Dell E520 Leopard Install Guide -- ICH8R Working!

[dr.vox]

Had a few bumps and scrapes since my last post. Mainly Windows destroying my bootloader and MBR on my 500GB disk (which had my Mac install on). Fixed the MBR so could retrieve my media and downloads from two NTFS partitions on there, but it didn't recognise HFS+ obviously, so I've started iAtkos 7i from fresh yet again. Ah well, at least I use seperate partitions for Media — if I didn't I'd've lost all my music and stuff several times over.

 

Just gotta reinstall all my apps, refind all my icons, etc. etc. but it's good to have a blank canvas I guess...

 

Glad to hear you're still rocking Kalyway, karo. Still no idea what I did wrong when trying to update my Kalway install to .3 a few weeks ago, but whatever, don't need it now (*crosses fingers*).

 

Also, uphuck and the iAtkos group have started work on a Snow Leopard distro, which is called iKaros.

[Karo]

@dr.vox that's a bumpy road man. Recovering the MBR is always a bit tricky with a multiboot system. Did you notice any differences between iAtkos and your previous Kalyway (performance wise)?

 

Really looking forward to snow leopard. The performance boost will come in handy on my macbook and ofcourse it's always a good challenge to get the new OSX working on the e520.

Also, I will upgrade my memory to 4GB soon. Did anybody encounter problems with their e520 while upgrading their memory to 4GB? If so, got any tips?

 

BTW> 10.5.7 with "RAID on" still going strong!

[dr.vox]

Yeah, been a hell of a trip.

Haven't noticed any difference performance-wise but that's because I had a good four- or five-month gap in between, in which I used Win7. Although I've still got somewhat of an issue with the two 160GB drives being slow, though it seems random as to whether it happens. A reboot resets it obviously, but doesn't always fix. Would be nice to upgrade Kalyway and see if it has the same issue now, since I didn't have the 500GB drive when I had Kalyway.

Thing is, Kalyway always used to take about an hour to install before, and all the other distros take about an hour to install on the two 160GB disks now, but only around 15mins on the 500GB. In fact, iAtkos 7i takes about 9mins from creating the plan to asking to restart.

 

Really can't wait for Snow Leo. Never managed to get it working before but I would be interested to do so now. Great of Apple to offer the upgrade for $30 though. Exactly what MS should be doing with Vista users and Apple are just making them look like greedy twats, to be honest. Oh, and of course Leopard wasn't broken in the start, of course, whereas Vista... well... yeah...

 

Also, I upgraded my memory from 2GB to 4GB just fine with Kalyway and iAtkos has had no complaints with it from the start. Totally changed all the modules from the original Dell ones. Pretty sure they're all 800Mhz but OS X says they're 667Mhz, though I can't remember if Windows says the same or not. Bit annoying either way, to be honest.

 

Anyway, I always end up typing massive paragraphs on forums so I'll stop here.

Good to hear everything's going great with Kaly .7.

[dr.vox]

By the way, has anyone managed to get Chameleon 2.0 RC1 working? I don't think it works for me; I have to use Chameleon 1.

[Karo]

@dr.vox you're right the upgrade to Snow Leopard is very reasonable, it will be 30$ well spend!

 

My upgrade to 4GB went flawless and it makes my system work great (as I work daily with big databases/datasets and multiple programs). I also wanted to upgrade to Chameleon 2.0 RC1 but it resulted in the boot1 error which I could not resolve, so at this point in time no themes for me Anyone got any tips?

[dr.vox]

Yeah that's what I got. Maybe our stuff just isn't supported. Ah well, Chameleon 1 works fine and I only see it once every few days anyway.

 

As for fixing it, you could try installing Chameleon 1 over it, you could try setting the partition as active through the boot disk and you could try using EasyBCD, but none of those worked for me, I had to do a full reinstall from scratch. :\

Hope that was a backup partition and not your main install. If it was your main install that was jolly silly of you.

 

Installed iAtkos 7i on a new computer which was delivered today (unfortunately my mom's, not mine ) and it installed Chamelon 2 fine — Foxconn G31MX, Intel ICH7 — worked great.

[AKennedy_4]

ahhh i was installing using the retail method found here and i got this error:

 

 

anyone got any ideas? oh and btw i had to install with -x -v boot flags cause -v didn't work

it hung there for 5 more times before i turned it off. Any help would be much appreciated

[dr.vox]

Not tried Boot 132 and imo you're better off just using one of the many other methods we know to work for E520s — e.g. Kalyway 10.5.2 disc, iDeneb 1.4 disc, iPC 10.5.6 disc, iAtkos 7i disc.

[Elkay]

@thedude9, you have RAID 0 working too?

[AKennedy_4]

Not tried Boot 132 and imo you're better off just using one of the many other methods we know to work for E520s — e.g. Kalyway 10.5.2 disc, iDeneb 1.4 disc, iPC 10.5.6 disc, iAtkos 7i disc.

alright. Im gonna try the iatkos v7. Looks promising. I'll post back with results

[dr.vox]

Good good.

You'll probably need these kexts, as I've never been able to get the disc kexts to work for me (on any distro). :\

Intel 82566MM (Ethernet)

Audio kexts

 

And you might also need a graphics kext — I recommend nvDarwin or nvInject — but it should be supported from the disc.

[AKennedy_4]

Big thanks for your help! I've already downloaded those kexts but still thanks for the suggestion. And i plan on adding a EFI string from OSX86tools for my nvidia 7300 LE once leopard is installed. I can do it that way too right? or do i need to select a graphix kexts from the disc?

 

Also: Dont I need install "Atkos disc's Intel ICHx SATA drivers WITH AHCI DRIVER LISTED ABOVE INTEL CHIPSET DRIVER?"

[dr.vox]

Yeah but that's during install. You want to put those kexts on a USB drive or on another partition while you install, and then install the kexts after you've got a working install.

Ok, this is the list you'll see when you click Customize:

http://i949.photobucket.com/albums/ad332/ivnet/iatkos7.jpg

You want to select the following:

• iAtkos v7 Main System (obviously)

Bootloader:

• Chameleon v1

X86 Patches:

• /Extra Directory

• DSDT

• AppleDecrypt

• 9.5.0 Kernel voodoo

• Disabler

Drivers:

• Might wanna use one of the nVidia kexts, I dunno, up to you.

System:

• AHCI

• Intel SATA/IDE

Sound:

• None

• Maybe NTFS-3G — I recommend it if you'll be working with NTFS volumes.

Network:

• You can try the Intel Gigabit but it probably won't work.

 

• Post-install actions.

 

Should be everything.

Then, once you boot into a desktop environment from your HD, install the audio and network kexts.

I don't know if the 7300LE works on EFI strings — I never tried it.

[AKennedy_4]

THANKS SOO MUCH for the help! Im currently burning the disc. But i have a question if i install the chamelon v1 bootloader will i have to do anything to dual boot with vista? i currently am running vista. I plan on having 4 paritions: 1)Vista 2) Vista Recovery CD 3)MAC OSX 4) Media

I plan on using this guide to help me with dual booting.. Good idea?

[dr.vox]

Not sure, to be honest. I always found Kalyway allowed me to dual boot perfectly even though XP was installed before Kalyway.

Now I use two different hard drives for iAtkos and Win7, so I don't need to worry about dual booting.

 

Sorry, can't help you there, but I'm sure it's possible and probably quite easy compared to some of the problems you can face with OSx86.

[AKennedy_4]

ha alright. I should be able to handle it. Just trying to get everything ready to try it out. I'll post back later with how it goes. Thanks again for your help!

 

oh and 20gb should be enough for a mac OSX partition right?

[dr.vox]

Yeah, 20GB should be sufficient assuming you're not planning on installing loads of huge games/apps and are doing what I am — putting documents, downloads, music, etc. on a second partition/disk.

Best way to handle that, by the way, is to create an Alias of your Documents folder on your Media HD and then move that Alias to your home folder and make sure it's named 'Documents'. Then OS X will treat it as the regular Documents folder. I'll explain better later, if you want.

 

EDIT: This Hackint0sh.org guide may be of some use to you, re: Vista dualboot.

EasyBCD actually worked for me when I made an entry in Win7's bootloader, so I can vouch for this method personally.

 

EDIT2: Heh, just noticed your post on InfiniteMac. I would go with that guide if this iAtkos doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure it should. Both iPC and iDeneb 10.5.6 versions are known to work with E520s, so I'd give one of those a whack.

 

And just another call, has anyone else managed to either install Snow Leo or at least Chameleon v2 on their E520? Because, from what I'm reading, one needs Chameleon v2 to run Snow Leo, and if we can't run Chameleon v2 it could be the end of the road for the E520s as Hackintoshes (for now, at least).

[AKennedy_4]

So are u saying like make a shortcut on the mac partition to the documents folder on my media partition?

 

And if easy BCD works then i'll gladly use that. But i heard it caused "waiting on root device" erros in 10.5.6. I'm planning on doing this on my family PC and i need it to be simple so everyone else can use it.. lol

Oh and if i do go with EasyBCD then do i still need to install the chamelon bootloader? or just install it and reinstall the vista bootloader later? Sorry for noobish questions this is my first time and trying to make sure it goes right

[dr.vox]

Click here — InsanelyMac won't let me use it as an image.

Hope that explains it.

 

As for the EasyBCD things, I'm not sure, again — like I said, I hardly used it and haven't gone into detail with it; you're better off asking someone else who knows a bit more. But I think you will still need to install Chameleon.

 

And don't worry about it being your first install — first installs usually go terribly wrong and present problems which take weeks or months to solve, but you're lucky enough to have a machine which has been experimented with already, and as such you shouldn't have many (or any) problems.

[AKennedy_4]

first installs usually go terribly wrong and present problems which take weeks or months to solve

haha well thanks for helping me stay confident.. lol

[dr.vox]

Nahh, don't worry about it. I was talking about when you're doing cutting edge stuff, things nobody else has done before; but like I said, the E520 has been experimented with thoroughly with many different distros, options, settings, blah, blah blah, and we know what will and won't work.

Don't be worried about going for this, but I do recommend backing up anything important. Better to be safe than sorry in the event of a worst cast scenario.

[AKennedy_4]

Yeah that what im doing now. I tried to boot the iatkos cd and it worked! Cheers! Bout to head somewhere. I'll try to install it tomm probably. Post back on results!

 

EDIT: UGHHHHH I was in the process of partitioning my hard drive and putting all my media on my media partition and vista's shrink volume took a {censored} on my really pissed me off. I have 130+ free space to shrink but it wont let me shrink the volume! I was thinking about using gparted to resize the volume but i reallyyyy dont wanna mess anything up. So i'm using howtogeeks guide on how to fix the issue.. Thank god for him.. lol. I'll post back if i ever get this {censored} partitioned right.. then on with installation

[AKennedy_4]

So I'm posting this from my dell e520 running leopard!! The install was easy and no problems so far! I do have a few questions though:

 

1) Dr.Vox can u elaborate on how u changed your user folders the way u did? I'm trying but seeing how im a complete noob to OS X i cant figure it out.

 

2) Is there a way to modify the keyboard layout so that my keyboard runs with osx for natively? I've tried changing the shortcuts in system preferences and it didn't work

[dr.vox]

Sure. Bear with me, here.

First of all you're probably going to need to open up Terminal (Open a Finder window and go to /Applications/Utilities and open Terminal.app). I advise you also open a Finder window and keep it showing your home folder (you should see Leopard's Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. folders)

Then in the terminal window you want to type

sudo rm -rf [FOLDERNAME]

but of course you'll need to replace [FOLDERNAME] with whichever folders you want to link to.

You'll also need to provide an administrator password (your account password should work just fine).

So, if, like me, you have Downloads, Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures folders on your other HD/partition, you'd want to run

sudo rm -rf Downloads

then

sudo rm -rf Documents

etc.. Then you want to navigate to your Media HD and right-click your Downloads folder and select Make Alias. Then you want to move the resultant file (click and drag the alias) to your home directory and get rid of the 'alias' at the end, so the folder's name is exactly the same as Leopard's folders were called — i.e. Downloads — not downloads nor Downloads with a space after it, nor Downloads alias.

PS: Aliases are basically what Windows calls Shortcuts.

Once you've done that for each of your folders, you should be done.

If you need me to explain more clearly, just ask. I can do diagrams/screenshots if you want, too; a step-by-step screenshot guide.

 

Just to explain the terminal commands, in case you're interested:

sudo is telling it to do it in Superuser mode — with root privileges, so it's all powerful. Sudo can be a very dangerous command if you don't know what you're doing.

rm is the remove command

-r is a flag for rm which removes directories.

the f is part of the flag (so 'rm -f' is also a valid command) which means 'force'. Necessary because Leopard doesn't like letting go of these folders, naturally. Again, rm -f and rm -rf can be very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

 

Oh and as for the keyboard thing, it depends what you mean... which keys aren't doing what you want them to? Some multimedia keys just won't work without proper drivers (which very likely won't exist) and changing the keyboard layout would do nothing, but if you're on the wrong keyboard layout, standard keys may not produce the expected results, e.g. @ beign where you think " should be.

Can I ask where you're from?

 

Oh and sorry I didn't reply on your edit. I only get emailed if there's a new post, not if a post is edited. Did say to back up, didn't I? Hope everything is ok now.

[AKennedy_4]

Wow thanks for the quick reply!

I got the whole alias thing set up now. Your directions were clear and precise. Thanks man

 

And also, thanks for the explanation of the commands. I was quite curious as to what they meant

 

And as for the keyboard shortcuts. Like you know how you have the F1-F12 keys? Well there aren't working on OSX. Plus instead of pressing WIN+A to select all text, i would like to change that to be CTRL+A like it is in windows. Just various things like that. Oh and i'm from the US