Unable to get GUI working

[rozetta]

I managed after some time to get my Acer Aspire 5110 (with SATA controller) to boot OSX86 from a physical drive using the VMWare installation method (with AppleVIAATA kexts, etc.*). However, since the system was instaled under VMWare, when it boots on the real machine, once the GUI comes up, it's unusable. The mouse pointer shows, but the screen is black and some very wierd patches of colours appear after a while - I presume these are the dock, apple menu, etc.

 

The laptop has an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card. I've already tried the borisbadenov method for trying to get the card to work, but it makes the problem worse. Instead of getting an unusable GUI, I see the consol mention it's launching the logon application, I see a slight flash on the screen and then I'm back at the console again. It's like it loaded the GUI, but somewhere else.

 

I tried plugging in a monitor to the VGA port, but it wasn't there. I don't have a DVI cable or s-video cable, and besides, the whole point of running this on a laptop is to use the laptop display

 

Anyway, since the DVD installer boots and shows a GUI (just won't find the disk), I was thinking there must be a way to force the OS to boot with a GUI (graphics accelerated or not). How do I do this?

 

I guess my second question would be how do I get this working properly. I've tried the borisbadenov method twice now - after each step I rebooted to see if it helped and I found nothing changed the problem, but the change of the field "ATY,Wormy" to "display" is the one that causes no GUI (corrupt or not) to come up.

 

Thanks in advance

 

* for those who want to know, I added 0x43791002 0x43761002 to the Info.plist in the AppleVIAATA.kext module to get this working. These are the ATI SATA controller IDs for this laptop's motherboard.

[Rammjet]

The laptop has an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card...I've tried the borisbadenov method twice now - after each step I rebooted to see if it helped and I found nothing changed the problem

The Boris method is known not to help x1600 Mobility graphics except for some improvements on the external video.

 

What version of OSX did you install? What packages did you choose under the Customize section of the installation?

[rozetta]

I used 10.4.6 and under custom, I selected the following packages:

10.4.6.Combo.Update

AMD.BaseSystem

AMD.SSE2

10.4.6.SemjaZa.V1.2.AMD.Decrypts

10.4.6.Radeon.Mobility.Support

Wireless.Networking.Support

VIA.Sata.ATA

 

I deselected all additional languages, fonts and printer drivers and selected X11.

 

Edit:

I found out that removing all ATI and GeForce kexts from /System/Library/Extensions and rebuilding the kextcache allowed me to boot with a working GUI. However, it's at a fixed resolution and colour depth. I'm under the assumption that the ATIRadeonX1000* set of kexts are my ticket to getting the card working correctly, but I haven't yet figured out how.