking, and then add everything network related from the one that actually gives you a working NIC.

 

If neither of those work, you should look at putting together a custom boot loader that is for only your hardware.

 

Yeah, I've tried removing the network stuff, but that doesn't seem to work. I thought I installed openhaltrestart.kext correctly using kexthelper, but who knows.

 

Custom boot loader is where I get fuzzy. Is there a walkthrough that you would recommend for that? I'm so close to getting everything perfect. Even got a new Broadcom BCM94321MC 802.11n Mini PCIe WLAN module and it works correctly on first boot. It should, since it's the same card Apple uses in it's Mac Books, but you never know.

[tamorgen]

Okay, I found the issue. In the Boot-132 from MacYourPC, there is a file called natit.kext in the preboot image. It is for Nvidia & ATI cards, but not my specific card. In fact, for older cards. I removed the file, after backing my my kexts, and it worked! I can restart & reboot. I still need to check sleep, but I have nearly a perfect install, from what I can tell. I need to create a Time Machine backup before I go on any further, but I think the worst of everything is behind me...

 

Now if only I could get dual booting to work correctly with JUST chameleon, I'd be totally happy. Right now, I'm stuck with a EasyBCD/Chameleon blend.