Wish Me Luck....

[trag]

I've been dropping in here off and on for about a year. The whole time I've had a trio of D430s I want to set up with OSX and probably Windows 7. I would have preferred XP, but I'm going to try this on Toshiba MK2431s and XP just won't install on that drive, although Vista and later will.

 

Anyway, I'm an old fart, with a kid and I coach little league baseball two seasons a year in addition to all the other life stuff, so I haven't been able to squeeze out a block of time to work on this.

 

This weekend, my son and his mother are out of town, baseball season has been over for a few weeks, so the urgent lawn care catch-up has been done. The refrigerator and dryer are fixed (fingers crossed, they stay fixed).

 

I have all day tomorrow (Saturday) to follow the instructions here and try to make this work.

 

I'm a little worried, because my OSX skills are beginner to mediocre. I started on System 6 way back when, and never completely made the jump to OSX at home. So my partner's machine is an MDD with Tiger and Leopard (her iPod needs Leopard). I still haven't upgraded my son's machine from Jaguar (iLamp). My main machine still runs OS9. I have so much knowledge and skill invested in OS9, it's been hard to make the jump to the unfamiliar territory.

 

Anyway, I'm going to try to do the install at a friend's house who has better Unix skills than I do, and if I get stuck, at least it will be possible to apply two heads to the problem instead of just my old crusty one.

 

So, wish me luck...

[Bronxteck]

good luck then! you will need a newer os to create the myHack installer minimum os i believe is 10.6.x Snow Leopard. you can check on his site.

[trag]

good luck then! you will need a newer os to create the myHack installer minimum os i believe is 10.6.x Snow Leopard. you can check on his site.

 

 

Thank you for the information.  That might have been critical if I was not already aware of  it.  As it happens, I have Snow Leopard on DVD and Lion on USB key.  I learned my lesson when Tiger disappeared from the shelves before I was ready, and I try to buy a version of the latest OS while it's available.  I got a nice shrink wrapped version of SL through SmallDog (I think they're still selling them) .  I actually missed the boat on Lion.  I read the annoucement that Apple had stopped selling it, and called around that very day looking for USB key versions, including calling the Apple store and asking if they had any left with no luck.  I bought a second hand one on Amazon, but how do you tell if it's legitimate?  Should the USB Key say Apple on it?

 

Anyway, I spent a lot of my time this weekend getting the Core2Duo Mini (2009 model) working well enough to create the installer volume.  I misread the MyHack instructions, and where it says one must have 10.6 or better on the machine running MyHack, I read that as Lion.   I keep forgetting that 10.5 = Leopard; 10.6 = SL.   I forget about Leopard.   So, I figured I needed to get Lion on the Mini.  It already had SL installed, so as it happens, I could have skipped the next few hours of effort...

 

Right off the bat, Lion refused to install because I only had 1 GB RAM and it requires 2 GB.  I've been planning to upgrade the Mini for several months, so I already had an 8GB RAM upgrade on hand.   While I had it opened, I traded the 120 GB drive for a 1 TB and replaced the optical drive with a TS-T633.   Then, when I put it back together, Disk Utility just spun the beach ball at launch.  

 

Another while of fiddling, and I think the problem was that I didn't have the interconnect board seated properly.   However, I never could get the optical drive to work  -- it didn't work before, which was something seller acknowledged before I purchased it.   However, it seems the problem isn't in the optical drive, but on the interconnect board. 

 

Examination revealed a pin on the SATA power connector which is too deeply recessed.   Repair attempts on that pin could be a whole other fun post.   Sigh.   I did successfully solder the temperature sensor connector back on.   Really, the plug should come out of the socket before the socket rips up from its solder joints.   Grrr.   I found new interconnect boards on Amazon for $30, so I have one of those on the way, which is not relevant to OSXLatitude, but is important to the future of the Mini if I ever want the optical drive to work again.

 

But with Lion on a USB key, I didn't need the optical drive.   So, having upgraded the RAM and hard drive, I installed Lion on the new 1 TB drive on the Mini, and into a partition on an external Firewire drive as well, so that I would have boot options.   That was the end of Saturday.  

 

To be fair, that was only 3 - 7P.   I got a late start because with the family gone, I actually slept until noon without meaning to, and then mowed the lawn and replaced the wheel barrow wheel, before I went to my friend's house for Hackintosh fun.    But then our role-playing game group started their session about 7, so I had to clear off the table for that.

 

So, I returned on Sunday, armed with an external USB optical drive which I had in the attic, and with a working Mini, followed the instructions for Preinstallation and the instructions on MyHack and created an installation stick for Snow Leopard on a 16GB Kingston stick.   I added the Boot Pack for the Latitude D430 as per the preinstalllation instructions.  

 

The MyHack installer generator took a really long time, I guess because it was going from an optical drive, which isn't all that speedy to a USB1 stick, which is even slower.

 

I switched the WLAN card in one of my D430s to the Dell 1510, as I want to have 'n' support and there was a 1390 in there before.   Then I inserted the MyHack installer stick and booted from it.   I briefly got a screen which asked me to hit any key to select between the OSX or Windows boot volumes, but regardless of which branch I took, I never saw an opportunity to select the options such as -v for verbose, mentioned in the installation instructions.   That doesn't really matter, but I thought it was worth mentioning.  Could be user error.

 

At first I thought the installer stick was hung, because it displayed the gray/silver brick screen for quite a while and there didn't seem to be any activity (activity light not illuminated) on the USB stick.   But after a minute or two, it booted into the OSX installation screen.  

 

At which point I realized that I needed to check for anything on the D430's hard drive that needed preserving.   I only recently set this machine up with a Toshiba MK2431 240GB hard drive and Windows Vista, so it shouldn't have anything on it, but I've used it a few times and might have stored a datasheet on it or something.

 

So, that's as far as I got.  The installer stick is created.  It appears to boot up fine when attached to a D430.   Next step is to actually do the OSX installation.

 

By next weekend, my son will have left for sleep-away camp for three weeks, but the aquariums need water changes, and I'll be dragged off for a Father's Day lunch on Sunday.    Perhaps the next weekend.  My partner is going to Hungary with her family for a couple of weeks, and with her and the boy out of town, I should have Hackintosh time.   

 

Anyway, it's going well so far.  The only real problems I've had were caused by the combination of mis-reading the MyHack instructions and the fact that my only Intel Macintosh is a second hand Mini which has/had issues.

[trag]

I had a little time this past weekend, and finished the installation.   The remaining part was mostly a lot of waiting while installers ran, so not much attention was needed.

 

At present I have Snow Leopard installed on a D430, 1.2GHz.   The only bit worthy of note is that it is installed on a Toshiba MK2431, 240 GB hard drive.  

 

Now I will begin some testing as time permits.  I especially want to test functionality with the Media Slice docking station and the PR01X dock.   After that, I plan to start over and follow the instructions for having Win7 and OSX volumes.