10.6 OK, 10.6.4 Blue Screen

[phillymjs]

You guys were very helpful when I got my second Hackintosh up and running with a USB stick instead of an EFIx device, so now I'm back. This weekend's project was to be upgrading my first Hackintosh, running Server 10.5.8, to Server 10.6, and getting rid of its EFIx in the bargain.

 

I have a USB stick that boots it into Server 10.5.8, and boots the copy of the Server 10.6 installer I put on a thumbdrive. I tried installing the Server 10.6.0 upgrade today on a clone of my 10.5.8 drive, and it went very smoothly. Then I applied the Server 10.6.4 combo updater, and the system rebooted, and.... blue screen city, right when the login window should be appearing. Whatever's going on puts the system into la-la land, because I can't even ping it.

 

I did some googling, the results of which made the video card my prime suspect. It's an ASUS NVIDIA 7300GS 256MB. I tried hooking up my VGA monitor to the DVI port, with an adapter-- same behavior. Just for grins I threw a different card in to see what would happen. This one, an ASUS NVIDIA 7300GT 512M. With that card, the system boots, and then alternates between a light blue and dark blue screen at the same point in the boot process, right when the login window should show up. This time, it seems to briefly respond to pings, then stops, then resumes again in a repeating cycle-- I didn't try to find out whether the screen was light or dark blue when the system was responsive.

 

I reconnected my Server 10.5.8 boot drive and put the EFIx back in place for now, while I try to figure out the problem. If anyone can give me a nudge in the right direction, it would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

~PhillyMJS

[Mackilroy]

When I tried my 7300 GT that came with my Mac Pro in my hackintosh, it would kernel panic every time. I suspect that the 7000 series cards are not supported very well on hackintoshes – do you have access to a newer GPU such as an 8600 or 9400?

[phillymjs]

I don't. I suppose I can try picking one up, but I was hoping for a software solution. Seems kind of dumb to spend money on a new graphics card for a machine that I never use directly-- this weekend was the most time I spent in the same room with that box since I built it.

 

But, you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess. Thanks.

[phillymjs]

I picked up a 9800GT, and that did the trick. The EFIx is out. I'm only seeing two problems:

Bonjour doesn't seem to work all the time, I keep having to rerun the command on the 'other' ifconfig to put my NIC into promiscuous mode

I have no sound, and no sound devices show in the preference pane.

Neither are dealbreakers, but if anyone has a fix for the Bonjour one, I'd be appreciative. I've got an updated Realtek kext in my USB stick, but that's not sufficient.

 

Anyway, my server tonight is running Snow Leopard Server 10.6.4, upgraded from a functioning 10.5.8. If anyone else out there is running OS X Server, here are a few gotchas I encountered during the upgrade:

 

The new mail service uses 'greylisting', which looks like a problem in the logs... inbound mail looks like it is rejected, then 5-10 minutes later it is delivered successfully. It is possible to disable that feature in the postfix config file.

 

In the DHCP service, my static maps were not brought over and had to be recreated. I'll have to boot back into a clone of my 10.5.8 install to make sure I got them all.

 

In the web service, a second default site was created in the default location, ignoring the existing one that I had placed in a custom location. Once I deleted the superfluous one, mine started working again.

 

~Philly