Snow Leopard 10.6 Asus Rampage II Extreme
Hardware
Asus Rampge II Extreme Motherboard (Intel X58 / ICH10R)
Intel Core i7 920 CPU
Corsair Dominator TR3X661600C9 6GB (3 x 2GB)
EVGA GeForce GTX 285 (also tested with GTX 260)
Seagate ST31500541AS 1.5TB SATA
Seagate ST31000528AS 1.0TB SATA
Plextor SATA DVD burner
Method
My installation method was to make an image of the Snow Leopard install DVD and restore it to an external USB hard drive. From there I installed Chameleon 2.0 RC3 (required for hard disks > 1TB) RC2 produced kernel panics on my system) and booted it as the primary hard disk. Unfortunately this requires a working Mac of some sort, be it Hackintosh or other.
** Note: When using a hard disk > 1TB you will be required to use RC3 (or later) of Chameleon in order for things to work properly. I originally attempted to use RC2 and had a kernel panic immediately upon bootup. It took me a while to correlate the issue to Chameleon so don’t make the same mistake.
This is essentially the same as popping the Snow Leopard installation disc into your computer and booting from it. The key difference however is the Chameleon EFI layer gets installed prior to booting the Snow Leopard installation.
I would like to come up with a boot CD solution to this install so that you can burn a small .iso image, boot from it, then insert the Snow Leopard installation CD and install normally. That will probably be round two of this guide. For some reason it doesn’t really “feel” like installing an OS when you have to pre-build an installation image and “install” it from a hard disk. It’s probably possible to not use an external hard disk like I did, and use a USB stick instead. You’ll need an 8gb USB thumb drive to accomplish this. With our motherboard, booting from USB hard disks is very simple and can be accomplished via the BIOS without anything fancy being done.
Snow Leopard, AHCI, and your Asus Rampage II Extreme
There is a problem with using multiple hard disks with Snow Leopard. I believe the problem surrounds an incorrect default DSDT and the way Snow Leopard configures the plug and play devices in the system. There are a couple people who apparently have fixed the problem by doing some heavy duty custom DSDT work, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. Netkas has come up with what appears to be the simplest solution for most users at this time, which is a kernel extension that allows us to disable AHCI and use IDE/Compatibility mode in the event you will have more than one physical hard drive in the system.
Given that I’m a glutton for punishment (my primary computer is a Hackintosh) and that I have multiple hard drives I will be working on creating a custom DSDT specifically for Snow Leopard and the Rampage II Extreme Motherboard to hopefully get around this problem in the future. If anyone has any hints, tips, or suggestions on this topic please let me know.
Using the EFI partition for Chameleon:
This is something that some of the recent installation methods have not been doing. It allows you to install all of your modifications to a nice tidy partition that already exists on any GUID formatted disk. In order to adhere to the disk partitioning standard Apple creates this 200MB partition on the Hard Disk, but doesn’t actually use it. We can use this space for the Chameleon bootloader, and any modified kernel extensions (kexts) necessary for the installation.
1. Format your temporary drive (USB thumb drive, or USB hard disk) as GUID Partition Table/ MacOS Extended (Journaled)
2. Format your installation drive (in my case it was the 1.5TB Seagate) as GUID Partition Table / MacOS Extended (Journaled)
3. Make an image of your Snow Leopard installation disc. This will take a couple minutes.
4. Restore the image to your temporary drive.
5. Install Chameleon 2.0 RC3 on your temporary drive.
cmd:
(The following is assuming you’re using an external USB hard disk located at disk1. You should be able to see which disk device your USB drive is using by issuing the diskutil list command shown below).
diskutil list – shows you which hard disks you have available.
diskutil eraseVolume “HFS+” “EFI” /dev/disk1s1
mkdir /Volumes/EFI
mount_hfs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/EFI
Go to the folder that you extracted the Chameleon 2.0 RC3 files;
cmd:
fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk1
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk1s1
cp boot /Volumes/EFI
6. Reboot and modify your bios to boot from the USB device first. It’s under the boot heading in the BIOS.
7. Boot into the Snow Leopard installer which you created on your external hard disk. If you’d like to see what’s going on enter the argument -v at the bootloader. This enable Verbose and will give you a way to monitor what is happening should the system fail to boot into the installer.
The most common error you are going to run into is “Still waiting for root device”. Basically what this means is that is that Chameleon has loaded the necessary files, handed the system over to the Darwin kernel (the underpinnings of OSX) and it was unable to access the hard disk (aka root device). This can happen for a number of reasons. I noticed during my testing for writing this guide that different combinations of thumb drives, external hard drives, keyboards, usb hubs, mice, and even which way the wind was blowing outside could affect whether or not I would get the dreaded “Still waiting for Root Device” error message.
There are several things you can try to get around it. Try booting with various combinations of -x, -f, -v, arch=i386, rd=diskXsX, etc. I would recommend that if you have problems with this the first step is to simplify your hardware configuration. Unplug USB devices you’re not using, unplug your USB hub, plug your keyboard/mouse directly into the system, unplug your DVD drive, etc. Get the system in as clean and simple state as you can for installation. You can always worry about re-integrating all of this hardware back into your installation once it’s completed.
8. Go through the normal Snow Leopard installation procedure. I would suggest that you customize your installation and install Rosetta, every system I’ve installed Snow Leopard on ended up needing it later. I’ve seen noted elsewhere not to install printer support, but I had no problems with it at all.
At the end of the installation you will be confronted with an “Installation failed” screen. Don’t panic, the reason for this is that the SL installer wasn’t able to figure out how to setup your hard disk to boot SL. Luckily, it doesn’t have to and we are using Chameleon for this purpose. Before you have a usable system, you now have to install Chameleon on your newly installed Snow Leopard partition (probably disk0s2 if you’re doing this the normal way) and a few kernel extensions.
The easiest way to go about this is to attach your USB thumb drive, and open a terminal. The thumb drive will be mounted in /Volumes.
For example:
cmd:
cd /Volumes/Thumb
mkdir /Volumes/EFI
mount_hfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI
cp -R /Volumes/Thumb/* /Volumes/EFI
This will copy everything from your USB thumb drive (just a few megabytes) to your EFI partition on your new installation drive. From there install Chameleon to your new drive, set the partition active, and you should be ready to boot into your new leopard install.
9. Reboot the system, and disconnect your USB thumb drive, and USB hard disk (as applicable) and set your first boot device in the BIOS to that of your new SL installation. It’s time to boot!
After making sure that the system boots up properly, we need to apply a fix for a couple things;
1) Ethernet
Follow the instructions provided in my previous Leopard installation guide. You need to make the same modifications to the Yukon driver located in IONetworkingfamily.kext. Using this method updates may overwrite your IONetworkingfamily.kext and require you to do this again. Don’t panic,
just re-do the modifications to this kext and you’ll be in good shape.
After working with the kext’s make sure you issue the touch command;
‘touch /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingfamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/AppleYukon2.kext’
2) AHCI/SATA
Install Netkas’ AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext (It’s only 68kilobytes) by copying it into your EFI partition’s Extra/Extensions folder.
cmd:
mkdir /Volumes/EFI
mount_hfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI
cp -R /Volumes/Thumb/AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions
Reboot your computer, and go into the BIOS. Set the SATA controller to mode IDE (not AHCI) and set the mode to Compatible. Now reboot Snow
Leopard and you will not have any performance issues with running one than more hard disk.
If you don’t have more than one drive in the system I wouldn’t bother doing this. Leave things in AHCI mode if that’s the case.I’ve been working on getting
I’ve been working on getting Snow Leopard up and running on my Core i7 system for a few days now. Given that these things aren’t exactly trivial I thought I would post up some instructions for people to accomplish this given that the Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard isn’t very well documented on the Hackintosh websites.
Hardware
Asus Rampge II Extreme Motherboard (Intel X58 / ICH10R)
Intel Core i7 920 CPU
Corsair Dominator TR3X661600C9 6GB (3 x 2GB)
EVGA GeForce GTX 285 (also tested with GTX 260)
Seagate ST31500541AS 1.5TB SATA
Seagate ST31000528AS 1.0TB SATA
Plextor SATA DVD burner
Method
My installation method was to make an image of the Snow Leopard install DVD and restore it to an external USB hard drive. From there I installed Chameleon 2.0 RC3 (required for hard disks > 1TB) RC2 produced kernel panics on my system) and booted it as the primary hard disk. Unfortunately this requires a working Mac of some sort, be it Hackintosh or other.
(continue reading…)
