[GUIDE] Dual boot Win7 / iPC 10.5.6 on Gigabyte GA-MA780G-UD3H

[lawsy]

After quite a lot of stuffing around I've finally got my Win 7 / OSX dual boot setup how I want it thanks to coming to these forums and searching for solutions to various problems. I'd like to give something back by writing up this guide.

 

Firstly my setup:

• Gigabyte GA-MA780G-UD3H Rev.1 motherboard. Worked on original bios ROM (v1) as well as newest (v5?). This motherboard has a AMD 780G chipset with SB700 south bridge, Realtek HD audio and RTL8168/8111C(P) ethernet.
  
• AMD Phenom x3 8450 CPU
  
• 4 sticks of Corsair 1Gb 800mhz DDR2 ram
  
• SATA Pioneer DVR216 DVD burner
  
• SATA 500Gb HDD for operating systems
  
• SATA 1Tb HDD for media
  
• 2x USB external HDD for other stuff/backups
  

 

After doing it a few times I would suggest starting by loading up the iPC disc and using disk utility to setup your partitions. I like to a disk into 3 partitions for a dual boot, the first for OSX, the second for Windows and the last formatted to FAT32 as a shared drive accessible from either. Formatting and partitioning in disk utility this way is easier for new installs of everything. MBR under options and a simple one word name for the OSX volume too. Don't install OSX yet though!

 

If you have an existing install of Windows you want to keep, back up it to an external drive with free software such as Macrium reflect. Don't forget to make the recovery boot disc. If you are doing it this way use partitioning software in windows to make a FAT32 partition to be later reformatted for OSX.

 

I'd recommend installing Windows first to make the dual boot part easier. Quit out of the iPC disk if you are doing a clean install of everything and boot into your windows installation disc instead. Go ahead and format the windows partition to NTFS and install windows now. Check if it works by booting into it. If it won't boot it's probably because the partition is not active or the master boot record is stuffed. Use the repair feature on the windows disc to check and fix the windows install. If you already had windows installed then put boot into the OSX disc.

 

I used iPC 10.5.6 Live DVD release which boots fine with the -v switch and now know the correct installation settings/options:

 

• Voodoo 9.5 kernel
  
• VIA/SiS/Marvell/SB600 Chipset Drivers (to avoid dreaded 'still waiting for root device')
  
• Seatbelt fix (to avoid kernel panic when mounting DMGs)
  
• Realtek R1000 ethernet driver
  
• ALC 889a audio driver (still need to go to preferences and change from headphones to speakers)
  
• PS/2 fix (for mouse)
  
• Either one of the alternate bootloaders (apparently mobo incompatible with default)
  

 

Before I stumbled onto the correct chipset driver I could complete install but not boot due to waiting on root device error. I could however install and boot onto an external USB drive which I did until I worked out how to get the SATA drive install going. From reading these forums it's clear that each install is different and there is no single way that always works.

 

Assumign you have the same mobo as me when following this guide and used the same settings then OSX should install and boot up without drama. Maybe use the -v switch to follow the process in case you get any errors. Setup your computer after the intro video finishes but before shutting down or restarting please install Chameleon 2 boot loader. Every time I've ghosted back partitions or anything like that reinstalling Chameleon 2 has given me perfect dual booting on next start up. It comes up with a pretty menu to select which OS you want to load all by itself once it's installed.

 

I originally had a HIS ATi Radeon HD 4830 512mb video card which needed the following procedure to get working:

1. install netkas hd48x0 pkg then restart

2. install netkas/insanely mac accel, natit & evoenabler kexts then restart (search here)

3. install netkas exotic 4830 pkg then restart with -f

 

This gave full QE/CI support with resolution change and dual monitor. If I didn't install the drivers in the correct order it destroyed my overall install and made me have to start again. I also installed all of these separate to the original install.

 

That card died and I've recently replaced it with a Gigabyte Nvidia 9800 GT 1Gb silent cell. Getting this going was extremely easy thanks to Netkas.

1. install Netkas Enabler_for_Nvidia_and_multiple_ATI_cards.pkg and reboot

 

Just that got me full QE/CI support with dual monitor output again.

 

Some notes:

1. Changing the arrangement of the SATA drives on the mobo after install gave me a waiting for root device error. I needed to do some shuffling to fit in the new graphics card (biggest heatsink ever!). Make sure you don't change the arrangement of your SATAdrive. Changing it back instantly fixed the error.

2. I didn't need to change BIOS settings at all thankfully. The only thing I've noticed is that having USB mouse support enabled makes the boot give a 'could not update platform UUID' error and takes 5mins+ to start up. Chased this one for ages and then fixed it by accident.

3. Having a second installed OSX on an external drive has been invaluable. Use free software such as CCC (carbon copy clone) to transfer your entire install to another drive. Immediately after you do this install Chameleon onto the cloned drive by changing the install target which will the cloned drive bootable. If you stuff up your original install you can boot into the clone, format the original partition and then use CCC to clone it back, just don't forget to reinstall chameleon each time or the newly cloned drive won't boot.

4. Had to disable sleep because the first time it happened I didn't know how to wake it and had to restart.

5. IDE drives aren't recognised for me.

6. I can't seem to burn discs, it gives errors.

 

Hope the guide is a help, I found it hard to find info on this motherboard when installing.