Can I upgrade IATKOS V7 leopard to Snow Leopard with full retail Disc

[timbojill]

I have a dual boot hacintosh. Windows XP and Iatkps v7 Leopard 10.5.7. My question is can I put in a Snow Leopard disc and upgrade it to Snow leopard. I tried finding a Iatkos v8 on the net but can find any.

[Beerkex'd]

It's a lot easier if you use a fresh, blank hard drive. This way, if something goes wrong, you can still boot into iATKOS and tweak things as required.

 

From within your iATKOS install, use Apple Disk Utility to format the blank hard drive as GUID, with HFS+ Journaled, non case sensitive filesystem, and make three partitions:

 

80-100 GB (or whatever you like) for your Snow Leopard installation

8 GB to hold the contents of your Snow Leopard installation DVD

x GB for storage. Just use the rest of the available space for this.

 

Then mount the DVD image or insert the DVD and use Disk Utility's "restore" function to restore the DVD contents to the 8GB partition.

The idea is that you can then boot from the new hard drive straight into this partition, and then install Snow Leopard to the first partition on the drive.

 

Still in iATKOS, manually Install the Chameleon bootloader to the drive's hidden EFI partition. You can use this guide:

http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php?topic=649.0

I recommend this version of Chameleon by Asere:

http://www.efixusers.com/showthread.php?t=644

 

At this point, test if you can boot from the drive and if the Chameleon bootloader starts. If not, you did something wrong when you installed it. Boot into iAKOS and try again until you get it right.

 

If your hardware can't run the vanilla kernel, rename and drop your modified kernel at the root of the partition that holds the Snow Leopard install DVD and configure /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist to load this renamed kernel. Obviously, you will want to also drop a copy at root of the partition that you will be installing Snow Leopard to.

 

Now, which kernel extensions will you need, and what kernel flags and Chameleon configuration settings do you use in /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist?

 

I don't know! That's for you to discover. But now you can keep tweaking and tweaking it until you can boot from the harddrive and into the Snow Leopard installer.

 

When you're done, you can use the Migration Assistant to transfer your data over from your iATKOS install, or you can just copy stuff manually.

 

Good Luck - use the search and find other people with the same motherboard as you to see which kernel extensions they use to run Snow Leopard. Or, if you can find a Boot-132 or Chameleon boot CD for your motherboard, you can extract the kernel extensions from that.