ignorantcow's 10.4.8 Journal

[ignorantcow]

After 4 days of frustration I thought I'd keep a journal of what I did wrong/right for reference... maybe some people would benefit from this.

 

Attempt 1:

- Installed JaS 10.4.7 w/ Patches

- Installed 10.4.8 Combo Update (~300mb) from Apple

- Old IOATAFamily.kext, AppleSMBios.kext. No other older/patched files were used. Not that I didn't try them, they either did... nothing, or won't boot GUI at all.

- Kernel with R2.

- Natit.kext (Titan 04 Nov did.. nothing. POS.)

 

FAILED. Stuck at blue screen w/ hardware cursor.

 

Note: I originally thought the nVidia kexts were the cause of the problem. "kernel[0]: display: Not usable" was shown in /var/log/system.log. Not the cause of the problem.

 

- Hagar suggested copying /System/Library/Coreservices && /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework from an old working install. That booted GUI but uh, strange things happened, as shown in the screenshot below:

 

 

Attempt 2:

- Used original 10.4.4 restore image. Made read/write using Disk Utility, patched OSInstall.mpkg and installed.

- Got 600mb worth of delta standalone updates from Apple. 10.4.5, 10.4.6, 10.4.7 and 10.4.8. Installed. The goal is to make this as clean as possible. Suspect JaS' dvds contains "dirtied" files esp. for AMD and the like.

- semthex kernel with R2, old IOATAFamily.kext, AppleSMBios.kext. No other older/patched files were used.

- Drive wouldn't boot. Flashing underscore. (Blinking _).

- Tried various was to get the Darwin bootloader. bless, dd & all that. No go.

- Installed 10.4.3 and tried to upgrade from there. Bad idea.

 

FAILED. No bootloader.

 

Attempt 3:

- Made sure the Darwin bootloader loads prior to any install attempt. "Double erased" (MS-DOS then HFS+) sandbox disk, followed gaucho's excellent guide.

- Same as attempt 2, except: I made hidden files visible in Finder, and discovered an "activateEFI" script in the postflight folder of every delta update except for 10.4.7. Removed those along with InstallationCheck.

- Made mach_kernel root:wheel.

 

SUCCESS! Natit kicked in on the first boot, and I saw the Tiger Welcome video for the very first time.