tubes_rock

The good news is that many, many people are using ATI cards. OSX86 and InsanelyMac can be of huge help and the folks at tonycrap have tried just about every piece of hardware under the sun, to varying degrees of success. Their forums can be hugely helpful, even if just using google searches to find the topics. If your card is listed in the OSX86 hardware compatibility list, some thread out there will help you get it running. This is half the fun of hackintosh. It's like hot-rodding a classic car, but in the comfort of your living room. No matter what, you will learn something that you will likely use more than once. --Justin

Many times doing a "full" myHack myFix will fix a "waiting for root device" problem. See if that fixes it, if not, we'll dig more. Graphics glitches in safari are because you aren't running graphics hardware acceleration. A quick way to see if hardware acceleration is running is to see if your menu bar is translucent. If it is, you're accelerated. It won't be accelerated in safe mode, so this is not unusual. I've never run ATI hardeware, so hopefully somoene else can chime in about that. --Justin

There could be a million reasons. Where does it stop in the process? Does it try to boot? Does it get halfway through? Does it look like it's booting and then go to a black screen? Have you tried booting it the -v flag for verbose output for troubleshooting, or the -x flag for safe boot? We'll need more info before we can even begin to help. Exact wording of what's on the screen will be tremendously helpful. --Justin

Woo-Hoo! I'm replying under Mavericks on my Optiplex 745 right now! Full audio, full QI/CE, fully upgraded to 10.9.1 No issues at all, but I will have to find a way to get some heat out of this Small Form Factor case. Between the Q6700 and the 8400GS, the air temperature inside the case is about 120F, with the CPU die running about 150F at "normal" use. If I ramp the CPU to 100% doing a video render, I will run it up to 186F, which is too hot for my liking. The 8400 is running about 145F. Thanks for everyone's help. I used Dan's DSDT, but removed his device properties from his chameleon plist. Added voodooHDA and AppleHDA disabler later. Everything works great. That PCI version of the 8400 was certainly the problem. --Justin

Yes, my Dell D630 is a myHack, as well as a couple of installs on personally-made sytems, most of which are in some flavor of Gigabyte P45 - Q6600 - 9600GT, Mountain Lion. Never had trouble with getting it to work like I am with this one. It has to be the fact that this is a straight 32-bit PCI card, and not a 64-bit PCIe card. I'm sure Mountain Lion and Mavericks have no idea what to do with it. I have this 745 running Lion right now with a hacked GeForce 7300 LE and hacked native drivers, but they are only 32 bit, so I can't go past Lion with it. That's why I tried to use an 8400GS, but with the PCI interface, I'm pretty sure it's sunk. Of course, any insight into my thought process is welcome. I should be getting the 8400GS/PCIe card in Friday, so I'll be working with it on Monday with any luck. I'll keep this thread posted on that progress. --Justin

The enablers were a bust. I tried NVEnabler64 as well as the 32-bit version, booting the system in i386 mode. None of it worked. (especially booting Mavericks in 32-bit mode. Duh, of course that wasn't going to work!) I'm certain Apple never thought that a PCI card would be used for graphics, so I'm sure there's some problems there. Not to worry a new 8400GS is on its way. Found a PCIe X16 low-profile version for $27 on eBay, shipping included, so I should be good to go. I'll post how it goes from there. --Justin

Yes, it's exactly like the one pictured. (But a PNY, not a EVGA!) I had it in a box of random computer parts, but I'll try the enabler and see what happens. If I can't get this working, I'll probably just blow $40 and get the PCIe version and be done with it. The problem is that the Dell 745 that I have is a small form factor, so I have to use a half-height card, which I've seen few of in the PCIe variety. I'll just have to look harder. Thanks for the advice! --Justin

Oh, one more bit of info, in the verbose output, I can see these tags: NVDAStartup: Official NVDANV50HAL: Loaded and Registered So, my device/product keys are indeed being recognized, and I can see that the temperature sensor in the 8400GS identifies itself farther up in the verbose output, so it sure looks like the card is talking to the OS, but as soon as it tries to go to graphics mode, the display goes black and into standby. --Justin

Its tough for me to get you the output of commands when I can't get any kind of graphics up. The card does indeed work with Linux, so I know the card itself is okay. I did have some luck using npci=0x3000, but that only worked for one boot-up and then never worked again. I can't for the life of me figure out why that would be so. That stroke of luck was using the -x flag, which is the only way I've had any kind of success with Mavericks or Mountain Lion in this hardware configuration. Like I said, it only worked in Mavericks that once. My 8400GS is a PCI card, not PCIe. I did discover that my PciRoot is indeed 0, so that takes that out of the puzzle. Could my card being standard PCI be the source of my problems? --Justin

Interesting. I have a D630 running 10.8 without any really spacial kexts installed, but to get my Opti 745 running 10.8 I needed to fix the NVDANV50HAL kext to have my device ID, then it worked reasonably well in safe mode, but not any other way. Loading 10.9 using the Extra folder that Dan provided, I could see that NVDANV50HAL loaded and regiusterd my 8400GS, which pleased me. However, as soon as it did that, the screen went black and into standby. It sounded like the machine was still running since I could hear it accessing the hard drive. Any ideas on what's causing that? I'm certainly no noob when it comes to OSX86, having been doing it since the Tiger era with many different methods. I'm a unix programmer by trade, and comfortable at the command line, so if there's any info I can get you, please let me know. I've just never run across a graphics driver that fails so silently and completely. It doesn't give me a hook into seeing what it's doing, so if this is something anyone else has run across, I'm open to suggestions. Thanks! --Justin

Hi Dan, I seem to have the similar same setup as you, except I'm running a Q6700 and my 8400GS is a 512M version. I'm looking to install Mavericks since I'm currently running Lion. (I'll skip 10.8 if I can!) Anyway, looking at your Extra folder, how did you get your 8400GS to work? Did you modify the NVDANV50Hal.kext? Do you use NVDAResman? NVEnabler64? Since those aren't stored in your Extra folder, there may be a few pieces of this puzzle that I'm missing, and I'd be incredibly grateful if you could clue me in. Thanks in advance! --Justin

I'll second that question! I thought the behavior was a bit strange too! D630.