Yes Hackinotsh Fans – I tried to update the Athlon in the Last Story to 10.5.7 to allows Safari V4 but after much trying and eventually failing, I managed to kill the machine enough that it needed a rebuilt, this was not big deal for me, do it all the time anyhow. Read on and find out how I managed to get the machine working with all the updates on-board…
Initial Try
I tried with iDeneb 10.5.7 and was met with the same non-booting problem (Silver apple on the screen, no spinning globe) and I went back to xXx 10.5.6 once again, updated it to 10.5.7 and the same thing happened. At this point I was sure I was indeed flogging a dead horse (sorry to all the horse lovers out there) but I am not one to give up anytime soon.
F8 Switches
I did what I never do – I pressed F8, Typed ? and read what it was telling me – what is this I see, if you type voodoo, it loads the Voodoo kernel – get out of here. I type this and there it was , a fresh new 10.5.7 desktop looking at me in the face. Basically then the problem is – it is loading the Vanilla Kernel and this is not going to work on my Athlon, Voodoo will though.
Modding the Kernel
I went in and edit the Boot.plist (/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist) and added a Line in there I thought was the part to type Voodoo for me – but all that happened was no switches / F8 and I was now stuck. I booted into Vista (and got very annoyed at how much disk thrashing occurred – what was it doing??), loaded the Demo of MacDrive to allow me to re-edit that file and reboot, press F8, type Voodoo and be back into OS X.
A Better Loader
I grabbed Chameleon 2 from the web and installed this, the good thing about this is it stops at the loading screen and allows me to type “Voodoo” which is a pain but personally all that works at the moment. I got the sound working (AC97) by using a combination of a few different AC97 files – Seems I put one on, reboot, no sound, put another, sound but later back to no sound and trying only the 2nd does not work – so this AC97 thing is a bit Hit & Miss.
Thoughts
Can anyone take any AMD Machine and make it work? Thats is impossible to say but the AMD64 3700+ supports SSE3 – a whole world apart form the AMD 2800+ which was previous generation for example. The motherboard is a typical NFORCE Model (ASUS A8NE-FM), sound been AC97, Gfx Card been Typical Nvidia, Network is Nforce – so every single one of them is supported in one way or another.
The iDened 1.5.1 (10.5.7) probably did work, had I typed Voodoo at the F8 Prompt and it had newer drivers, just meant less work for me after the install basically. This is not the final resting place for the Hackintosh for this machine, 10.5.8 is out, no doubt i shall try this and again my machine will fail to load, the fun is not trying to get a machine to be a Mac but rather the challenge of making an old AMD into a Mac – it defiantly runs a LOT faster then either Vista for example.
