The Sinister Moose

My OSX86 Project:

My initial goal was to simply update my perfectly happy Dell Precision 690, which was running OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, to the newer Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

The Leopard install was accomplished by using the iPC Leopard installer DVD, I downloaded. It was a very easy install, and I could have ran the machine happily for a very long time, until some of the software I needed to run, would only run on 10.6 or better.

No point in getting complacent.

I started by attempting to find an iPC Snow Leopard release, and had no luck. I looked at several other releases, which are popular links on numerous torrent sites. Unfortunately I couldn't find one that would work with my Precision 690s rather peculiar hardware.

My Hardware:

Computer: Dell Precision 690
CPU(s):  Two Xeon 5130
Memory: 8 X 2GB 667MHz DDR2-667 PC2-5300, 240p DIMM, Fully Buffered, ECC 1.8v = 16GB RAM
Chipset: Intel 5000x
Drive Controller: Onboard Dell LSI SAS Raid + ICH7 SATA + IDE
Hard Drive: 300GB WD Velociraptor on SAS port 0
Optical Drive: Dual Layer DVD burner on IDE Primary Master on port 1
Network Card: Realtek 8139 PCI add-in card. (Because the built in Ethernet is notoriously unreliable, and difficult to get working)
Video: PCIe Nvidia 9600GT 512MB GDDR2 (dual DVI ports)
Monitors: Two 22" LCD DVI monitors.
Audio Chip: Intel I believe. (Voodoo HDA patch always works)

You can see from the specs that this machine powerful enough, certainly for my needs as a graphic artist / designer.

When I installed Leopard 10.5, I did so with the hard drive connected to the SATA controller, which isn't really fast enough for the Velociraptor, but the iPC Installer DVD recognized the SATA adapter and not the LSI SAS.

I wanted to do a completely fresh, clean install of Snow Leopard 10.6, and none of the install DVDs or the install methods from places like tonymacx86.com would allow me to boot a DVD, and install directly to a drive connected to the SAS controller.

After digging around, I discovered that I could get the Dell LSI SAS controller working in OSX, by editing the AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext and adding  a string to the info.plist file.

Once I tested this on Leopard 10.5, I now knew what I had to do to use the SAS controller to install Snow Leopard to a drive connected to the SAS.

After deciding on an install method (iATKOS S3 V2), I downloaded an iso, and had to learn how to mount the iso in a way that I could edit it's contents, save them back to the iso, and burn it without loosing my edits.

It was not easy, but after three or four tries, I had managed to edit the iso and burn it so it would boot in my Precision 690, and recognize the Dell SAS controller, so I could access and format my Velociraptor drive.

In the end my attempts were not %100 effective, since the file I edited, was only used if I boot from the DVD, and wasn't installed. Which caused me to have problems after the install but I'll cover that later.

During the install, I was able to access the Velociraptor and format it with one partition with GUID. I chose the Chameleon 2 RC5 Pre 11, boot loader with the only other option being the fakesmc.kext, which is required.

The install succeeded and I thought I was good to go, but it would not boot to the Velociraptor, I got the "still waiting on root device" error message.

At this point, I booted back into Leopard, and did a little more searching through forums, and decided that I would also need a DSDT.aml file, for my machine to boot Snow Leopard.

I grabbed the DSDT Patcher GUI and created a DSDT file in Leopard, hoping it would work in Snow Leopard. I placed the DSDT file on the root of my Velociraptor drive, and again attempted to boot to it.

No joy. "still waiting on root device"

I also discovered that the DSDT file, reset the computer's CMOS setting, every time I rebooted. I had to edit the DSDT file, to stop it from resetting the CMOS, and tried to boot again. Still, I got the "still waiting" message.

That's when I realized that the AppleLSIFusionMPT file that was installed, was not the one I edited. Once again, back in leopard, I went into the Snow leopard drive, and edited the AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext file, and saved it.

Now I was able to boot the Velociraptor by issuing the preboot commands -v -f, which at least got me to the desktop.

Once running Snow Leopard, I thought I was good to go, but every time I rebooted, I would have to use the "-f" preboot command, or it would give me the error "still waiting on root device".

After many different attempts, I realized that my problem was that Chameleon wasn't loading the AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext, and because of that, it had no idea where to look for the Velociraptor thus the "still waiting on root device". By using the "-f" preboot command, it was forcing chameleon to reload all the kexts.

I then, decided that chameleon will always load kexts placed in the /Extra/Extensions folder on the root of the drive, so I copied the AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext to that folder, chowned those files to 0:0, and chmod to 755, and did a reboot.

Still no joy. I could still only get it to boot with the "-f" preboot command.

After a little more searching, I found a program called KextUtility which became my new best friend. I installed it on Snow Leopard, executed it, and it repaired permissions, and rebuilt the kextcache.

Finally, my machine would start with no flags. But, I still didn't have good video. It was low resolution, and only worked on one display.

I put the NVenabler 64.kext into the /Extra/Exensions folder, ran kextUtility again, and rebooted.

This time I was greeted with both displays, at the highest resolution with everything running perfectly.

The iATKOS S3 V2 that I was now happily running, was actually version Snow Leopard 10.6.3, with kernel Darwin 10.3, and the latest version was Snow Leopard 10.6.8 with kernel Darwin 10.8, so I needed to update.

I was nervous about updating, because I was afraid it would break something in my system. But I downloaded the Apple supplied 10.6.8 Combo Update, and let it install.

After restarting, it was all still working well. The processors are recognized as Two 2.0GHz Core 2 Duos, which is fine with me, I don't care what it calls them, as long as they run as fast as they do.

So far, I am pleased with the performance, and I may get brave enough to try the New Lion 10.7 install eventually.