Tubgirl 10.4.10 AMD installation experience (missing com.apple.Boot.plist solved)

[nefilim]

I'm outlining my installation experience so hopefully it will help make it a little easier for others. I'm new to OSX86 but not OSX or Unix.

 

I have the following hardware configuration:

 

Asus M2NPV-VM mother (Nforce 430 & GeForce 6150 onboard video)

Athlon 64 X2 4600+

Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI adapter

80gig IDE drive

NEC 2500A DVD-/+RW IDE

 

I used tub_Osx10410_AMDVM_SSE3.rar which I burned to DVD in linux using growisofs:

 

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=Osx10410_AMDVM_SSE3.iso

 

The bootable DVD got picked up fine but letting the boot timeout expire or pressing any key or F8 resulted in the missing 'com.apple.Boot.plist' error. It wasn't immediately clear what the problem was, clearly the DVD was burned fine. I found all kinds of stupid theories and remedies for this problem until I found someone pointing out that letting the timer expire tries to boot from the harddrive. And secondly, if the apparent small size of the burned DVD doesn't make sense, someone pointed out that there is two partitions on the DVD, a small partition with the boot loader that the BIOS can recognize and a large HFS+ partition with the actual OS on it. Using F8 you should be presented with possible kernels to boot from, for me it said something like "hd(128,0) PXE .... " as the only option in startup volumes. PXE is used for booting over a network (I use this for my EPIA M6000 with a NFS root filesystem). Selecting this option also resulted in the 'com.apple.Boot.plist' error as obviously it's not configured to boot over a network.

 

The solution was to move the DVD drive from secondary channel master device to the primary channel (usually the southbridge IDE controller), either master or primary device, didn't make a difference booting wise. I'd recommend the secondary channel, use the primary channel for the IDE target drive to install OSX on so you dont run into "Still waiting for root device" issues later on.

 

Once in the installer, I had no destination device visible. This was because the drive still had linux partitions on it. Running Disk Utility I was unable to select the drive. I opened a terminal and repartitioned and recreated the MBR on the drive with:

 

fdisk -a boothfs -i /dev/rdisk0

 

After this the harddrive showed up as a destination option for installation.

 

The installation went fine, the reboot went fine. Once I made it through the setup & registration I changed my Boot.plist to boot up at 1280x1024 instead of the default 1024x768. My network card does not work by default. I've tried adding in my specific VendorID:DeviceID combination in the AppleIntel8254XEthernet.kext even though the mask specified there (0x10008086&0x0000ffff) covers it. No luck. I tried the Small tree drivers which interestingly enough specifically excludes my deviceID (0x107c... it has 0x107b,d,e etc) also with no luck, it's not a Small tree branded card. I copied the latest kext from my Macbook Pro (10.4.10), same situation. Even though this Tubgirl image installs kernel 8.10.1 I noticed that the drivers are much older than the ones on my MacBook Pro.

 

The only thing I see is

 

ethernet: family specific matching fails

 

I haven't tried the hacked forcedeth driver yet for the onboard LAN, don't really want to compromise my gigabit jumbo frame network I haven't even looked at trying any GeForce drivers, doesn't sound like there's much hope for the 6150.

 

Hope this helps others. If anyone knows how to get the Intel Pro/1000GT (0x107c:0x8086) I'd love to hear about it.

 

Interestingly enough, this baseline install seemed a lot snappier than my (admittedly bloated) 2gig 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro. The standard 5400rpm hdd is sooooo slow.

[evanlugh]

I tried the fdisk stuff, but I get permissions denied. Please help!

Thanks pal.

[nefilim]

Bought a used PCIe GeForce 6800 256mb for $10 (which turned into $8 ), graphics all sorted using Titan.

 

Got a cheap SATAII PCIe card based on the Silicon Image 3132 chipset for $19. Flashed with the BASE BIOS from Silicon Image's site and installed their BASE OSX driver. I booted to Linux and cloned the 80gb IDE drive I installed OSX on, to a 320gig SATA drive. The drive/controller shows up as a SCSI drive in my BIOS, set it boot from that and off it goes. I had to disconnect the old 80gb IDE drive to boot from the SATA drive. Xbench posts some pretty good disk numbers, the system feels soooo much snappier than my MacBook Pro with it's crappy 5400rpm drive.

 

Also got a cheap gigabit ethernet card which uses the Marvell Yukon chipset, works fine with the skge driver from this forum. The driver comes with PCI IDs for the D-Link DGE530T but mine had different IDs (0x1186 0x4B01) which I added to the Info.plist. Unfortunately the driver does not allow jumbo frames even though the hardware supports it (works fine with jumbo frames in Linux).

 

I've installed the X11, Audio and iTunes updates, not quite brave enough yet to install the Security 2007-007 updates, not sure if this will work on AMD.

 

So it's more or less a usable system now, haven't looked into audio yet, I have enough other computers connected to my hifi. Busy downloading the latest Xcode, then I'll be installing a bunch of stuff with fink.

[nefilim]

Remaining problems:

 

* Cannot resize partition from 80GB to 320GB, tried parted & iPartition, the downside of installing on an IDE drive first and then cloning with dd

* Cannot chainload OSX using GRUB, tried all combinations, no luck.

[bluedragon1971]

Remaining problems:

 

* Cannot resize partition from 80GB to 320GB, tried parted & iPartition, the downside of installing on an IDE drive first and then cloning with dd

* Cannot chainload OSX using GRUB, tried all combinations, no luck.

 

If you can hook up your IDE drive again, use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the system back from the larger drive, then boot from the IDE drive, repartition and reformat the larger drive with Disk Utility as its full size, then use Carbon Copy Cloner again to move the system back to the large drive.

[nefilim]

thanks bluedragon, i'll give that whirl! do you know if ccc 2.3 will be sufficient?

[nefilim]

Ok finally got my drive resized.

 

 

1. booted up with the old IDE drive (original installation)

2. imaged the SATA drive onto the IDE drive (17gig image) using disk utility

3. partitioned the SATA drive as one large partition with disk utility

4. restored the image ... initially this did not work got errors 2, 16 and 19. i tried asr on the command line which segfaulted (!), i played around (restarted a lot) and finally got the clone image to mount properly and finally somehow got it to restore using disk utility (have a look at the (console) log and keep working with the errors). from what i've read on the forums this should've just worked, maybe i was just unlucky.

 

from here on it got a little more difficult.

 

5. i attemped to reboot with the SATA drive, nothing. booted back to the old IDE drive, and restored the MBR on the SATA drive (fdisk -u) and also mark the first partition as active (it was not after repartitioning) with fdisk -e /dev/rdisk2 and then "f 1".

6. still nothing, just cursor blinking at me, rebooted from the IDE disk but using the SATA disk as root device (rd=disk2s1 as darwin bootloader option), which worked fine, so it told me the filesytem was intact, the image was restored properly, just the bootloader & co is screwed.

 

(NB read this post to understand the darwin bootloader)

 

i found this great post (with minor mistakes - you need to specify partition, not just raw disk) by some kind soul, perfectly explaining what needed to done to restore the bootloader:

 

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?s=&...ost&p=32129

 

i compared bootsectors of the drives (using dd and a hexeditor) and found them roughly the same (obviously fdisk did the job) but when i compared the first sectors of the root partitions.. i found the sata drive's was empty! it was missing boot1h.

 

7. so, i had to:

 

dd if=/usr/standalone/i386/boot1h of=/dev/rdisk2s1 bs=512 count=1

AND

/usr/sbin/startupfiletool /dev/rdisk2s1 /usr/standalone/i386/boot

 

startupfiletool didn't come with my OSX, just download the source here and compile (oh, you'll need Xcode installed for gcc... i've done that previously already fortunately).

 

Booting from the SATA drive now with one big 300gig partition :censored2:

[josh patel]

Hi there, nefilm.

I have near enough the same setup as you...

i have installed osx on my second hard drive which is ide...

after installation

only windows boots which is on my other sata hard drive..

Please help if you can

thanks

[Patina Creme]

I was looking for my intel pro 1000 kext info and found this:

 

 

I managed to get an Intel pro 1000 MT server card to work in tiger with the addition of the ID 10268086 to the correct kext, appleintel8254xethernet.kext,

info.plist,so line reads IOPCIPrimaryMatch

0x10008086&0x0000ffff 0x10268086

 

 

 

http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-012904.htm

It looks like you have similar cards.

 

Maybe this helps.

 

patina

 

ps if anyone has any info on intel pro 1000 82563eb

let me know