malch Posted October 29, 2013 Share Posted October 29, 2013 I have an XPS 8500 that is running Mountain Lion well. I've downloaded Mavericks from the AppStore and created multiple bootable thumb drives with MyHack and the UniThingy. All of the thumb drives will boot into the Installer on a couple of other systems so I think the images are basically clean. But they all fail on the XPS 8500; crash and reboot at Starting Darwin. I have tried dozens of combinations of bootloader switches: -v -x -f GraphicsEnabler=Yes|no PciRootUID=0| etc. I've tried copying the smbios.plist and org.Chameleon.Boot.plist from Mountain Lion. And it still crashes at Starting Darwin :-( FWIW, this system has a Samsung 840Pro SSD and Nvidia GTX650ti. Any and all suggestions appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kvonlinee Posted October 29, 2013 Share Posted October 29, 2013 you have a spare hard drive, you can put in and make a installer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malch Posted October 29, 2013 Author Share Posted October 29, 2013 you have a spare hard drive, you can put in and make a installer. Maybe I'm missing something but isn't that going to be just the same as I've already done except that I'll be booting via SATA versus USB? You think there's a problem with the Mavericks USB drivers? I know the thumb drives themselves are are okay: I've tried three and they all boot up to the installer on other machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kvonlinee Posted October 29, 2013 Share Posted October 29, 2013 you try that, then let me know by SATA port. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malch Posted October 29, 2013 Author Share Posted October 29, 2013 you try that, then let me know by SATA port. Okay. This will take a few days. I have to shuffle a couple of TB around and I have to get some other things done too :-( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rlf Posted October 29, 2013 Share Posted October 29, 2013 Have you tried the USB drives in different USB ports? The drives check out OK on other computers, so then the question is whether the USB port you are using is OK. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malch Posted October 30, 2013 Author Share Posted October 30, 2013 Have you tried the USB drives in different USB ports? The drives check out OK on other computers, so then the question is whether the USB port you are using is OK. Yes, tried multiple ports. USB2 and USB3. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malch Posted October 30, 2013 Author Share Posted October 30, 2013 Well, I tried yet again, and this time it worked. I have absolutely no idea why and what changed. In any event I got Mavericks installed and running reasonably well. A few issues: * Bluetooth. I don't use that so I killed the BT related daemons to stop them constantly crashing and restarting. * Spotlight was a disaster. I've completely disabled that for the time being. Will revisit later. * Audio. I tried several drivers for the ALC887 audio. VooDooHDA 2.8.4 was the only one that worked. * Flash. Not surpisingly this was a disaster. It almost works but very badly in Safari and not at all with Firefox. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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