Author Topic: [How To]: Installing OSX without access to a Mac  (Read 82146 times)

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r0m30

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Re: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #30 on: December 05, 2009, 06:40:15 AM »
....   just wondering when you might have this ready?

I have it written, I need to do a walk though to make sure it's right. My netbook is in TX at the HP repair facility so I don't have a machine to try it on.... :(

If you want a copy knowing that it's not been fully vetted PM me an e-mail address and I'll send it to you.
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rocksteady

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Re: UPDATED: Installing OSX without acces to a MAC - HOWTO first draft
« Reply #31 on: December 07, 2009, 03:04:48 AM »
Congratulations from me too r0m30

thanks for your efforts, pure quality post :)

(polished your title a bit, your thread will make it to the next rev of our FAQ)

Cheers
« Last Edit: December 07, 2009, 03:07:50 AM by rocksteady »
Stop bitching, start coding or documenting or both..

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r0m30

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac (1st draft)
« Reply #32 on: December 07, 2009, 03:52:01 AM »
Congratulations from me too r0m30

thanks for your efforts, pure quality post :)

(polished your title a bit, your thread will make it to the next rev of our FAQ)

Cheers

Thanks  ;D but none of it would have been possible without all the hard work of the team that built Chameleon.
--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

CSUFSteve

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #33 on: December 07, 2009, 11:25:41 PM »
And a public thanks from me, r0m30. As I said, your writeup was really the dam-buster that made it all happen for me.

I'm gonna work on that dual-boot USB thing we talked about. If I can get that working, along with mobo and video combo I have (Gigabyte EP45-UD3P and Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850), then I think it'll be worth it for me to do a guide too. I also had to use EPI v10.5 as well as that booth1 update you give me. Plus other kexts for my mobo, graphics, and ICH10R in RAID mode.

Steve

s0nykus

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #34 on: December 08, 2009, 12:46:24 AM »
@r0m30: Feel free to include any or all of my post-install notes in your guide, if you feel like. Modified, or unchanged, in any way you find it appropriate, I'll leave it to your discretion. Sharing my own experience / tips and tricks is my way to give something back to the community, and it's free for all knowledge.

Thanks again, your guide gave a whole new dimension to my Dell laptop. ;)
Dell Latitude D830
BIOS A14
Core2 Duo T9500 Penryn 2.6GHz
Intel PM965, 82801HBM (ICH8-ME)
4GB Hyundai PC2-5300 nVidia Quadro NVS 140M Broadcom BCM5755M Gbit (32bit drv) Wi-Fi Intel 4965 AGN (no drv) USB Wi-Fi Canyon CNP-WF518 (32bit drv) Triple boot SL 10.6.2/Ubuntu 9.10/Win7 x64

CSUFSteve

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #35 on: December 08, 2009, 01:13:05 AM »
s0nykus: I just re-read your "now what?" post and that triple boot thing is EXACTLY what I want to do (well, except for I'll be booting off a stick). Can't wait to try it.

Incidentally, there is a 64-bit version of MacDrive now, at least for Windows 7.

Oh, and do I *need* to compile my kext's?  Or can I just leave them in E/E on the stick?  Also, r0m30 wasn't sure about this either, but what is the load-order of kext's anyway? Is it local E/E, local S/L/E, then OS X S/L/E?? For the 4850, I have to remove non-4850 kext's. I did that on the stick, but still got a KP from OS X. Can I just rename them on the OS X?
« Last Edit: December 08, 2009, 01:16:57 AM by CSUFSteve »

rocksteady

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #36 on: December 08, 2009, 04:33:09 PM »
Done: linked this thread to the faq

Keep the spirit of this thread alive + kickin' guys

Thanks heaps :)
Stop bitching, start coding or documenting or both..

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s0nykus

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #37 on: December 08, 2009, 09:23:27 PM »
@CSUFSteve: Triple boot from a Chameleon USB key? It's perfectly doable, and quite easy. I've stayed that way for a good while, and it's nice to see how a USB stick literally becomes a "key" to your system. Without the USB key plugged in, my system was booting straight into Win7 Ulti 64, which I've let take over the master boot record (not that you have much choice on install :D).

Some useful hints: *Always* keep TWO USB sticks, one for experimenting with new kexts / settings / tricks / tweaks, and one with a stable / known-good / working kext selection and setup. That way, whenever you screw up something (and trust me, you will, more than once) you'll still have your safe-stick to boot up with, and get a stably working system. *Never* commit changes to both sticks at once (sometimes it's tempting), you better keep your safe-stick a little bit obsolete, but stable. This two sticks setup saved my @ss quite a few times. :D

I think there was a 64-bit version of MacDrive out already, but all I've had was XP64, XP32 and Linux, on my home boxes. First time I've tried Win7 was on this triple boot Hac, and that came *after* I've installed Snow already. :)


Now, what's more important:

About driver caches (Extension.mkext files): On my stick (or EFI / boot partition, to same effect) I only have /Extra/Extensions/ . I've left my /System/Library/Extensions/ *completely* untouched on my Snow partition. I did not edit, modify or delete anything from it. Instead, I've played with mkext files, placing *all* the kexts I need in /Extra/Extensions/ even if some of these kexts are overlapping with existing S/L/E ones.

Your boot volume may be a USB stick,  EFI partition,  or a separate, small non-journaled HFS+ boot partition. On this volume I have all my kexts in /Extra/Extensions/ , and I create an Extensions.mkext package, issuing a command like:

kextcache -v 2 -t -m /Volumes/YourVolumeNameHere/Extra/Extensions.mkext /Volumes/YourVolumeNameHere/Extra/Extensions/ /System/Library/Extensions/

Note that I'm including both my boot volume's /E/E/ and my Snow installation's /S/L/E/ to the build path. That way, even if I have two kexts with the same name, the one from my /E/E/ will take precedence, and still, I won't have to edit or remove the other one from /S/L/E/.

As I see Chameleon booting, if it finds an /Extra/Extensions.mkext it will load first, and Chameleon will no longer even look in /E/E/ for more kexts. Then it will load /System/Library/Extensions.mkext, do all its other mojo (dsdt, GraphicsEnabler, and the like), and boot up the system, eventually.

If I have a modified kext in /E/E/ (e.g. IOATAFamily.kext) mine will simply load first. :) Later on, when the kernel will try to load the original one from /S/L/E/ it will notice that a kext with the same name already exists and is running OK, so there's no need for another instance. That way there's no more need in editing or deleting kexts in /S/L/E, leaving my Snow install nice and fresh like vanilla.

Maybe this approach is a little bit redundant. I still have to try building an Extensions.mkext from /E/E/ only, and see if I can obtain the same effect without adding /S/L/E/ to the mkext build path as well. I'll try it out on my *other* stick, and come back with the results at a later time.

Same precedence rule did NOT work for me by just placing my own kexts in /E/E/, that's why I've built an Extensions.mkext in the first place, as described above. There may be better ways to do this, if you have found one, please do post it here, this is all work in progress.


Please note that this is all new grounds to me as well, and part of it has been learned via the good old trial and error method. That said, all of your input, feedback, comments and opinions are more than welcome.



@rocksteady: Thanks a lot for the good words, and the attention we're getting here. I might be too lazy to start my own topic, so here we go, I've just combined my ideas with what's already been well said here. I hope r0m30 doesn't mind, I don't want to steal his thunder. ;)

That said, we'll keep the ball rolling!
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4GB Hyundai PC2-5300 nVidia Quadro NVS 140M Broadcom BCM5755M Gbit (32bit drv) Wi-Fi Intel 4965 AGN (no drv) USB Wi-Fi Canyon CNP-WF518 (32bit drv) Triple boot SL 10.6.2/Ubuntu 9.10/Win7 x64

CSUFSteve

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #38 on: December 09, 2009, 11:54:19 PM »
WOO-HOO, I can boot without the -x option now! :)

I still find the boot order confusing, in terms of the effect of combining the kexts with the mkexts, but I've only had time to sort of skim your note.

But I took an Extensions.mkext I found for my mobo, combined it with other kexts I found, restored my original S/L/E (from the Snow DVD), and... viola! ATI Radeon 4850 recognized!!

Only thing missing now is sound.

Really looking forward to cleaning all this up and doing it from scratch, documenting it all. Hopefully the next version of Chameleon will not need the boot1h_patched and I can keep things as vanilla as possible.

One question for you s0nykus... in your triple boot scenario...
I have a W7 Ultimate 64-bit on hdisk0, partitions 0,1 ("System Reserved", Windows itself), Ubuntu 9.10 on hdisk0, partition 2. Both are in a ICH10R RAID-5 SATA array.  Mac OS X is on a non-RAID SATA on physical hdisk4 (I have 2 RAID-5 disk groups of 2 drives each). Then I also want a USB stick where partition 0 is EFI/Chameleon of course, a partition 1 that is PartedMagic as r0m30 documents, and then partition 2 as a kext/utility collection. A second USB would be a backup of this one.

See any problem with that?  Particularly I guess with Ubuntu being "buried" on hdisk0. Right now, I can only assume Ubuntu did put grub on that partition (at least that's where I told it to put it).

Steve

s0nykus

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #39 on: December 14, 2009, 06:10:04 PM »
Congrats Steve, looks like you've really got things going allrighty. :)

The boot order is indeed a bit confusing, but now that I've found a way that works, I'll just stick to it, until I'll have the time to dig deeper and find out more. The new Chameleon RC4 that came out one day after your post might be the answer to your ATi-ist prayers. :)

As for the sound, there's a 64-bit compile of VoodooHDA + PrefPane here on this forum (check sweec's post #5):

http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,687.0.html

And there is also a forked version of VoodooHDA available (but keep your existing PrefPane from above source) developed by Slice. Current version as I write this is 0.2.52, check if your sound card / codec is supported, and give it a spin, maybe. It works decently with my Sigmatel STAC 9205, no more distorted sound after wake (the classical VHDA problem). You will find it on the projectosx.com forum, section 3 - 3 - 7 (forum rules here prohibit me from linking).

I can't say much about your RAID setups as I do not have any, but (at least in theory) they should be properly recognised by Chameleon, and you should be able to boot from any valid device setup. Linux on partition 2 doesn't sound like a problem. Just tell grub to install at the beginning of your Linux partition (as opposed to the MBR of your hard drive/array). It will bitch about it, but it works, Chameleon is able to see the Linux partition and hand over to grub nicely when selected.

I'm not sure if you'll be able to boot from more than one partition of a multi-partition USB stick easily. But then again, I might be wrong, as this *should* work too, in theory. Try it, and tell us your findings about everything. All new info is welcome.

I know we've long overshot the initial scope of this post here, but that's just me, trying to be (sometimes overly) helpful. I'll take all the blame for it. ;) Good luck and keep on diggin'!
« Last Edit: December 14, 2009, 06:16:57 PM by s0nykus »
Dell Latitude D830
BIOS A14
Core2 Duo T9500 Penryn 2.6GHz
Intel PM965, 82801HBM (ICH8-ME)
4GB Hyundai PC2-5300 nVidia Quadro NVS 140M Broadcom BCM5755M Gbit (32bit drv) Wi-Fi Intel 4965 AGN (no drv) USB Wi-Fi Canyon CNP-WF518 (32bit drv) Triple boot SL 10.6.2/Ubuntu 9.10/Win7 x64

7thk

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #40 on: December 15, 2009, 02:13:06 PM »
This method works! FLAWLESS! I'm so freaking happy now, I could kiss a cow. There are a few typos in the guide, eh, some things mixed up, but yeah, it WORKS.

Thanks!


r0m30

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #41 on: December 15, 2009, 06:38:03 PM »
There are a few typos in the guide, eh, some things mixed up, but yeah, it WORKS.

Can you could let me know where the typos are and what is mixed up so they can be fixed?

Thanks
--- r0m30 ---
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    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

7thk

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #42 on: December 16, 2009, 07:37:58 AM »
Sure! They're very minor but I did have to think about it for a second or two to get what you meant. :)

Quote
dd if=/c/i386/boot0 of=/dev/zzz bs=440 count=1
where zzz is the base device name WITHOUT any numbers if your Chameleon partition is sda3 then you would use sda here!
dd if=/c/i386/boot1h of=/dev/yyy2 where yyy is the GPT disk
I think it would clearer if you mentioned that zzz & yyy is the same disk. In my case, with a single hard drive on ICH10R, it was sda.

Quote
mkdir /c/Extra
mkdir /c/System/Library
mkdir /c/System/Library/Extensions
cp –r /f/System/Library/Extensions/*/c/System/Library/Extensions/
We'd already created the /Extra directory on the Chameleon partition so I'm thinking you meant for us to create the /System directory here.

Quote
umount /f /c
The current version of Parted Magic doesn't seem like it's got unmount bundled. Maybe there's something else, I'm not sure - I've never done anything like this before, so as a complete new person, I mounted the partitions that I needed using the Mount Partitions link on the desktop of Parted Magic. It meant that typing all of this out would get complicated, so I resorted to just dragging and dropping the files. But it let me unmount the partitions with a click, so it worked out in the end. Or, like how I just realized, you meant "U M O U N T" and not unmount. Gah, way to go, brain. I'm thinking a fixed width font for the parts you have to type would save other people from the same embarrassment?

I have to say though, your idea of a helper partition is just brilliant, especially with not enabling journaling on it! I can't say enough how much I struggled and raged with the souped up install disks that throw things in the EFI or installation partition.

Also, it might be helpful to point out the way to know if 'rd=disk?s3' hasn't worked is when you get the "Still waiting for root device" error. Another minor but easy to figure out tip would be to delete all existing partitions on the disk before you start creating partitions (yeah, I know, maybe I needed more sleep then.)

I realize the last two points are pretty silly since your guide is aimed at the moderately experienced, but I just want to put it out there for people who're trying this for the first time, like me. :)

Also also, unrelated - but for someone trying this out, do yourself a favour and buy the disk. I've downloaded it half a dozen times and between the corrupt files, the improperly restoring it to a USB drive, the headache of burning a DL DVD disk of an incorrectly converted IMG/ISO file - just buying the thing would make your brain love you more.

Lastly, RC4 doesn't require PlatformUUID.kext, at least, I think it doesn't - mine works fine without it, and the fakesmc.kext in the link is an older version (current version now is 2.5), but yeah, that's probably beyond the scope of this guide.

If you'd lived anywhere near the Caribbean, I'd invite you over to get drunk or get high. Thanks again, man!


r0m30

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #43 on: December 16, 2009, 10:03:45 AM »
I think it would clearer if you mentioned that zzz & yyy is the same disk. In my case, with a single hard drive on ICH10R, it was sda.

Agree, would be a "good thing"(tm) to rationalize the xxx,yyy,zzz references.  (note to self)

We'd already created the /Extra directory on the Chameleon partition so I'm thinking you meant for us to create the /System directory here.

Yep, I've updated the guide to use mkdir -p /c/System/Library/Extensions to save a few keystrokes too.

umount /f /c

I said what I meant and I meant what I said  ;D - I type uNmount about half the time so if I had gotten it wrong it wouldn't have surprised me.

Also, it might be helpful to point out the way to know if 'rd=disk?s3' hasn't worked is when you get the "Still waiting for root device" error. Another minor but easy to figure out tip would be to delete all existing partitions on the disk before you start creating partitions (yeah, I know, maybe I needed more sleep then.)

I realize the last two points are pretty silly since your guide is aimed at the moderately experienced, but I just want to put it out there for people who're trying this for the first time, like me. :)
Not silly at all, those are the kind of assumptions that make reading tech documents so difficult.  I was also going to add a tip that if you use an external USB DVD drive for the SL DVD you can skip entering the rd=disk?s3 altogether, just don't plug in the USB DVD drive and wait for the "Still waiting for root device" message. When you get the message plug in the USB DVD Drive and the kernel will see the DVD mount it and take off.

I debated a disk zap step, gdisk x z will wipe out all the partition tables.  I guess the debate continues.

Also also, unrelated - but for someone trying this out, do yourself a favour and buy the disk. I've downloaded it half a dozen times and between the corrupt files, the improperly restoring it to a USB drive, the headache of burning a DL DVD disk of an incorrectly converted IMG/ISO file - just buying the thing would make your brain love you more.

Agree, but kids at college have more bandwidth than money so......

Lastly, RC4 doesn't require PlatformUUID.kext, at least, I think it doesn't - mine works fine without it, and the fakesmc.kext in the link is an older version (current version now is 2.5), but yeah, that's probably beyond the scope of this guide.

Both true.  I don't know what happens if you try and load PlatformUUID with the current release of Chameleon, anyone?  The fakesmc from the site will work and once you're up you can go and find the latest and greatest.  Maybe another note at the end.

If you'd lived anywhere near the Caribbean, I'd invite you over to get drunk or get high. Thanks again, man!

 :'( Left coast  :'(

Thanks for the feedback.
--- r0m30 ---
HP Mini 1033CL (Costco) OSX Retail 10.6 Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658
HP m9077c -  ASUS IPIBL-LA MoBo with Core 2 Quad Q6600
    Retail 10.6.2 Chameleon-2.0-RC4-r684

CSUFSteve

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Re: [How To]: Installing OSX without acces to a Mac
« Reply #44 on: December 17, 2009, 03:27:29 AM »
I actually have not had good luck with RC4 so far, but I was kinda going through it quickly last night.  Thank gosh I made a backup of my original USB stick.

I'm thinking of asking r0m30 if he'd accept a supplement to his HOWTO where Chameleon is on one partition of a USB and specific to my rig (Gigabyte mobo, ATI Radeon 4850, SATA/RAID config, onboard audio)  ;D

But weirdness happened last night as, for some reason, with RC4 and fakesmc 2.5, my same kexts did not recognize the ATI and so the screen was garbage. Also, there was this annoying thing where RC4 ended up making my USB file system read-only, which means I had to re-format every friggin' time after an RC4 boot attempt.  I re-created from backup the RC3-based stick and everything was working again.

I've noticed people seeming to have a preference for device-id's and compiling everything into an mkext or DSDT. Why is this better?? Seriously. I like the individual kexts because then I know *exactly* how the device tree is being manipulated and I know exactly where the non-vanilla-ness is coming from.

I'm also wondering if I copy the SL 10.6.2 S/L/E and create a USB boot based off those if it would detect some of my hardware without the need for kexts.  Like I've heard it supposed to support my ATI now and detect the quad CPU timings and stuff since Apple now supports it.

Anyway, the hunt for the perfect USB bootloader config continues...