dparm

The computer: D430 (A09 BIOS) Snow Leopard 10.6.6 EDP 1.5rc5 Problem is the display brightness always reverts to 80% in the Displays control panel after a reboot. Using the Fn+up/down does not seem to change the slider. I must manually change it every time. I have also tried resetting the BIOS to defaults thinking it was some sort of glitch...no effect.

Worked. Thanks. Odd quirk with EDP1.5rc5: the brightness setting in the Displays pane always goes back to 90% whenever I reboot. Works independently of the FN+up/down.

Well this is good, the install completed and I rebooted...now I get the same blinking cursor garbage when trying to boot from the HD. What did I miss?

Many thanks for the suggestions, all. Psyched for the install to complete.

Started from scratch with an INTEL Mac and it booted the USB drive correctly. Someone should edit the guide to say you must perform it on an Intel Mac.

10.5.x. I actually tried it on a Tiger Mac and the Chameleon installer said "needs Leopard or better". I'll go try it on an Intel Mac we have too. *shrug*

Perhaps this is the problem: 4. Extra the extra.zip that i have attached to later down to the / of the USB drive I extracted the Extra.zip to the root of the MacOS Install USB partition (which adds the files into the pre-existing Extra folder). Does it need to go to the EFI partition instead? Honestly there's something really simple that I'm missing here. I did OSx86 on my old HP Mini 311 netbook and it worked just fine.

Yes. I partitioned the drive with 1 partition, GUID. Did NOT do MBR. Did this all from an old PowerPC iMac we have sitting around.

Howso? Like I said, I followed the guide. Sounds like the guide is wrong, incomplete, or something else... How did everyone else do it?

Don't see that in Gparted. The EFI partition on the USB drive has the "boot" flag on it already. You can only mark a partition as active on fixed MBR disks, according to diskpart. The guide says you must format as GUID.

I used the installer for 665 that was on the home page: http://www.osxlatitude.com/groups/d4xosx/wiki/a5841/Creating_a_USB_Installation_pen_with_OSX_for_Dell_Latitudes.html

I have used this exact drive to install Ubuntu and Windows 7. And yes, I do have an external DVD drive if necessary.

Followed the instructions to the letter and when attempting to boot to the USB stick, I get a black screen with blinking cursor. Nothing happens. Tried two different USB sticks, two different OS X discs (both 10.6.0 retail), and even a different D430. What I did was basically this: 1. format & partition USB stick, GUID partition (also tried MBR just to be certain) 2. restore SL DVD onto USB stick 3. install Chameleon onto USB stick 4. extract Extra.zip onto root of USB stick The D430 has the A09 BIOS, if that matters.