Snow Leopard on Dell XPS 14/15 with Core i5/ Optimus Graphics

[imgeorge]

From the information I have gathered so far, it seems impossible to install SL (retail vanilla or iAtkos) because of the Optimus and that Dell BIOS cannot disable the NVidia GT 420m card. Although I've seen people succeed in using GT 420M without Optimus on some Acer laptop.

 

Anybody tried?

[imgeorge]

I've just tried it myself trying to following the tonymacosx's guide using Retail DVD image on a USB stick ( I don't have DL dvd).

 

I first tried booting with the latest [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url], but couldn't get pass the initial Apple Logo screen.

 

Then I tried [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url]-GE, even worse: I got black screen after choosing the SL Install USB stick as booting device in Chameleon.

 

So right now I'm totally beaten.

[mcx_sic]

there are only problems with optimus? Because i've a XPS 15 with core i7 (740 QM) and NVIDIA 435GT, so I don't have Optimus. Could i try to install snow leopard?

[alepartt]

the way to install is retail (in dual layer) and nawcom cd boot with flag busratio=21 for cpu i7 looking for correct busratio...but Nvidia 420M is not working for me,I'm trying to resolve.suerte

[princektd]

the way to install is retail (in dual layer) and nawcom cd boot with flag busratio=21 for cpu i7 looking for correct busratio...but Nvidia 420M is not working for me,I'm trying to resolve.suerte

I succeeded partially in successfully installing Snow leopard on my Dell XPS 15.

My system specs are:

 

Intel core i3 370m

8GB RAM (2x4GB)

Reaktek audio chipset

Intel HD Graphics (main, inbuilt and i think, is a part of the chipset-Intel HM57- itself) + Nvidia Geforce 420M (on PCIe x16 lane, is secondary though it doesnt say so. I think this is the case coz if i uninstall or disable the intel graphics driver from my win7 os, then the nvidia chipset also automatically gets disabled while i can safely uninstall or disable the nvidia driver alone and the intel hd graphics still functions and gives me the full 1366x768 resolution). both together work on the Nvidia Optimus technology of switchable graphics.

 

Intel centrino wifi,

broadcomm and realtek chips for ethernet and bluetooth

 

 

Here is what i did:

 

used Nawcom's boot cd to boot the system. Swapped it on the boot menu screen wit the snow leopard dvd and selected it.

used: -v GraphicsEnabler=n busratio=18 maxmem=2048

as the boot option and thus successfully got to the installer screen. Input ur busratio depending on ur cpu.

 

Installed the default settings (I used the snow leopard 10.6.6i by Hazzar/Hazard which contains legacy kernel as well as vodoo kexts and stuff. Default audio kexts from apple do not work.) This particular dvd by default selects legacy kernel as SL doesnt by default support core i3 or above cpu. Also vodooHDA and vodoo kexts for keyboard/mouse are selected by default here.

 

select a free partition (doesnt matter if the partition scheme is MBR or GPT coz this dvd also includes other extra kexts and stuff to allow OS X to be installed on a MBR disk.)

 

Format the partition as Mac-journaled using disk utility and install on it.

 

Reboot after successful install.

 

Important note:

You have to boot from nawcoms boot cd every time you need to boot OS x coz I've tried almost every other bootloader: chameleon various versions including the latest as well as some which said they were specifically modified for sl and lion, chimera, xpc, EFI, [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url]...... Nothing works except nawcoms boot cd. Dont know why.

 

If you want to boot from HDD, then there is a work around.

 

create another partition, around 4 gb and format it as mac-journaled.

Boot into ur SL using nawcoms boot cd.

When successfully on ur desktop, put in ur SL dvd.

Open disk utility, select the second partition (the 4 gb one u created) and go to the restore tab.

use ur SL dvd as source and ur 4gb partition as destination and restore it.

next, download the nawcoms osxbootcd for usb utility.

run it. It is made to be installed to a USB drive to make a usb bootable installer. It doesnt allow to be installed on to the root, nor to an empty mac partition. hence the need for the restore-step. install it to the 4gb partition.

 

now you can restart and boot from hdd and select ur proper SL installed drive at he bootmenu of nawcoms USB bootcd thing. no more need for the bootCD.

 

Note2:

To enable ur Geforce chipset, boot to windows, open device manager, select ur Nvidia card and right-click select properties. From there, note down its ID (I dont remember the link but u can google something like 'Find Nvidia chipset ID + device manager' to find out which part of the information shown is the actual ID coz there are many lines of info). Then u neeed to boot back to SL. Open /System/Library/Extensions.

Rightclick GeForce.kext and NVDAGF100Hal.kext one by one and select 'show package contents'.

A new finder window opens up showing the contents of these kexts. double-click the info.plist files and edit:

 

'IOPCIClassMatch' key of the Geforce.kext by setting its string value to your Geforce chipset ID. it ought to be a hex value, something like 0x0df110de

 

'IOPCIPrimaryMatch' key of the NVDAGF100Hal.kext by setting its string value to your Geforce chipset ID like above.

 

save the info.plist. you may need to change the permission to read/write to be able to save them.

 

Next, open disk utility again, select ur root partition and do a 'repair disk permission'. Now reboot.

 

Note3: I updated my bios to A07 before all this.