10.4.5 on Dell Inspiron 600m not working

[neil55]

Hello,

 

I've been trying pretty hard over the past several weeks to get Mac OS installed on my Dell laptop, but I have been unsuccessful. I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction and help me get this working.

 

First of all, I have a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop. I have an Intel Pentium M processor 1.60GHz. CPU-Z says it is capable of MMX, SSE, and SSE2.

 

I have a 120GB external USB WD drive (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=261&language=en) that I've been trying to install this on. The first way I tried to install Mac OS was by downloading the famed deadmoo image and using dd to copy onto the USB drive. Everything worked out fine, and the WD would even boot to an apple screen, however it would crash almost instantly and show the "Reboot required" screen in many languages. No dice.

 

After running through that a few times and consistently getting the same results, I downloaded the "MaC.OsX.10.4.5.Universal.Install.DVD(Intel:AMD:SSE3:SSE2).iso" file over bittorrent. I successfully burned the ISO to a DVD, popped it in, and booted.

 

To my surprise, it booted the mac os install program perfectly fine! Everything worked. The disk utility program worked perfectly. All the utilities worked. I ran through the install, installing it to my external USB, and everything looked like it worked. However upon rebooting, the apple screen appears and the little loading image at the bottom of the screen spins. Unfortunately, it doesn't get anywhere past that. I even let it sit there for hours. It got as far as half loading the "Welcome to mac os" dialog box, but no where past there. The mouse showed up, but I couldn't move it.

 

So, I'm wondering where to go from here. I'm thinking that my problem might be that installing and booting from this USB external drive might not be the best way to go and instead I should just install directly to my internal 80GB hard drive. I currently have Windows XP on this drive, and I can't lose that or the files on it. So I have two options.

 

A ) Move the internal drive to the external disk and boot using that external disk whenever I want to use windows XP. I wouldn't mind this option at all, however when I tried this, the blue screen of death would appear shortly after the black windows xp loading screen came up. So making an exact copy of the disk from internal drive --> external USB drive didn't boot properly. Does anyone know how to make this boot successfully? If I can get that to boot, then I could wipe my internal drive completely and dedicate it to the mac install.

 

B ) Repartition my internal drive and have both windows xp and mac os on it and use my external USB just for extra storage space. I have partition magic, but I have a few questions about this before I proceed. First of all, if I repartition the drive and create a large enough empty partition for the mac, how does the booting process work? According to some guides I've read, it appears as if darwin some how takes over the boot process and I'll get to pick between win xp and mac os. I'm a little skeptical of this though. Can someone shed some light as to how repartitioning a windows xp drive and then adding mac os to it works? I'm fairly knowledgeable with linux too, so is it possible to use something like grub to handle my booting?

 

Any help would really be appreciated. I'd love to get this working. Thanks.

Edited February 12, 2007 by neil55