E6230 - El Capitan installation in dual-boot on HDD with existing Win partition

[Senenmut]

Hi,

I have a dell e6230 with the right (osx compatible) wifi-card. (Swapped it out a while ago when installing yosemite.)

 

A couple of weeks ago the system crashed and I had to wipe the drive and install Win10 on it to get it running again. I now have 1 ntfs partition and legacy boot in the BIOS.

 

Is it possible to install El Capitan next to it, dual boot, without formatting the drive?

what would be the best way to do that?

The last time I used MyHack and that worked very well, but it does not seem to support anything above Yosemite

[scram69]

Yes - it's possible.  You need to defrag and then run the Disk Management tool to try and reclaim empty space - there is an example here.  Depending on your disk size and how Windows10 installs, this may not leave you with very much space for OS X however.

 

Given that you just wiped the drive a couple weeks ago, I would recommend backing up your files and starting from a clean drive.  That way you could move to UEFI boot/Clover.

Install ElCapitan first using Jake's guide, partitioning the drive into your OS X and Windows partitions in step 2.7.  Then install Windows.  I followed this method to get Win7 alongside ElCapitan on my 6230 and it went relatively smoothly.  The only trick is to go into the Dell BIOS following the Windows install and re-select CloverEFI.X64 for booting.

[Senenmut]

Thanks!
Which install do you recommend? will Clover work 'out of the box' or do i need some special settings/kexts for the dell e6230? (You said 'relatively', did you run into problems?)

 

Reason I ask this is that I get a kernel panic when i try to run the installer (jake's guide) upon boot.:

...kmem_suballoc failed"@/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-...

Booting with -v -x -f flags did not help, so maybe you ran into this as well (?)

[scram69]

The only real problem I ran into was after installing Windows 7.  That installer puts its own files into the EFI partition, and I needed to re-instruct the BIOS to use Clover and not the Windows boot files.

My OS X installation onto my E6230 following Jake's Guide went flawlessly.  Are you having difficulty booting from the USB?  If that's the case, based on your error snippet I would try 2 things:

1) re-download the ElCapitan - I've had instances when my downloaded .dmg has been incomplete

2) re-create the USB, paying very close attention to steps 11-19; here there are multiple levels of disk images, and it is very easy to get yourself confused.

[Senenmut]

Thanks for the tips!!!

[Senenmut]

I downloaded ElCap again and rebuild the installer using jake's method. It all went well, but the installer won't boot. I get a kernel panic when loading the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement driver/kext.

I tried replacing it with a patched one, but that didn't work.

What would be the best way to fix this???

[scram69]

That kext should be patched on the fly by Clover.  Did you follow steps 28 and 29 carefully?  Clover takes its instructions from the config.plist file in Jake's E6230.zip file.  The contents of that file need to be placed in the Clover folder of the generic EFI folder at the top of the second post.  Then you need to replace the EFI directory that the Clover installer created with Jake's.

[Senenmut]

Thanks again!

I copied the entire e6230 folder into the clover folder, not just its contents. After that I got another kernel panic. Something about zone_init suballoc failed.

Turns out my memory bank A was empty. Only B had a ram chip in it.

Switched banks and now it boots! So happy!

[Jake Lo]

Yes, known issue with Clover. Glad you sorted that out.

[moonman]

Yes - it's possible.  You need to defrag and then run the Disk Management tool to try and reclaim empty space - there is an example here.  Depending on your disk size and how Windows10 installs, this may not leave you with very much space for OS X however.

 

Given that you just wiped the drive a couple weeks ago, I would recommend backing up your files and starting from a clean drive.  That way you could move to UEFI boot/Clover.

Install ElCapitan first using Jake's guide, partitioning the drive into your OS X and Windows partitions in step 2.7.  Then install Windows.  I followed this method to get Win7 alongside ElCapitan on my 6230 and it went relatively smoothly.  The only trick is to go into the Dell BIOS following the Windows install and re-select CloverEFI.X64 for booting.

 

Hi scram69,

 

Could you explain about how you go into Dell BIOS following Windows install and re-select CloverEFI.X64?

 

I installed El Capitan on a e6230 using Jake's Clover guide and it went okay. 

I installed - or tried to install - Windows 7 on a 2nd partition, formatted from Windows 7 installer. Install seemed to complete, but on reboot, from Clover menu, if I choose Boot Windows from Legacy HD4, it says no bootable device. It also says this if I try to boot from the Windows 7 installer on USB pen. 

 

Any help much appreciated. 

 

 

P.S. I just see that you said you partitioned drive in STEP 2.7 of Jake's guide. I made the MS-DOS partition using Disk Utility in El Capitan. Is that a problem?