anyone successfully install snow leopard on AT3N7A-I

[terramir]

Well my net book runs Sl Just fine but the other computers in my house are still in Gates-ville. One of them is the AT3N7A-I Question is has anyone installed SL on it and if so with what Success?

 

What did you get working and what did not work?

and if everything worked what tutorials did you follow?

 

Help

terramir

[terramir]

anyone????? help

 

terramir

[gyozadude]

I've got it working for the most part. Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, this is a mini-itx mobo that has a dual core Atom 330, realtek 8168D ethernet, and an nVidia MCP79 (ION) chipset, right? Very similar to a Zotac IONITX mobo, but it gave me a lot of heartburn to install this one. But AT3N7A-i has a VT1703 or something HD audio codec. It's not ALC662. So that's a difference that requires adding VoodooHDA.kext

 

Part I - PUTTING SNOW LEOPARD BITS ONTO A TARGET DISK:

 

These options got me a 10.6.3 image onto the disk with vanilla bits:

 

- get Chameleon2-rc5_b643 bits

- get 10.6.3 retail DVD bits

- get mach_kernel_atom for 10.6.3 compiled binary from the Russian site

- get the Zotac IONITX v2 bits from another thread on http://www.insanelym...howtopic=197516

- get VoodooHDA.kext (v. 2.7.2 works for me okay)

- get NullCPUPowerManagement.kext and SleepEnabler.kext for 10.6.3

- get latest kext utility still compatible with 10.6.x (I'm using 2.5.1)

 

Option a) Have another machine running SL 10.6.3

- stick your target disk into another box w/ Snow Leopard 10.6.3 running

- partition new disk as GUID partition table w/ Mac Extended Journalled,

- clone current running system with 10.6.3 bits to that disk (use diskutility and restore function)

- run Chameleon2-rc5-b643 and install boot loader onto the NEW disk (don't accidently hose your current system!) There should be a 'boot' file in /Volumes/[newdisk/ put there by Chameleon.

- unpack the ionitx_v2.zip from the Zotac IONITX thread and stick AHCIPortInjector.kext, OpenHaltRestart.kext, and fakesmc.kext into /Volumes/[newdisk]/Extra/Extensions. And stick the standard com.apple.boot.plist and smbios.plist in /Volumes/[newdisk]/Extra.

- chmod -R root:wheel on files/directors in /Extra and then run as root on the command line in a terminal

# kextcache -m /Volumes/[newdisk]/Extra/Extensions.mkext /Volumes/[new disk]/Extra/Extensions

- copy the mach_kernel_atom to /Volumes/[newdisk] and make sure root:wheel owns it

- edit com.apple.boot.plist and change the Kernel from 'mach_kernel' to 'mach_kernel_atom', and you may want to have key/string XML options like:

Kernel Flags = -v arch=i386

Timeout = 4

GraphicsEnabler = yes

EthernetBuiltIn = yes

USBBusFix = yes

EHCIacquire = yes

UHCIreset = yes

USBLegacyOff = yes

 

- now install it into the target ASUS AT3N7A-i box. Boot and get into BIOS settings. Things I did were setting SATA mode to AHCI; to set USB2.0 speed to Full Speed and not High Speed; and I also manually allocated 512MB to shared iGPU graphics. And for CPU settings, I think I have hyperthreading on Atom enabled, Limit CPUID MAX ID = disabled (no limit), and CPU TM2 (thermal monitoring) either on or off. I think default is on to protect the CPU and adjust voltage but it can cause KP when trying to do power management. Save and Exit and complete boot. If these are fresh bits, you should actually see the OS X splash video with no audio. Otherwise, it boots up and you get a login screen or your desktop. Now, create the 2nd partition and restore bits now that slice in case you hose your working disk, you can reboot the 2nd slice and recover. I installed Chameleon the same on the second slick and checked all the files in ./Extra/ were still there on the cloned bits.

 

- get a kextutility and install into Applications -&--#62; Utilities folder. Start it up, let it correct and rebuild kext caches and then drag VoodooHDA.kext into the utility to install it. Then open a terminal and manually move AppleHDA.kext to _AppleHDA.kext.bak or something, and re-open the kext util to rebuild the new kext cache.

 

Note1: substitute your actual volume name where [newdisk] is

 

Note 2: I highly recommend that you split the target drive into two partitions - one main one for your usage, and a spare that's about 20GB or so that you can clone the bootable backup OS X bits to on it and boot it in an emergency and recover. If you started out with just one big slice, it's okay. Use disk utility and resize the main one and create a smaller second slice later. First get the installer working, and after it boots, you can create the smaller second slice and restore bits to it.

 

Note 3: After much hacking, I was able to put SL 10.6.3 retail installer bits onto an 8GB usb stick Mac OS X 10.6.3 Install image plus all the /Extra bits I put into the disk as described above (minus SleepEnabler.kext). But to get the system to install off USB, I had to burn TonyMac's i-Boot iso to a DVD and stick that in and stick the USB stick into the box as well, and when I boot the DVD, the bootloader is able to workaround the USB issues correctly and I can read from USB properly. Clearly, the i Boot loader dynamically parsed and presents BIOS configurations as EFI emulation in a far superior way than how DSDT.aml does it. When it boots, I get a choice of boot volumes, I select the USB stick and then on the command like, enter 'mach_kernel_atom -v -f arch=i386' and that usually gets me into the Mac OS X Installer. Then I can select the Disk Utility before trying to do an install and format the target drive as GUID/Mac Extended Journalled, then proceed with the install. Of course, I have to boot the system DVD and USB again to copy mach_kernel_atom and chameleon boot file, and Extras into the system after a vanilla install. I can't remember if I opened up a terminal and manually ran an fdisk to flag the new drive as bootable and then rebooted a third time with just the i-Boot DVD but no USB, and this time, I was able to then select the freshly installed SL 10.6.3 and use the same manual command line options (mach_kernel_atom -v -f arch=i386) and then the new disk is booted. Once booted, you need to make sure you install Chameleon and configure com.apple.boot.plist and smbios.plist. Funny thing, is you don't need a DSDT.aml. And then repeat the VoodooHDA.kext install and move AppleHDA.kext to .bak in S/L/E and re-run kextutil.

 

Part 2 - Get Audio Working

 

You already installed VoodooHDA 2.7.2 or later and this plus turning USB2.0 down to full speed and not high speed somehow now lets audio play without skipping - go figure?!?. But now you should have sound - VERY LOUD sound. And the only thing that could control volume was Itunes app. Solution was from the VoodooHDA folks to go into directory S/L/E and edit the ./VoodooHDA.kext/Contents/Info.plist and where there is a "Vectorize" "VoodooHDAEnableHalfVolumeFix" and "VoodooHDAEnableVolumeChangeFix" and change the XML false to true. Save edit, re-run kext util, and reboot. Note that when you sometimes wake up from sleep, the audio volume is reset and can be lower or higher. You just need to open the volume control icon in the upper right just once and then the level reverts back to where it used to be.

 

Part 3 - Ethernet Network - The AT3N7A-i has some variant of realtek 8168D,8111 NIC. Simplest thing was to go to Realtek site and download their driver for Mac and install it. After installing it, the NIC works.

 

Part 4 - Reboot, Sleep, Power Off. I copied over 10.6.3 compatible SleepEnabler.kext, and already had NullCPUPowerManagement.kext in /Extra/Extensions and rebuilt kext caches. Power off works almost all the time, and in less than 10 seconds. Occasionally, it seemed like it would hang. But this in fact wasn't the case. The system waits for a while and fan and power is still on, but after sometimes 2 minutes, the system powers off. This isn't always perfect. There are hangs, and I'm still playing with VBIOS options and iGPU to see if a combination exists to wake the system properly or makes the sleep faster and more consistent.

 

My sleep (aka Suspend to RAM) has my hibernate mode still set to 0, and when I click on "sleep" in the apple menu, the screen would blank and do nothing. But about half the time, the system fan and power draw disappear after 10 seconds. Other times, I get a blank screen and this may last almost 2 or 3 minutes, then the platform sleeps and has a blinking light switch on my case. Hitting the power button, or pushing a keyboard or mouse button and I get instant wake-up. But it's working sort of. 33 Watts power draw to 3 watts in sleep. Not bad. As boot loaders improve, I expect the need for buggy dsdt files to go away. I'll be trying it more often.

 

No DSDT.aml to mess with is a good thing.

 

Hope that helps. Not a perfect build and not fully stable. And you only get slow, 12Mbps USB instead of 480Mbps. But for most work, it works.

 

Edited: I'm playing with a trick I used to get sleep more stable on ECS945GCT which was to write a cron job (unix of course!) to have the system hibernate and it'll check the pm settings for the platform and wake up every 5 minutes and put the system to sleep via unix command if the time has expired. No one needs to be logged in and the system saves power.