MadClouds

Installing Leopard on x86 PC – Dell Dimension 4500

Monday, December 8th, 2008 | Technology, Tutorials | 16 Comments

It took me roughly 12 hours and 20 installations before I stabilized my installation of Leopard on an old Dell Dimension 4500. Along the way I read a ton of guides and references that helped me finally install Leopard 10.5.4 on my x86 desktop. I figured I’d centralize them all as well as offer my experience in hopes of making it a little easier for the next person.

Guides:

• OSX86 Project Installation Guides – This site offers the widest verity of installation guides. the OSX86Project team has built an amazing informational foundation for getting OSX installed on a PC. I’d recommend surfing around their pages for the most accurate and detailed help
• The ultimate OSX on PC guide – The best guide for me offering explanations for each step. This was the most useful guide during my journey.
• Hack-Attack: Install Leopard in 3 easy steps – A good general overview of what needs to be accomplished but really lacked essentials like links to resources and meaningful descriptions
• Hack-Attack: Install Leopard in 1 step – The most basic article I found. Basically says “Pop in the installation disk and follow the instructions”.
• LifeHacker’s guide to a Hackintosh PC – Great guide with pictures. They also have a good guide for building a Hackintosh from scratch.

Resources:

• OSX86Project – Solid reference for all things related to getting OSX on your PC
• InsanelyMac – First hand problems and solutions. Great place for dynamic help. Having a problem with the OSX installation? Post a question here for help.

Installing Leopard on a Dell Dimension 4500:

1. Get DVD image JaS 10.5.4
   • If you happen to have lost your legitimate copy you might be able to find a replacement at “thePirateBay.org” by typing “JaS 10.5.4“
2. Burn the image
3. Boot the PC and insert the DVD
4. Enter bios (delete key as soon as computer powers on)
5. BOOT > Boot Device Priority – you want CD/DVD 1st and hard drive 2nd
6. Save and exit
7. After POST you’ll see “push any key to boot from CD or push f8 to boot from cd with options” – guess what?  push a key…
8. It should pop up to a gray screen with an apple logo and a circle animation rotating underneath
9. Select your language
10. OSX Installer app should pop up with a welcome screen – this overall looks a lot like OSX.
11. On the bar at the top of the screen click “Utilities” > “Disk Utility”.
12. When it opens you should see your hard drive on the left at the top (It may have some partitions under it).
13. Select the hard drive and then click the erase tab then click erase.  ( dont worry about “Volume Format” or “Name” as these will be taken care of in the next step)
14. It Should only take a moment, then click on the only partition under the hard drive and then back to the erase tab.
15. Change the “Volume Format:” to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and rename the partition to something pretty like “Leopard” or “BlueBird”.
16. Click erase and wait for the progress bar to fill.
17. Close the Disk utility app and the installer should pop back up.
18. Click continue then agree then select the newly erased partition and continue.
19. Click “Customize” and select packages:
    • Kernal package: Intel SSE2 SSE3 9.2.0 Sleep
    • Driver Package: Intel-ICHx
    • Device Identification: NVIDIA GeForce nForce Chipset Fix
    • uncheck clean
20. Click Done, then install
21. You can wait for the “disk check” just to be sure, but after I verfied the disk was fine once, i skipped it every time after that to save about 20 minutes.
22. Wait for the install to complete
23. Restart the computer
24. Pop out the DVD
25. During the next boot hit any key to add options to the HDD boot.
26. At “boot: ” enter “cpus=1″ and hit enter
27. Enjoy booting into Leopard

Additional useful information:

• If your system dosen’t boot up try “-x” at the same place you enterd “cpus=1″ above.  This will boot the system into safe mode.
• If for some reason that still doesnt work… Try using “-v” which displays the boot messages while starting rather then the apple graphic.  These messages help with debugging.

Once you get the system booting add the parameters to “com.apple.Boot.plist”:

1. Open Finder
2. Go to your partition
3. Then go to Library > Preferences > SystemConfiguration
4. Open com.apple.Boot.plist with “Property List Editor”
5. Add parameters to “Kernel Flags” (I added “cpus=1 -x”)

Additonal things you can add:

• “Boot Graphics”=Yes|No    see graphics mode or text mode when starting.
• “Quiet Boot”=Yes|No       Use quiet boot mode (no messages or prompt).
• “Graphics Mode”=”WIDTHxHEIGHTxDEPTH”  such as “1024x768x32″ wher depth is the color in millions

Update:

So i was inconsistantly recieving a kernal panic during boot.  It was caused by my PCI Ethernet card that just happens to be a RealTek 8139 chipset card.  So by checking my Console.app under “Utitilities” I was easily able to narrow down what was causing the kernal panic by seeing:

1. Download this zip and extract the contents:   pcgenrtl8139ethernet_120
2. Open the Termianl.app in “Utitilties” and type these commands:

3. sudo su

   rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/AppleRTL8139Ethernet.kext

   cp -R <path to>/PCGenRTL8139Ethernet.kext /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/

   chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/PCGenRTL8139Ethernet.kext

   chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/PCGenRTL8139Ethernet.kext

   touch /System/Library/Extensions

   shutdown -r now

4. Enjoy a panic free boot!

Please feel free to post comments/questions!

Tags: leopard on pc