Mac OS X Mountain Lion on Alienware?

ok so i get the exact same kp if i use you extensions folder. but i did forget to mention in the previous post that about a minute after i took that picture it does say still waiting for root device. which is why i thought it is a usb issue

 

ok so i get the exact same kp if i use you extensions folder. but i did forget to mention in the previous post that about a minute after i took that picture it does say still waiting for root device. which is why i thought it is a usb issue

 

sorry double post

 

I try to load snow leopard on a M18 with nVidia GTX 460m, I spend all night and at the end I am unable yo complete the install. At certain point stop. See the second picture. Well I try, I will wait few months for update.

 

Does the installer finish? or does it crash or stop responding? If it stops responding it may be the computer is going to sleep and without sleep working properly the installer crashes. If it installs fully I suggest disabling dedicated GPU in bios and booting with flag 'GraphicsEnabler=No'.

Okay, I suggest burning your install USB to disk or cloning it to a sata drive and installing from one of the internal drive bays. Still waiting for root device is the general error when boot volume becomes unresponsive. It is usually indicative that the boot volume is using an unsupported storage medium (USB 3.0 or certain sata controllers). The other thing I can suggest is extracting a DSDT using either windows or linux and compiling that. For my machine to boot at all I required a DSDT with repaired iGPU support.

 

See i cant use the igpu at all because i have the 3d bundle and it uses a 120Hz display which is incompatable with the integrated (HD 4000). but i will try that about the sata cloning... btw any idea if i could just install the unibeast to a different hdd partition?

 

Okay would you happen to be booting with graphics enabler turned on or off? I wouldn't recommend installing to another partition as sometimes the installer messes around with partition schemes causing boot issues for windows. My all else fails plan is usually clone installer to a HDD and toss that into the second drive bay and boot off that to get it installed.

 

On the beginning, yes too many crashes, but after I sort out the installacion and finished it using 'GraphicsEnabler=No'., Get stuck (see my second picture). At the end I quit and install win7. I hope very soon we have all the tools to install the hacknigtosh on our AW. I am not sure if any body was able to install it already on the AW 17 or 18

Regards

 

Ok so i managed to install 10.8, and got everything (minus sound, wifi, and 7970m) to work. I updated to 10.8.3, and now i can't get back into my system outside of safe mode (-x boot). Does anybody know where to proceed from here?

 

Reboot with Win OS DVD in the drive and start a clean installation, It's none other option. Forget the OS x for at list few months.

 

What are you talking about....... I didn't say windows was broken. I said OS X refuses to load gfx drivers now as of 10.8.3

 

That is what understood correctly, you try to load MAC OS X, and you have troubles to load a few drivers, right? Well for those drivers does not load into the system you don't have options to fix it. No any solution at the moment. That is the reason I suggest to forget about a MAC OS on windows computer.. Please if you found a solution let me know

 

Probably AICPM borked or something, I ran into the same issue, 10.8.3 screwed up boot, I haven't gotten round to fixing it. I'll attempt it this week so I should have an answer in a few days.

 

Please only reply to posts with helpful suggestions. This information is incorrect, any experienced hackintosher should be able to work out most hardware incompatibilities and fix them. There are a multitude of suggestions for repairing driver support issues without giving up.

 

Yea, you probably right! person with experience to work with the hackintosh will be able to work around of the problems. and you say that experienced. But how many days, or week or probably months will take to solve just one issue? that is the reason I give up loading OS X on my AW, I am not have the experience, time and money to expend on a incomplete modified OS. I hope some day any AW be able to load this system with out any issue. I search and read for few nights looking for answer to my problems on my AW and none.
Regards

 

Anyone comment on the performance of mountain lion on running on virtual box? I know there is no gpu acceleration, but everything else run ok?

 

No, thats not the case. C state packaging clamp is disabled for me, so I have no need to patch AICPUPM, vanilla is fine. No, the problem lies somewhere withing the new intel hd 4000 kexts. Apple changed the default allocation memory size from 64mb to 387 mb, so it doesn't know how how handle ours. Use 10.8.2 kexts or somebody help find a way to patch this. Maybe somebody with an unlocked bios can change the video memory size allocation. 7970m is recognized as of 10.8.3, but it gives a blackscreen, likely due to a mismatch of personalities defined in the ati7000controller.kext, we will have to write a new personality for it.

 

Sorry guys Ive been out with school for a few days but I'm back! So I tried installing from a separate hdd no go. All I can get is a black screen so i assume its a graphics card issue because I'm using this dang 120Hz display......makes about to go suicidal haha You thinking its an issue with 10.8.3? Possibly that's the reason Ive had a hell of a time with this because that's what Ive been using this entire time....

 

Well wat is the point of installing an OS that would never give you full functionality as a designated windows OS would. This is not to say which is greater. Our hands are tied indeed. I have done both ubuntu and Lion OS on VMware workstation...but wats the point it would never let us enjoy full screen or the crisp speed and smoothness for which the OSes were designed for. So in short we can do it for fun..but we will never ever have full functionality.

I have a Dell Mini 10 that runs perfectly on Ubuntu...but that is because its certified to run on Ubuntu and tested too. Everything works nice.....It was my first experience with Linux. I must say it so much like Apple minus the restrictions...

I really wish I could install Ubuntu perfectly on Alienware M17x r4.

 

Memory allocation should have already been 376mb unless you were running an unsupported model of the 4000. If this is the case I would add in your GPU model to the 4000 graphics kext. Disabling bios C states is the easy way of dealing with AICPM, does your method support speedstep?

Well at least on my machine I am running into issues with AICPM.

 

Has none of you heard of iAtkos? you can run OSX pretty much perfect in Virtual box

 

Your right, I forgot about those guys I'm downloading the newest iatkos release right now, it has support for all Kepler cards (supposedly) crossing fingers...... I'll report back with any good/bad news.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

probably won't work on my r3 right because I can't use the newer bios.

 

Nope no go for me at least..... Though it's probably because of the 120hz screen. 120hz is both very pretty and a colossal pain in the butt

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

Ok....so I finally have a working install on my R4 running 10.8.3 with the 680M 120Hz display in all its glory.

All you have to do is get the latest unibeast and you HAVE to download the 10.8.3 from the app store. I tried to be slick and torrent it and that was the spawn of all my problems.....so take it from me its worth the $20. I installed unibeast to a external HDD and hooked it up via eSATA and it will install without a problem on your R4. I then ran Multibeast and didnt do the easybeast install but just the chameleon bootloader version 2.whatever it was. And its working!!!!!!

If anyone knows how to do dsdt stuff I'm all ears because I have no experience with dsdts and am lost regarding them but I would love to use one if anyone knows how...

 

No idea on the DSDT stuff, but it looks like the 7970m is not even in the slightest supported with OSX, least I have Intel HD which will do! Might stop running from a virtual box and go dual boot

 

For DSDT go and download DSDT editor, its an app for OSX, then under the file menu for it there is an option to extract DSDT. Once extracted you need to save it somewhere, the saved output file should be named DSDT.dsl. Once it is saved you can compile. click the IASL menu and compile. Now comes the fun part, you have to repair errors which the compiler runs into, only trust the first error, most of them will be certain lines which it cannot understand, so just delete them. Keep running the compiler over and over till you end up with an error free compile (warnings are okay), and it will compile as a file called DSDT.aml, copy this to extra and you should have a working DSDT. This tutorial is for how to get a working DSDT, it won't fix many things or anything at all, but it is required for a lot of the fixes that are used through the link I posted a couple pages back. You will need to add in the fixes yourself.

Just wondering, what works on your machine?

7970m is supported in 10.8.3 its just that virtualbox cannot run graphics acceleration at all under OSX. I'm not quite sure how well supported the 7970m is, but it is definitely supported to some extent.

 

Thanks ill try the dsdt stuff... and as for what works: 680M works at 120Hz, the bluetooth works, what dosent work is the webcam, wifi, alienfx (obviously), trackpad isn't very smooth but it definitely works just needs work, eSATA, battery monitoring, sound works with voodoo but i cant adjust volume so thats annoying and confusing?....... Think thats about it....

 

Yeah well... EULA states that you cannot install OSX on anything other than a machine built by Apple. Doing so is punishable by law.

It's called a hackintosh for a reason.

 

Well with DSDT edits I currently have all USB 2.0 ports working, Esata, Battery monitoring, Brightness and Sound without needing Voodoo HDA. Wifi cannot be fixed and either you will require to replace the card with a supported one. although I just bought a USB wifi solution which was OSX compatible.

Breach of EULA means nothing, its not a crime to breach the EULA. And furthermore if they tried to sue as EULA doesn't constitute a binding contract, so it would be thrown out of court. If on the other hand you were making a profit off it then it would be a totally different story.

 

Ok so i have a working DSDT but im not sure what to do now lol Where did you get the edits for all the things you fixed? Im having a hell of a time learning how to patch a dsdt. i pretty much get that you copy paste compile etc.... but like does the spacing matter as far as what you paste in? because the alignment is always off from the existing text and going in and moving each line individually after i paste it is a real pain in the butt.

I think I'm finally seeing the light at the end of this tunnel.....getting close to a "MacWare Pro" hehe...

 

The page I linked to should have a list of DSDT edits used to fix most of the hardware problems. When you copy and paste line spacing gets ruined due to the TAB key having different assignments in different languages, some it translates to 8 spaces, some 6, and printing 1 space, spacing isn't that important although its used to read the code if anyone else has to edit it, so try and fix the spacing if you can, but its not urgent. You managed to get much working with the edits?

Sorry I haven't been on here much, I'm pretty busy atm so hackintoshing has taking a backseat for the next few months.

 

Ive got most of the major things working on mine with the exception of sleep don't know whats up with that it just freezes on wakeup and the lid dosent put it to sleep. Also is your trackpad very rough and two finger scrolling is terrible and tap to click does a right click which is annoying.... as for sound I used voodoo but then downloaded au lab and soundflower (ill post a link later) this gives you volume control and an equalizer!!!! lol so im getting there ssdt is working great trying to figure out the alienfx lighting but its a mess trying to figure that one out. also eject button dosent work but not a big deal

 

Sleep requires speedstep otherwise it doesn't know what to do with the processor, you can extract SSDT files and use them to fix speedstep, also lidsleep is a DSDT edit under the graphics part of the page I linked.

Trackpad is buggy due to horrible PS2 kexts, why can't synaptics use USB? Does your trackpad get recognised as a mouse or trackpad?

For sound I would recommend heavily against Voodoo HDA, it is only a sort of working solution, there is a patch on the page I linked with a modified Apple HDA kext and a DSDT edit which will get sound working, which I would highly recommend over Voodoo. Voodoo has issues with sleep, speedstep, power management, and half a dozen other systems, its the most painful kext to keep working reliably.

Alienfx will not work at all. The controller on everything past the M17x R2 is different to anything programs like pyalienfx and such can handle, I tried my hand at working with it, but without a linux SDK there isn't much I can do.

 

As I stated earlier, native speedstep can be achieved without modifying AppleIntelCPUPowermanagement.kext, just use intel XTU to turn off package c state lock (you dont' need an XM cpu for this either)
Then, just put your DSDT and SSDT in your /Extra directory, and remove nullcpupm or any other kexts that may interfere and sleep should work.

 

You don't actually need to do that for native speedstep all you need to do is toss in the SSDT files and add in 'dropcstates' and 'droppstates' into chameleon boot.plist. Honestly this is the method that I've always seen used, and there is no reason to disable c state lock on bios level at all.

 

Ok I've got it all working fairly well with the exception of lidsleep. I've done the dsdt edit for it but i cant tell that osx even recognizes i have a lid. also no brightness controls. may be related?

 

Lack of brightness control means either GPU or LCD not being recognised properly, essentially your machine is being detected as an iMac or something similar.

 

Has anybody gotten 10.8.3 to work? 10.8.0-10.8.2 work fine, but 10.8.3 makes it impossible for me to reach desktop without booting in safe mode.

 

Wouldn't exactly call that perfect when you've lost wifi and gaming capability. In fact I'd describe that as grossly counter productive.

 

If you are trying to game on OSX, you're doing something wrong.

 

Got the same issue on my end, seems like a reinstall is going to be required here.

 

I tried with a fresh 10.8.3 image, couldn't even get to the installer. Something is up for sure, Apple must have changed something in the intel hd 4000 kexts. I would play with BIOS settings, but seeing how easy it is to brick just with playing with some values and there is NO way of reseting , I think we have to give OS X a break until at least we discover a reliable BIOS reset method.

 

Right I have the same system as you although I have the 3610qm and 8gb of ram. I have an unlocked bios and don't mind fiddling around with a few things on there if your happy to tell me the stages you went though to get to where you are with it. I already have my own instruction list but if you tell me how you did it on yours then I can compare. The only reason previously that I couldn't get into 10.8.3 was because I had a black screen and with the 7970 you need to put it to sleep and wake it then the graphics will work. But my sleep doesn't work, so I couldn't do this previously ad I didn't no how. So a little guidance would be good.
As I said I don't mind tweaking my bios to find the correct configuration.

 

As for sleep, as I said, you MUST do the following:
1. Remove any nullCPUPM kexts, whether in /Extra or S/L/E
2. Have a fully sorted DSDT.aml
3. Have a SSDT.DSL
4. Make sure you are using stock appleintelcpupowermanagement.kext. Make sure your package state lock is disabled though, AICPUPM cannot write CPU states with the lock enabled, causing kernel panic.

I will be happy to help. The 7970M is not equal to the 7970, so sleep trick may not work ( tried already). Likely the 7970m exhibits issues like the 6970m, where Apple's written framebuffer directs video to non-existant ports on the M17x R4. For example, displayport / hdmi/ dvi is supported via native framebuffer on the 6970m. LVDS (which is our internal LCD) is not. Somebody will have to write a custom personality which directs the ATI kexts to output to LVDS only, forcing to recognize our LCD.

As for BIOS settings, this is what I have discovered so far:
IGFX for intel HD 4000 only, PEG for ATi/NVIDIA only. Do not use SG, AUTO, or PCI

Here is where it gets tricky. I am almost certain that Apple changed default memory allocation for the Intel HD 4000 in update 10.8.3, from default 64MB, to some other value. Changing this value in the BIOS should make it work, however changing it caused a brick for me. So, be careful I wouldn't mess around with this. A simple bios reset should have resolved this, but apparently pulling the CMOS battery doesn't reset anything. 10.8.3 will cause black screen on intel or 7970m, since Ati drivers were introduced in 10.8.3 and the 7970m device ID's exist natively in the kexts. If somebody figures a way around this, PLEASE share, this has been a major roadblock for sometime now.

EDIT
Major discovery. Turn off VT-d feature in the BIOS, it causes mega problems in OS X.

I'm retiring from Hackintoshing, maybe forever. I'm just sick of it and its games, its become more of a nuisance than a pleasure. I will still answer questions best I can, but I'm through with mac. Made me appreciate windows so much more (windows 7 at least)

 

Something else you can do is compile NCPUPM without the nosleep tree, which will re enable sleep. Basically NCPUPM is built so it will fix Power management on all CPUs, so they disable sleep as some don't have if working, there should be source somewhere which you can remove the sleep disabler section.

 

hi all, since yesterday i'm trying to make osx work on mine ! Do somebody have access to that file here : tonymacx86 Forum • View topic - [GUIDE] Alienware M17xR3 : It's almost there! ? because i'd like to stop using voodoohda...
thanks I'm trying to have speedstep working for now

 

Just sign up to the forum and you should have download privileges.

 

Yeap that's what I thought but since this is on their old forum (named "legacy") it's only available for reading... I can't login there or sign up for that part ><" So that's why I was asking here
But, can you btw explain the utility of a dsdt ? Cause' it's been some time, and by time I mean years lol, that I haven't played with osx86 now !

I'm pretty happy with it now look :

I think I'll change my wireless card if I finally get the sleep working ! (and applehda patched too because voodoohda won't let me change the volume lol)

any ideas to help me ? Oh and I don't think I'm going to update to 10.8.3 since it froze my keyboard and touchpad last time... or maybe do I need to install with unibeast ?

 

DSDT is essentially a hardware table for your computer, it tells OSX what different things are so that you don't need to edit any kexts for hardware support on most things. I remember back in the old hackintosh days everything was kext based, but now DSDT's allow us to install without third party kexts.

BTW there is a non legacy version of that forum post, [GUIDE] Alienware M17xR3 : It's almost there!

Also if you decide to go and create a DSDT for yourself I recommend reinstalling with unibeast as it will be as close to vanilla OSX as you can get (makes upgrading easier).

Lastly I don't recommend installing 10.8.3, at least for alienwares it appears to be completely broken, my machine ended up in a CPU kernel panic, others are having multitudes of other issues, so for the moment its pretty much not worth it. At some point I'll go and work through and fix stuff up but for the moment 10.8.2 is fine.