OSX86 - out of the picture… for now

Entry Filed under: Hardware, Rants, Software

March 6th, 2008

Argh! You may have won this round Mr. Murphy, but I will triumph sooner or later! After several attempts, I still can't natively run Kalyway OSX Leopard on my PC, even without using FireWire kexts which make my motherboard reset itself, and with using only one CPU core (the "cpus=1" switch)! I managed to boot to the installation wizard, and after successfully installing everything on my SATA HDD drive (one PATA drive I have is not detected at all), the dreaded thing won't boot, dieing on me with a "Still waiting for root device error" (translation: "No, I can't access your HDD, now stop staring at me"). Wonderful... The obvious problem is that my motherboard doesn't support AHCI mode (the advanced SATA mode that OSX works with perfectly), as the MSI customer service has informed me: "P35 Neo doesn't support AHCI mode.". Yeah, my motherboard is an MSI P35Neo - the one of the few rare Intel P35 based motherboards that don't support RAID or AHCI. How lucky am I, right? Now, as a last resort, I will try to get my hands on a 4GB USB thumbdrive so that I can install a copy of MacOSX on that. However, I would suggest on NOT using the journalled HFS+ file system to format it because of the major number of writes that occur during normal operation in this mode, which wears down the flash memory inside the USB drive fairly quickly. It's wise just to stick to plain HFS+, without journalling enabled.

If this works, I'm gonna replace my Recycle Bin icon in Windows with a picture of Steve Jobs... If not, at least I'm gonna have a neat porn transfer device.

When the night has come… and the land is dark… HDDs - making millions of people loose their hair since 1956!