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[GUIDE] Dell Studio 540 SL Retail Vanilla

Saphiresurf

By Saphiresurf,
in OSx86 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

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Saphiresurf
Saphiresurf
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Sorry the file was deleted and I haven't been upkeeping the guide. I'm starting from scratch to install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my desktop because some of the methods I used caused instability and I believe that I can find some new methods to get Mac OS X working on my desktop again. Thanks for all of the support guys!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Model: Dell Studio 540

Ram: 3 GB

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33 GHZ

Video Card: Nvidia Gforce 9800 GT

Sound Card: Intel HDA

 

 

Ok first you have to download everything you need here:

*UPDATED FRESH INSTALL* v0.7

 

Then you burn legacybootcd.iso located in folder you just downloaded at the lowest speed possible. Now put the disc in your 540 and boot from it. After its loaded up you will be in a chameleon boot loader. Eject the disc and replace it with your snow leopard disc. After that press F5 and HIGHLIGHT YOUR DISC (dont click on it yet). you want to boot with the flags -v cpus=1 busratio=20.(you’re going to need a usb keyboard and mouse that are WIRED will get wireless working after the install) After the disc boots up go head and choose your language. After agreeing to apples terms highlight utilities and go to disk utility.

 

when its loaded up click on your hard drive that you want to install mac on (not partition) and go to the partition tab. under volume scheme select one partition and name it whatever you like. before you apply you have to click on options and select GUID Partition Table if its not already selected then you have to make sure under format that it is Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Now you can click apply. After its done partitioning exit out of disk utility adn select the hard drive you just partitioned. Then click install and that should take 25-30 minutes. After you install mac and your computer restarts boot to the cd again.

 

Now HIGHLIGHT the hard drive you installed mac on. Now boot the hard drive with the flags -v cpus=1 busratio=20. When mac boots up you should see the welcome video then you should see the setup. Of course just go through the setup until you get to the mac desktop. Now you have to transfer the folder you downloaded onto the desktop of your mac. After that open the folder and open Kext Helper b7. Then go into the kexts folder and drag its contents into Kext Helper and click on Easy Install. When your done dont reboot, instead go to the Legacy Boot Cd and go into extra, then post-install, and open and install the myhackinstaller. After its done installing (dont reboot yet) open kext helper again then go into VoodooHDA_Pref and run voodoohdahelper and VoodooHDA.Prefane. After that drag VoodooHDA.kext into kext helper and install.

 

Now you can reboot.

Everything should be working now. If you dont want the theme or the boot log just go to extra on the root of your hard drive the go to themes, default, and delete boot.png and backround.png. If you want to change the theme then just change those pictures. Anyways i hope you enjoyed my tutorial and id be glad to help anyone having problems.

 

*UPDATING*

If youre updating an existing installation of Snow Leopard with an updated package for installation on the Dell Studio 540 i am now providing a folder that provides any changes that you will need to apply. Directions will be in the folder you download. (NOTE: to update to the newest version of this installation you have to have already upgraded to the version before the update your installing). For those installing updates from an install you havnt updated in a while i will include a package to install all of those updates. (NOTE#2: you dont need to upgrade a fresh install because that will already be upgraded to the current version. NOTE#3: the version number is decided by how close we are to having a perfect installation of Mac OSX Snow Leopard on the Dell Studio 540).

 

UPDATE v0.7: http://www.mediafire.com/?1nx4yyhgj2n

 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

What updates work and what updates dont:

 

10.6.0: Yes

 

10.6.1: Yes

 

10.6.2: Yes

 

10.6.3: Yes

 

10.6.4: Yes

 

10.6.5: Work in progress

 

10.6.6: Work in progress

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Saphiresurf
Saphiresurf
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I think I'm going to make a pack of kexts for video cards that are usually in Dell studio 540's just to make everything simpler. Then I'm not sure if Ethernet works if someone wanted to test that out for me and post the results that would be great.

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Mac Loving Apple Fan
Mac Loving Apple Fan
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Hello Saphire,

 

Could you post your BIOS settings? More specifically, is the controller set to ATA or RAID?

 

Thanks.

 

 

Hello Saphire,

 

Thanks for the guide! I also have a Dell Studio Slim 540. I think it should be the same as the Dell Studio 540. I don't have the time to install osx86 right now but I will try it in a few weeks.

 

My setup is:

Core 2 Quad Q9550

2x2GB DDR2 800mhz RAM

Radeon HD 4550 512 MB

 

Also, does the ethernet work out of the box? I heard that it may require the RealtekR1000 driver.

 

Thanks

Yea the Slim studio should work to. One thing I forgot though is that about this Mac says it's a quad-core xenon but everything still works the same. I haven't tried out the ethernet though but it shoul work because mac on this system worksmso smoothly it's ridiculous to think it's not a Mac (yay!). Anyways for your video card you may need to find a diffrent kext since it's ati. If I find a kext for it I'll send you the link. (if your going to use the ati card then dint install the nvenabler kext because you wouldn't need it. Maybe I'll just make a package of kext for commonly used video cards on the Dell studio 540). Then your processor should work just fine as well. If you have anymore problems or questions just post them or pm me.

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Mac Loving Apple Fan
Mac Loving Apple Fan
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I did a few extra steps .After saphire's instruction, just about everything worked but I wasn't able to access my second hard drive on the port marked SATA4 on the motherboard, only SATA1 and SATA2 which meant that I either had to choose dvd drive or my second hard drive. So I decided to enable RAID mode in the BIOS. However, Chameleon RC2 has a problem with the RAID mode and the RAID mode was fixed in Chameleon RC4. So I installed Chameleon RC4 and it worked. The second hard drive can be accessed now. Be careful though. If you have windows on the RAID drive you need to install the intel storage driver in windows before changing to RAID. Second, when I put the computer to sleep by apple logo and then sleep, the computer locks. I installed SleepEnabler.kext which allows sleep to work now.

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Mac Loving Apple Fan
Mac Loving Apple Fan
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Another update. The NVEnabler extension worked but the card is identified as "Unknown Chipset Card" under System Info. To fix this, I opened OSX86Tool and generated an EFI string for my card, nVidia GeForce 9400 GT with 1 GB of RAM with DVI+VGA and placed the file as /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist and moved the NVEnabler kext from /System/Library/Extensions to a backup directory.

 

Here is my com.apple.Boot.plist:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>5</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=i386</string>
<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
   <string>y</string>
<key>Graphics Mode</key>
   <string>1024x768x32</string>
       <string></string>
       <key>device-properties</key>
       <string>6c0200000100000001000000600200000d00000002010c00d041030a000000000101060000010
101060000007fff04001e00000072006f006d002d007200650076006900730069006f006e0000002e
0000006e5669646961204765466f7263652039343030204754204f70656e474c20456e67696e65205
b4546495d22000000400030002c006400650076006900630065005f00740079007000650000000b00
0000646973706c6179100000004e00560043004100500000001800000004000000000003000400000
000000007000000000e0000006e0061006d00650000000b000000646973706c617914000000400030
002c006e0061006d0065000000120000004e5644412c446973706c61792d41100000006d006f00640
065006c0000001a0000006e5669646961204765466f72636520393430302047540e0000004e005600
50004d000000200000000100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000014000
000400031002c006e0061006d0065000000120000004e5644412c446973706c61792d422000000040
0031002c0063006f006d00700061007400690062006c00650000000e0000004e5644412c4e564d616
3220000005600520041004d002c0074006f00740061006c00730069007a0065000000080000000000
004020000000400030002c0063006f006d00700061007400690062006c00650000000e0000004e564
4412c4e564d616322000000400031002c006400650076006900630065005f00740079007000650000
000b000000646973706c61791c0000006400650076006900630065005f00740079007000650000000
f0000004e5644412c506172656e74</string>
</dict>
</plist>

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cellfanatic
cellfanatic
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Well it took quite a while to get the OS X DVD to actually boot, but it really had nothing to do with incorrect directions and more to do with hardware configuration. If you are planning on following the guide and get the Unable to locate root device error you are going to need to open up your computer and change the way the hard drive and dvd drive are connected (if you've added drives or changed configuration).

 

The only way the installer would ever get past the root device error was to plug in a fresh hard drive on SATA 0 and the DVD burner on SATA 1. Any other configuration would not work no matter which boot parameters I tried. The closest I could get to starting the installer without opening the machine was using "rd=disk0s1" and playing with the disk and s number, but all attempts results in a errorno=19 where it couldn't mount the disk.

 

After getting the correct hardware configuration so the OS X installer could begin following the rest of the guide worked like clockwork. For those of you who have additional hard drives or have played with your SATA connections I really recommend just using a drive (new drive if possible) on SATA 0 and your DVD drive on SATA 1, it will save you many hours of testing boot commands.

 

If you still want to try to get around opening the machine here are a list of boot commands that I attempted to use, but was not successful with. These are a collection of different solutions I found across the Internet for getting around the root device error during setup.

 

1. "-v cpus=1 busratio=20 rd=disk0s0" adjust the disk for disk number and s for partition number

2. "-x -v cpus=1 platform=ACPI busratio=20"

3. "-v cpus=1 platform=ACPI rd=disk0 busratio=20"

4. "-v cpus=1 platform=X86PC rd=disk0 busratio=20"

 

You can try different combinations of those commands, but always leave the -v cpus=1 busratio=20. The idea is to force the OS X installer to see the root device as a drive and partition, with a blank drive you can use rd=disk0 assuming it's the only hard drive in the machine.

 

Once you have completed the setup and have OS X on your machine you can power down and reconnect your additional drives. At the moment the included kext files have everything on my Studio 540 works, including the DVD drive which would not work in the iPC 10.5.6 universal release. Even my video camera works in Photobooth and iChat, along with the mic jack on my computer (remember for mic you need to go into system preferences VoodooHDA and change the recording volume of the device otherwise they won't be able to hear you in iChat).

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Saphiresurf
Saphiresurf
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You do have to use the flags -v cpus=1 busratio=20 to boot the disc. Though i forgot that you cant boot with those flags while booting the mac osx. Then you install the kexts and the boot loader and everything should work. Right now i have a triple-boot (Windows 7, Mac OSX Snow Leopard, and Linux Ubuntu) and it has been succesful. If you need anymore help just ask!

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cellfanatic
cellfanatic
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You do have to use the flags -v cpus=1 busratio=20 to boot the disc. Though i forgot that you cant boot with those flags while booting the mac osx. Then you install the kexts and the boot loader and everything should work. Right now i have a triple-boot (Windows 7, Mac OSX Snow Leopard, and Linux Ubuntu) and it has been succesful. If you need anymore help just ask!

 

Just did the 10.6.3 update and everything is still working like butter. I also went ahead and picked up the DLink usb to bluetooth adapter that is recommended by Apple as well as the Wiki (model: dtb120). I can confirm it is completely plug n play -- bluetooth settings worked instantly in system preferences. Just to test the limits I picked up a wireless mac keyboard along with the magic mouse. Both devices detected and work like a charm (you will need 10.6.3 in order to get the magic mouse gesture support *scrolling, zoom, pan*).

 

Since I had done all my installation for OSX on a secondary hard drive, I decided to redo the installation with a fresh WD black 640GB drive... start to finish including OS X 10.6.3 update was 1 hour and 14 minutes. I'd like to thank the OP for putting together the guide, I really don't know how much easier it could have been to get SL running on the Dell Studio 540.

 

The only question I have left at this point is whether or not the OP was able to add additional hard drives... On my 540 I have the 4 sata ports, numbers 0, 1, 4, 5.... I cannot get OS X to see sata 4 or 5 drives so I've put the drives in external enclosure and they work over usb.... not sure if there's a workaround for that.

 

 

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Saphiresurf
Saphiresurf
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Im looking into the drive detection right now. For some reason iPortable has drive detection so i'm going to see what hazard had used for that. And i was just wondering what wireless card your using because i havn't been able to find working internal wireless card. Anyways i'm glad you enjoyed the guide!

-Saphiresurf

 

 

EDIT: Also i was also able to get a triple-boot between Windows 7, Mac OSX Snow leopard (10.6.3), and Linux Ubuntu

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cellfanatic
cellfanatic
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Im looking into the drive detection right now. For some reason iPortable has drive detection so i'm going to see what hazard had used for that. And i was just wondering what wireless card your using because i havn't been able to find working internal wireless card. Anyways i'm glad you enjoyed the guide!

-Saphiresurf

 

 

EDIT: Also i was also able to get a triple-boot between Windows 7, Mac OSX Snow leopard (10.6.3), and Linux Ubuntu

 

I am using the internal network card, wired connection. The bluetooth adapter is the Dlink DBT-120 and that works plug and play.

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cellfanatic
cellfanatic
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I decided to take advantage of the Fry's i7 930 combo and I can report that the computer boots perfectly with the MSI X58 PRO-E motherboard and i7 930 cpu using the same hdd that I setup OS X 10.6.3 for the Dell Studio 540. The processor does not show properly and the Mac Model is listed as Mac Mini but GeekBench scores are over 9000 and I see all 8 cpus.

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jd-08
jd-08
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I'm still trying to figure out how to get the other SATA spots to work. I'm stuck just using SATA 0 and SATA 1 right now...

 

This took some digging - BUT IT IS FINALLY WORKING! I've got SL 10.6.3 on a 540 and had dead SATA drives.. As of today - they work like a champ! OK -

 

Go to http://www.kexts.com and look for this kext "IOATAFamily.kext

Or - this link may take you there:

http://www.kexts.com/view/319-ioatafamily.kext.html

 

Next - go to System>Library>Extensions and move:

 

IOATAFamily.kext

into the trash (Do not reboot yet!!!)

 

Open KEXT Helper and install the version you just downloaded.

 

After the install - I used OnyX to reset the extension permissions (I'm not sure it matters, tho'?)

 

Anyway - my sincerest thanks to the OP for walking us through the initial install..! I'm quad-booting SL, Win 7, Win XP and Ubuntu...

 

HTH!

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