Complete Leopard build and Install from Scratch: Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2L

[bobdotorg]

I decided that I want two partitions, so I went back and used MeanSizzler's instructions.

 

Restart worked, but boot time was longer.

 

I also lost PS2 keyboard functionality, and XBench dropped from 179 to 175.

 

So now I'm doing KalyWay 10.5.2 with the following options:

kernel_vanilla_92

nvinject-256

GMA950

Intel NVIDIA VIA ATI HD Audio Controller

NVIDIA AC97 Audio

Realtek Sigmatel etc ......... Audio Codec

lastnetkassmbios

PCGenUSBFix

TimeMachineFix

IntelMemoryController

 

Ok - it's installed. Boot. System update asks if I want a RAW update, so the LAN is working.

 

PS2 Keyboard / mouse: works

video: all res work / rotate works, core image, quartz extreme

audio line out: works

spdif out: not recognized - only shows HD audio output

LAN: works

sleep: works, wake on double mouse click works, wake from power button works

restart: DOES NOT WORK (hangs on black screen for over 5 minutes)

shut down: works

 

Applied audio patch from above, restart:

line out: works

spdif out: works

 

XBench: 178.

 

Any ideas how I can get restart to work?

 

Update: I could not get it to boot when hooked up to a projector. I did two things at once - installed the above Graphics update, and plugged in the HDMI cable into the adapter attached to the video card a few seconds after the BEEP during the boot process. I don't know which one fixed it, but after two hours of frustration I'm not about to turn anything off.

 

I still can't get it to restart.

[CSOSX]

Only want to Thank You (meansizzler) and all the people.

 

 

I have GA-945GCM-S2L (F5 Bios)

 

I'm use KalyWay 10.5.2 intel/amd DVD :

 

VGA,LAN is working.

 

PS2 Keyboard(use PS2 to USB adapter) / mouse: works

 

fast quick my MacBook Pro many times.

[m16]

Well I have a GA-945GCM-S2C which you can see here:

http://revver.com/video/803347/mac-development-station/

 

This board works very well with leopard for me but I have had some issues. Mainly my CPU cooler is too big for this tiny motherboard. It covers the first ram slot so I cannot get dual channel support. There is a graphical lag when you run firefox. Extremely annoying.

 

Also there I cannot get the Windows key to work on my logitech ps/2 keyboard

[meansizzler]

For the poster above, suing stock graphics results in tearing use an Nvidia 7600GT, I made a guide so you will build the machine as I did, did not intend for you to leave out major component, as fir the OP who banned me, bring on the 7 year old I can each him a thing or two...

[Icebird]

Has anyone tried using an IDE DVD drive while following this tutorial? I'd rather not spend another $40+ on a drive just for installing leopard when I have a few perfectly good IDE DVD-burners laying around, and according to the specs on the motherboard it supports at least one IDE port.

Is the SATA DVD drive absolutely necessary to get this to work?

[m16]

one a s2c an ide dvd burner works. Probably the same for the fancier model.

[Icebird]

one a s2c an ide dvd burner works. Probably the same for the fancier model.

 

Well I know it works with the motherboard, but I was wondering if it works for the leopard installation.

The tutorial seems to state for this to work, you need BOTH the HDD and DVD-drive on the Master SATA ports.

 

Can you just have the HDD on the Master SATA and use the leopard disc on an IDE DVD-drive?

[meansizzler]

Well I know it works with the motherboard, but I was wondering if it works for the leopard installation.

The tutorial seems to state for this to work, you need BOTH the HDD and DVD-drive on the Master SATA ports.

 

Can you just have the HDD on the Master SATA and use the leopard disc on an IDE DVD-drive?

 

 

Back, you can try an IDE drive but then you have ot go into the BIOS and set the IDE/SATA ports accordingly, basically read the manual and try to understand how to set them, I just used a sata to IDE converter to hook up my IDE drive but be warned, while it worked my drive could read discs but not write them!!!!

[Canis Lupus]

Only had a bit of time Saturday to start the process after I built the computer. I was wondering if it's better to have the Kalyway 10_5_2.iso disc burned by a Windows box, as opposed to a Mac which is what i did. I got an error when booting from CDROM that there was a "Media read error. Check cable". The box definitely sees the DVD Burner (Lite-On cheapy). Is it possible an .iso disc burned on a Mac could fail, and it's better to burn the disc from a Windows box?

 

Thanks

[m16]

Well I know it works with the motherboard, but I was wondering if it works for the leopard installation. The tutorial seems to state for this to work, you need BOTH the HDD and DVD-drive on the Master SATA ports. Can you just have the HDD on the Master SATA and use the leopard disc on an IDE DVD-drive?

I have installed with only with an IDE dvd drive and one SATA HDD drive connected.

Only had a bit of time Saturday to start the process after I built the computer. I was wondering if it's better to have the Kalyway 10_5_2.iso disc burned by a Windows box, as opposed to a Mac which is what i did. I got an error when booting from CDROM that there was a "Media read error. Check cable". The box definitely sees the DVD Burner (Lite-On cheapy). Is it possible an .iso disc burned on a Mac could fail, and it's better to burn the disc from a Windows box? Thanks

Probably doesn't matter what you burn it from as long as it is a reputable software piece and you burn SLOW.

[Canis Lupus]

K thanks. I'm gonna try moving the SATA channels to 1 and 2 for the HDD and the DVD as suggested above, just in case this is causing read errors. Just have to find ports 1 and 2

 

I have installed with only with an IDE dvd drive and one SATA HDD drive connected.Probably doesn't matter what you burn it from as long as it is a reputable software piece and you burn SLOW.

[agrajag]

A great guide- my system seems to have worked pretty well from the start. The only issue I have so far is that I am having trouble with the wired Ethernet after waking from sleep.

 

I installed the suggested network driver after installing 10.5.2 and it works fine. However after sleeping, the connection is lost and so far my fiddling is unable to get it to work. Only a reboot seems to get the network connection working again. Is there any advice about how to get the network functioning after sleeping (aside from disabling sleep I guess).

 

Also being new to this- what is the suggestion for trying overclocking this MB- I have a GA-945GCM-S2C and an E4700 (2.6GHz) Core 2 Duo cpu. Is it the "CPU Host Clock Control" that one fiddles with? Mine is set at 200MHz right now (800MHz FSB).

[m16]

Are you using s1 or s3 sleep?

[agrajag]

Are you using s1 or s3 sleep?

 

S3

[CSOSX]

yes set bios (S3) work fine

[meansizzler]

Yes follow the BIOS screenshots please, on windows though changing to S3 after installing it has no affect so you have to reinstall, not sure about max os, my ethernet works fine, try and reinstall it making sure the BIOS settings are the same as mine...Graphics driver changed to NATIT... using it for 6 weeks without a hiccup.... also do not install colour/graphics update... so far machine starts up very quick and no problems...

[agrajag]

Hmmm- still not working. How do I know which network driver is actually being used? I also tried downloading and installing the v 2.0 ethernet driver from the Realtek web site and things stayed the same. Is there a way to know which driver is actually being used? It may be that a default driver from the Kalyway install is actually in use. I looked in the system.log and saw nothing unusual, even after the sleep and failure to re-connect on the network.

[meansizzler]

make sure the mobo bio is up to date, and check bios settings and well reinstall the os is al I can think of, only trouble I have with sleep is sometimes, now this is rarely that the machine won't sleep at a set time eg after 5 minutes, but this is only because i was using a time machine backup restore, also the machine would show a blank screen after resume, but i put this down to the graphics/colour update or nvinject driver, so reinstalled the os without them updates and tried natit instead of nvinject.... only problem which is not 100 % stable is disc burning...

[agrajag]

I tried using Kalyway 10.5.2 (not 10.5.1 + the updater) and tried a couple of different installs. I'm not sure which option did it, but now I can sleep and do get connections when I wake up. It seems that the price of this (so far) is that it does not shut down completely (i.e. does not turn itself off) but perhaps I can find a tweak to fix this. I have not yet tried to burn CDs or DVDs but hopefully will get to try this soon. I am hoping this hackintosh will be stable enough to replace my dual G5 tower. I am waiting for a PCI Firewire card so I can connect my EyeTV 200 to it.

 

Thanks for the help.

[byuu]

Thank you all for the excellent work! Based on this post, I've built my own system using Kalyway 10.5.2 and the following components:

- Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2C

- Intel Pentium E2160

- 1GB DDR2-533

- 80GB SATA HDD

- SATA DVDRW

 

Pictures:

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i221/byu...hackintosh1.jpg

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i221/byu...hackintosh2.jpg

 

I'll share my experiences.

 

The first problem was with restart causing my system to hang forever when using the vanilla kernel. I see others have this problem as well, so I looked into it more. It took me a while, but I was able to come up with a workaround to fix this.

 

I posted about it here:

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=102027

 

Relaying that post here in case anyone misses it. It's a very complex fix, so it's probably best to just use the sleepkernel for most. I was just trying to keep things as close to a vanilla Mac as possible.

 

Next, I had the same problem with the ethernet not recovering when putting the machine to sleep. I fixed this by copying down all of the DHCP settings, and then changing it to manual. It will now start working ~10 seconds after waking up again. This is really only effective if you have a router. ISP DHCP leases tend to expire too frequently.

 

Next, no audio. I used the AppleHDAPatcher v1.20 with the alc662 dump. This enabled sound (front panel jack doesn't work, but that's okay), but it caused a new problem: if I put the computer to sleep, and then wake it back up, the kernel will panic when I shut down the computer.

 

With -v, it mentions something along the lines of:

"panic (cpu 0 caller 0xNNNNNNNN) A driver releasing a(n) AppleHDAController has corrupted the registry -- SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.4.31/libkern/C++/OSObject.cpp:241"

 

Sounds scary. I've yet to find a fix for this. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? I've tried repairing permissions already.

 

Lastly, the onboard GMA950 graphics have the infamous mouse artifacting problem. This doesn't just affect Firefox 2. If you try and rename a file with Finder, it will do the same thing.

 

I did not want to try using the VESA driver, as I need QE / CI. In desperation, I tried using the Apple Leopard Graphics Update. This fixed the artifact problem and gives me QE / CI, but it removed the ability to change resolutions. It only boots into 1024x768. I can specify "Graphics Mode"="1280x1024x32", but anything higher fails. I cannot use 1440x900. I even tried using switchresx, but it doesn't work at all.

 

Does anyone have any other ideas to force 1440x900 mode? Another graphics card will be very difficult, as I have a low-profile case.

 

Other than that, the system works great. Thanks again for this tutorial.

[meansizzler]

maybe you can help with with my problem, I suffer from the grey screen error, basically after the white logo when the machine boots instead of loading the dashboard it boots to a grey screen, so blank video, but machine is working i.e cd drive ejects, volume beep works, just no video, if I restart then it sometimes boots to the dash, but it only happens 50% of the time... I have put this down to the leopard graphics update, without it installed system works fine no probs at all, was using 7600GT and natit driver, but as soon as I installed graphics update then I got the problem, unfortunately I need it installed in order to use the 8800GT otherwise it won't work... so can someone install the graphics update and let me know if they get the same error.

 

Just start up the machine with monitor off and then switch it on and check if the dashboard loads, do this about 10 times...

 

Using PCI-E graphics not on board...

[byuu]

Okay, I fixed the problem with ALCinject from AppleHDAPatcher v1.20 causing a kernel panic on shutdown ... solution is to not use it at all.

 

On the Kalyway 10.5.2 install DVD, just opt for the top two HDA options, leave out AC97 and the rest. Sound output works with its default AppleAzaliaAudio kext. I don't use a microphone, so I don't care about input anyway.

 

Voila, no more kernel panics.

 

As for the video problems, I gave up trying to fix the GMA950. Lots and lots of people with problems on the desktop GMA950. Tried all the various custom Natit's, EFI gfx strings, etc to no avail. Went out and bought an XFX 9400 GS 256MB PCI-e low profile graphics card instead.

 

Performed a clean install of Kalyway, chose not to install any graphics drivers. Immediately installed the Apple Leopard Graphics Update, and then installed NVinject 0.2.1 (didn't feel like messing with EFI gfx strings again). On reboot, I have QE/CI and resolution change support. Output through DVI works great. After 2 hours, no kernel panics, can suspend and shutdown fine. Card is fairly decent for a low profile, too -- ~16,000/5sec on glxgears. I was getting <4,000 with the GMA950.

 

So, system seems 100% stable now. No known problems. Sleep + wake-up, wake-up ethernet, shutdown + restart, video + QE/CI + resolution change, audio output, USB ports all working fine with minimally patched vanilla kernel. Given the official Mac forums I've been reading lately, that seems even better than with Apple's official hardware

 

----------

 

meansizzler,

 

I noticed after loading NVinject that when I set the resolution to native 1440x900, the screen turned blue and didn't change. What I did was wait about three minutes, and then switched to the other DVI output port. I turned the monitor off and back on, and it then detected everything and the screen came up fine.

 

My XFX 8400 GS has this Y-adapter that splits the one custom DVI-sized port to two DVI-I connectors. If you don't have something like that, or a second DVI port ... maybe try the S-Video output or something.

 

Hope this helps.

[meansizzler]

I fixed my grey screen issue, had the system connected to a scaler and guess nvinject did not like it, so connecting it direct to the display and working fine...

[Unetwork]

meansizzler thanks for all your work and the posting, I have the same hardware as you have but the only thing different is that I use the onboard video.

I did not sucseed the format as you suggested so I used the mbr way and from the first time all went great and smooth.

After the patches the machine is working very stable and no issues here.

Sound is working and also the input from my USB keyboard with a line in is working.

 

USB Bluetooth adaptor is alo working and the network is fine!

I am very happy reading your topic here and again thanks!!!

Peter

[meansizzler]

thanks forthe above reply, what USB BT adapterare ou isng?, does it support,"Allow device ot wake system from standby", many thanks...