I did do a D420 with SL, upgraded to 10.6.8 and in the end it was all fine the little box is working out pretty good a tiny bit slow but not so bad, I had a MacBook Air for a few weeks but didn't keep it because the battery wouldn't last more than 3.5 hrs and this low-key box with the few limitations gets the job done and I've been using it for over 9 months even doing some Eclipse/Xcode dev on it. Also put Win7 on a tiny 10GB partition and it is also fine had to turn off hibernation or it would run out of space and give out some not so pretty messages
Doing Lion
But for some newer Apps they require some more powerful CPU and/or higher MacOS versions so that was the reason for going back and going over thru this. Got a D430 off Ebay with a Core2Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM even with the CD & free shipping for a decent under $100, it had Linux on it , tried to Gparted it to keep it since it was cool gave it a 10G but it got corrupted, reformatted and tried my already proven Win7(10G) and OSX combo.
What I needed
- InstallESD.dmg for Lion
- USB keyboard & mouse
- Empty 8GB USB stick
- PDANet tool and an iPhone to give net access to a vanilla Lion
- EDP tool
- Little bit of patience ... or was it more than that? ;)
I started with the USB-pen method using the myHack 3.1.2 guide to start up along with the D430 Bootpack from OS X Latitude followed the instrucctions and everything looked good, After my USB got done I went for it, it let me choose the hfs+ partition and here we go... Oops nope got the lovely message The Mac OS X installation couldn't be completed when I either hit Install or Customize, not so nice huhh
The suggestions were redo the USB , mount the InstallESD.DMG and/or point to the OSxInstall.app on the mounted drive but still after many tries/permutations and making the USB over and over again same result still that lovely message would popup and I thought this would be a walk in the park but it turned out to be not so.
Next I updated to the latest A09 BIOS available from Dell and retried it...still no cigar
This one worked
So that was not getting me too far digging in the the net I found this alternative way to make a USB with Lion, tried it and it was quicker than myHack , but it only got to the start screen of the installer then it blanked out, then I added the D430 Bootpack from OSxLatitude using myHack and it got to the start screen but mouse/keyboard were unresponsive, and finally decided to just use the Generic Extra from myHack and gave it a shot, this one came up the mouse was shaky and the the Customize was empty but tried it anyway and it did complete. At last one good step. Supposedly if the switch USBBusFix=No is issued there are no keyboard/mouse issues but that one did nothing for me.
Next came the 1st boot which it did and it asked me to plug a keyboard, laptop's keyboard/mouse were unresponsive, so I plugged a USB keyboard and USB mouse and it took, made it thru the initial setup and Lion is up and running, but it is pretty vanilla, no sound, no network, no wiFi, USB works as it senses a USB drive. So it seems like my InstallESD.dmg is not the version they used for the myHack instructions because a lot of folks have done it that way with minor issues.
As I did with my D420 I partitioned the drive with GParted with 10G for Win7, and the rest for the hfs+ and it is fine and working. Since this got me thru next was adding the missing drivers(e.g. kexts)
Last touch up
OSxLatitude has a great post-installation EDP tool which in previous versions was self-contained but in their latest incarnation requires internet connectivity and the old one is nowhere to be found so here at first it looked like it wouldn't help me much since my system was completely vanilla. I attempted the Multibeast for Lion tool, from the Bootpack I had the Extra set needed for the D430 and with the Multibeast I browsed to the Extra and installed it that way, rebooted it and yeah!!! now mouse/keyboard work but still no sound, no network. gave it a few shots adding/deleting/moving kexts, and playing around with the DSDT but didn't get me any further than keyboard/mouse work now.
This pointed to going back to the EDP tool which is supposed to get thru this post-installation with minor pain, so I decided to attempt that got around the issue of no internet by using PDAnet with my oldie/crappy iPhone 2G that I kept for situations like this. So reformatted to hfs+, installed with my vanilla USB, added the /Extra from the Bootpack to the / and downloaded&installed the EDP tool a couple of usual issues but it came thru and now I could load the latest EDP, it has menu options to choose the hardware, I needed to choose the myHack default/ps2 kexts option to get my keyboard/mouse working and the rest of the defaults were fine, so now I have sound, the battery/CPU icons , the Airport still a mistery they have 3 options tried both and I'm still out of internet, my WiFi is the Intel 3945, I'll update this when I figure out the last step.
Note: Most places you'll read the Intel 3945 is no go for D420/D430/etc but in my D420/SL I got it working good here is my D420/SL working kexts for Intel 3945 . I tried them on the D430 with no success so far, a replacement for the DW1505 is around $7 to $9 so I'll give a couple of shots or just get the one that works with no issues.
Upgrade to 10.7.4
Uneventful: Download the UpdateCombo from Apple, install it, do not reboot it yet, run the EDP and then reboot and it is there. The reason of this whole exercise was that some of the software I needed to use required this as a minimum.
Kernel panic
Well this is another thing that will eventaully get to you. Machine was doing great I even ran some SDK6.x tests on some code I'm working on and then I got busy and left it ON for I think a day or two then the screen showed the panic message...I got the panic on initializing the Intel 82801G. Usually a reboot with -v -f takes care of it, but not in this occasion.
So what to do? 1st thing is try to use the Extra backup that got done when the EDP tool installed, but somehow it didn't help much, looked for some people with a similar issues on the net but they seemed too blurry to me not a clear answer, after many tries and when I was getting ready to start it over, I had not tried to use the Extra that comes with the OSXLatitude D430 Bootpack referenced above. So it was worth the shot, after setting the chown/chmod properly for the /Extra, fired it up and it came up!!! of course keyboard/Mouse were again unresponsive. But not a problem the EDPTool takes care of that, which BTW it needs to be reinstalled since once the Extra gets replaced it breaks it, so did that and back to life.
Final thoughts
So in conclusion my way was a bit on the unorthodox side (which I always do anyway) to fit my InstallESD.dmg file I'd assume but managed. If you have some similar issues this is a way around it.
Update:
Tweaked a bit on the WiFi Intel 3945 card it came with but not much success got a D1490 off ebay for 6 USD and it was plug and play
No comments:
Post a Comment