Method confirmed!
I've managed to install SL on two laptops using this method, my Dell Latitude D830, and a friend's D820 as well, the other day. No Macs involved, just a WinXP PC, PMagic USB stick and SnowUSB stick, as mentioned in the tutorial.
Some the missing bits, maybe:
The SnowUSB stick (see PDF in original post) doesn't have to be that large. You don't have to copy the whole DVD to it. It's sufficient to copy mach_kernel, and /System/Library/Extensions from the SL dvd to the SnowUSB key. These won't take up more than some 250MB. Like r0me0 says, 300MB tops, with all your other files there.
In order to convert the SL .dmg to .iso (to be able to burn the dvd under windows ), I've used the dmg2iso command line utility available from:
http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/Like in the tutorial, I've used MacDrive in order to access the resulting dvd and copy the mach_kernel and the S/L/E directory to the stick (preserve the names and the directory nesting). But MacDrive doesn't work under XP 64-bit!
Luckily, my dusty old WinXP 32-bit laptop has come to the rescue.
Finally, following the screenshots above, I've used a 432 bytes block size:
dd if=boot0 of=/dev/sda bs=432 count=1
Anything up to 440 seems to be safe for MBR indeed, but I've looked at the "boot" file from Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658, and it was 432 bytes long, the rest being zerofilled. See screenshot in prior post, the contents of the file ends at "GPT.testing.done", and that's 432 bytes.
What hasn't been covered here:
All fine, I'm done installing. So WHAT'S NEXT???
When my install was ready and successful, I didn't know where or how to continue. If you have used Disk Utility to partition your hard drive (like you should), it will erase and recreate the EFI partition from the beginning of the drive, so all your boot files will be gone. And once the install is complete, you will have a 30 second reboot timer to deal with.
)
To pause the reboot timer, just open any of the utilities from the toolbar, a Terminal console might be pretty useful. If your files are gone from the EFI partition, you can now format it again to HFS+ using the command:
diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" "EFI" /dev/disk0s1
This will format your EFI partition as HFS+, and name the partition "EFI". After formatting, your Snow Leopard will automount the EFI partition to /Volumes/EFI/ . Now you can start again, and copy all the files necessary for booting your system to the EFI partition, just like you first did with the 200MB partition in the tutorial.
Once again, you'll copy Chameleon, put your boot file in the root dir (/Volumes/EFI/), then copy your /Extra/Extensions/ there with all the kexts you have hunted down from the interwebs for your particular system. Your com.apple.Boot.plist, smbios.plist and DSDT.aml will go in the /Volumes/EFI/Extra/ directory.
Then you'll make the EFI partition bootable again with:
cd /Volumes/EFI/Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658-bin/i386/
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk0s1
What's different this time, you can (and should) use fdsik to write boot0 to the MBR of your hard drive:
fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk0
Before you reboot, you should build a kext cache file too.
But first, you will need to "repair" permissions on your EFI partition using a quick-n-dirty:
chown -R 0:0 /Volumes/EFI/
chmod -R 755 /Volumes/EFI/
And now, you will build your first Extensions.mkext (one large file with all the kexts compiled into it, much like a "driver pack") on your EFI drive. Okay, it's not *that* large, mine has about 30-40MB. And the command is:
kextcache -v 2 -t -m /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions.mkext /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions/ /System/Library/Extensions/
You might see a couple of warnings about missing dependencies, don't worry about them right now. If it complains about the wrong permissions on the other hand, make sure you've fixed them with the quick'n dirty above.
Once all this is in place, you're finally ready to reboot and enjoy your
kernel panic freshly installed Snow Leopard. But if you are like me, you'll first make a small USB rescue stick (yes, I've got 4 sticks, w00t!) even a small 128MB is enough. Format the stick to HFS+ (without journaling) with Disk Utility (or command line if you're brave), and replicate everything you've just put on your EFI boot partition to the USB key. Make it bootable in the same way. Use this highly resorceful blog for reference if you want (see chapter 7 there for creating a bootable USB key):
http://aserebln.blogspot.com/Got your stick? Okay, now you are indeed safe to reboot. Oh, and by the way, have you edited your com.apple.Boot.plist and your smbios.plist for all the right settings? You'll learn into it, just use some google intelligence.
If you get a kernel panic after rebooting (and there's a good chance that you'll get quite a few while experimenting), select your Snow partition, and hit space while in Chameleon, and try booting by entering the -v -f flags (verbose, ignore kext caches), or with the -v -x flags (verbose, safe mode, minimal set of drivers) at the boot prompt. Adding Wait=Yes, "Quiet Boot"=No and "Legacy Logo"=No may also help to see where it crashes. You can add all these parameters and more (in key+string format, lose the quatation marks) to your com.apple.Boot.plist file. Google up some examples!
I've seen many forums posts with users complaining like "I've got the apple logo / the spinning rainbow wheel, and then the whole darn thing freezes and it stops working". This kind of input will definitely NOT help in identifying your problem. Use the verbosity options above, instead, and get some real output.
So this is where your quest starts. You'll probably have to add or lose some kexts to make things work like they should. Add or remove them one by one, and see what happens after each step. Don't forget to restore permissions and rebuild your Extensions.mkext after each and every change. I know it is painful and slow, but still, change just one thing at the time only. Otherwise you won't know which change resulted in what effect. Live and learn, it's fun after all!
Bottom line: after a 2-3 weeks of digging, I've got a beautifully working h*ckintosh on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop. It triple boots (whoa, baby!) Snow Leopard 10.6.2, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. A few weeks ago I didn't even know what to do with that large .dmg file I've downloaded. The learning curve's been pretty steep though, I must admit, but it was fun.
P.S: Triple boot tutorial explained here (but get your SL working first, the better):
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=165899My install order was SL / Linux / Win7, but the order doesn't really matter that much if you know what you're doing.
You will need gptsync to explain a dumb operating system (guess which one
) where to load, get it from:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=177505&pid=1214512&mode=threadedFinally, a great big thanks to r0m30 here, for this tutorial that got me started off, I'm so glad I've found this post!
Also many thanks to the great folks on this forum, the Chameleon team, Voodoo Labs, insanelymac.com, infinitemac.com, AsereBLN (who never looked into my DSDT eventually
), Kabyl, zhell, mackerintel, and of course netkas The Man, for making all this possible. And many thanks to all of you guys out there, for putting together this great community. Keep on rockin'!