trag

Could a flat CMOS battery (under the keyboard, IIRC) cause this problem? The laptop detects the SSD but can't remember what it detected later and must re-detect it.

The specific adapter for this purpose is the Sintech (manufacturer) PA6007 (model #), mini pci-e Msata SSD to 40pin ZIF adapter card as tohiba or hitachi zif hdd (list of buzz words). As far as I can tell, all the adapters are identical to this one. Of course, it's possible that some unknown factory in China is making them and Sintech is just another reseller. But the Sintech model number works and a seach on "Sintech Pa6007" will turn up units on Amazon, Ebay and Sintech's own direct sale website.

Thank you, once again, Herve. I appreciate the help.

I understand that the boot packs are being checked, updated if necessary, and rereleased. In the meantime, is there any possibility of getting a link to the old D430, Lion bootpack? I would wait patiently, and will, if necessary, but school just started here, and I'd like to set up a laptop for my son this weekend. He just found out that he needs one for his Chinese class and a D430 seems like the best option of the laptops in the house, given the elevated risk of theft, etc., taking to middle school brings. Thank you.

Repeat after me, "Herve is usually right...." I had the cable upside down. I felt pretty confident I had them right-side-up because I was careful to connect them the same way as with working hard drives. But... The Crucial M500s shipped with Amazon Prime did not arrive today, but should have. Probably get here tomorrow. In the meantime, Herve's suggestion kept reverberating in my brain. After reversing the cable orientation, the laptop saw the SSD with Sintech adapter. I should have been able to figure it out from the photos that ddiego posted. Slaps forehead. I am almost done installing Win7 on it as a test. OS X will have to wait for this weekend. Given that I tried it with the cable wrong a few days ago, apparently connecting the cable backwards will not fry the adapter, nor the SSD. I'm pretty sure I've read at least one review where someone claimed that having the cable backwards fried their adapter or SSD.

The M500s are already on the way. If they don't work, then I'll try the cable upside down. There is a risk that trying the cable upside down could apply power where it should not, although that should not be possible if the flex cable connector only has conductors on one side. I'm not sure about that though. They might have conductors on both sides.

Pretty certain. I compared the connector for the standard hard drive and the connector for the adapter and the cable orientation, and made certain to do it the same way. So, unless the adapter connector wants the cable inserted upside-down to the way the hard drive connector wants the cable, I got it right. With the hard drive or adapter board on the table, and the connector on top of the hard drive or on top of the adapter board, the cable goes into the connector with the exposed conductors on the underside (facing down) of the ribbon cable. Correct?

I tried the MydigitalSSD BP4 240GB mSATA SSD with Sintech adapter this weekend and it did not work. I tried three of them, in three adapters and none of them worked. So, unless I got three bad adapters, or three bad SSDs, or some combination thereof, the MydigitalSSD BP4 does not work with the Sintech adapter. MydigitalSSD's website's page for the BP4 states that it has a SATA III interface and is compatible with SATA II. No mention of SATA I compatibility and the Sintech adapter board uses a JMicron JM20330 chip which only supports SATA I (1.5 Gbps) on the SATA side. Sintech's website claims compatibility with MydigitalSSD brand, but I bet that was for the BP3. The BP3 is backwards compatible with SATA I. I could be wrong, but that's the evidence I have and my guesses. I have not heard back from MydigitalSSD tech support so far. It looks like Amazon will take them back and refund me without an issue -- I hope. I tried this brand and model because they have pretty good reviews and there was a Black Friday sale. I called Crucial support this morning, and the pleasant fellow I spoke with said that they have not tested it, and there could always be unknown problems awaiting, but he sees no reason why the M500 should not work with the SATA I interface on the Sintech adapter. So, I have three of those on the way now... Fingers crossed.

I have an aftermarket 9 cell battery for my Dell Latitude D430. It worked great for about a year. Recently, I think it was discharged too far. After that the external test yielded the flashing LEDs and the battery would not charge either while the machine was off and plugged in, nor under Windows. I tried various tricks like installing a good battery and then swapping batteries while the machine is plugged in and booted, but nothing helped. I noticed that OSX, on my other D430, actually provided more battery information in System Profiler than I can easily find in Windows. So I installed the battery in that machine, booted OSX, and it started charging the battery immediately. I've tested it for a while and everything seems fine. Various utilties report battery health as normal. So, if you have a battery which suddenly won't charge, before discarding it, try it in an OSX machine.

Wow. Thank you for all of the prior art and information. I don't know when I'll have time to experiment, but that will be very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate you sharing your experience.

A most concise description of the HD3000 solution. I wonder if there is an analogous solution for the D430's GMA950 to get the DVI port working: https://osxlatitude.com/index.php?/topic/1969-guide-for-enabling-vga-and-hdmi-in-intel-hd3000-gpu/?p=14333

Any chance that this will add support for the Secure Digital card reader on the D430? It looks like it's a driver compatible with the Ricoh chipset used on the D430 and PCI connection, but there are always pesky details....

Do you mean to connect the DVI monitor to the VGA port? Or do you mean to connect a VGA monitor to the DVI port? If the former, that would not meet my goal. I would like to achieve two external monitor support -- with the built-in LCD off. So I need the DVI port to work. If the latter, would it make a difference? Do you think the type/brand of monitor is affecting whether it is detected? However, I don't think a DVI-VGA adapter will work on the PR09S. The DVI port lacks the four analog signal pins that surround the single flat horizontal pin. Here is the article/forum post I was thinking of. I'm not sure if the link is going to work properly, so it's the third page of the thread and about 2/3 of the way down the page. This example is for the HD3000, but I wonder if something similar would work in this case to enable the DVI port? http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/259705-editing-custom-connector-info-for-intel-hd-3000-graphics-sandy-bridge-osx-lion/page-3 When I get some time I'll look into it, but if someone with experience would like to comment, I would enjoy reading your thoughts.

I had a little time this weekend to do some more testing, so I tried out multiple monitors on the D430 under Snow Leopard. First, I connected an older LCD panel directly to the VGA port on the back of the D430. This worked fine and operates in either mirrored or extended desktop mode. Next, I put the D430 into the Media Slice Dock (PR09S, I think). This is the dock which includes an optical drive and makes the D430 a little thicker and heavier. In the Media Slice, the VGA port still works great, however, do not use the FN F8 key to switch monitors. This switches the display to some frozen screen that looks like an old left-over display buffer from boot time. I don't know where in memory that is living. It's weird. If one uses the FN F8 key during the boot process (before the desktop appears) it will cycle the start-up screen between the built-in and external screen just fine. However, once OSX has detected and activated additional display devices (both displays lit) using the FN F8 key gets one the aforementioned display buffer crud and no way I could find to recover. I'm not sure if this FN F8 behaviour is the same when connected directly to the D430's VGA port (no dock) because I don't remember testing it's behaviour without the dock. Next, I connected a monitor to the DVI port. Snow Leopard refuses to acknowledge in any way that there is a monitor connected via DVI. However, if one uses the FN F8 key during the boot process, it will cycle the start-up screen (OSX Latitude emblem on gray background) from screen to screen, including the DVI monitor. I tried the DVI monitor both alone and with another display connected to the VGA port. The behaviour was the same in both cases. So, any ideas on how to get the DVI port to work? I remember reading an article somewhere (might have been here) about enabling a DVI or maybe an HDMI port on a Hackintosh. IIRC, it involved adding another entry to a Plist table for some kext related to displays or video cards. I'll see if I can find the page again. That might be a reasonable place to start. Is it possible that there simply isn't a plist entry for DVI monitors where one is needed? I'm treading far into my ignorance here, so please forgive and correct me if I make little sense.

Thank you for pioneering this! I ordered one of those adapters on Ebay a few weeks ago ($15 vs. $22 on Amazon) and it has arrived, but I've been hesitant to buy the msata drive, because that is the expensive part. I've been using the Toshiba MK2431 240GB hard drive in my D430s but it is kind of slow. Oh, I think it's reasonably speedy compared to other 1.8" hard drives, but none of them are speed demons. MSATA would be much better. And, as you write, if you change your mind later, an msata drive has other uses. If one gets one of the 1.8" ZIF SSDs there are a very limited number of possible uses. But an msata SSD can go in any number of devices. The 1.8" ZIF to msata adapter seems like a good choice. Oh, and 256 GB of msata drive is about $200, while a 240GB 1.8" ZIF PATA SSD costs about $400. If the msata drives would fall by about 50% it would be a complete no brainer. The MK2431 is about $90 up from $75 a few months ago. If the comparable capacity msata drives fell down into that range, there'd be absolutely no reason to consider sticking with a hard drive. Did you choose the Plextor based on reviews and/or research? I've had my eye on the 256GB M5M based on reading a few reviews/roundups and relative pricing and such, but don't fell especially confident in the choice. Still, given that it will be connected to a 100 MB/s PATA interface, the last few smidgeons of performance are probably irrelevant.

Thank you for the information about the System password and reboot. That is reassuring. Before you posted the above message, I decided that I may as well update to 10.6.8 following your instructions two posts back. I did so and **now sleep works fine.** I had already done the update before I saw your latest message, so I do not know if the 10.6.3 installation had AppleACPIPlatform.kext properly installed or not. The new 10.6.8 does have it in place as you describe. With 10.6.8 sleep is working both from the power switch and by closing the lid and wakeup seems to be fine, although I haven't tested all functionality after wakeup, yet. I'm just pleased as can be that the machine finally sleeps. Under 10.6.3 sleep did not work properly with either the power button or by closing the lid. Unfortunately, this leaves us not knowing the root cause of the problem. Is there an issue with Sleep and 10.6.3? Was something else wrong? I guess it doesn't matter very much because updating to 10.6.8 usually makes sense. Herve, thank you very much for your patience and help. Onward to more testing. I tested the Media Slice dock (PR09S) a little bit a couple of days ago and initial results are good so far, but I haven't tried the video ports yet. I'll do more of that. Also, any recommendations on which of the PS2 kexts to try to get the pointing stick working, or is that fraught with hazard? It looks like there are seven choices in Extras/Storage. Eight choices, except that "appleps2controller" (v. 1.1.5) is already installed.

Thank you, Herve. I tried that. I deleted SleepEnabler.kext from the /Extras/Extensions folder -- moved to trash and emptied trash. Then I ran full myfix from myhack. Then I restarted. After boot process finished, I pushed the power button. Chose the "sleep" option. The green lights still remain solid instead of pulsating, and no action I have tried will wake the machine. I must hold the power button until it shuts off. I appreciate the help. Are there other things I should try? BTW, when the machine is running OSX, and I choose "Restart" from the Apple menu, and the machine restarts, it always asks for my System Password. Shouldn't it skip that because in the BIOS the option Password Bypass = Reboot & Resume Bypass? Doesn't that mean that when I reboot/restart, I should **not** be asked for the system password?

Thanks, Herve. I have double checked and triple checked the BIOS settings, and they match your recommendations from your posting on the topic. Hibernate mode is definitely 0. Do I need to run EDP after making those settings? I did the MyHack install. Ran EDP. Then I set the System password and turned Hibernate off. Does the order matter? Should I run EDP again, now that the BIOS and Hibernate settings are proper? Thankyou, Jeff

Another possibly relevant tidbit is that the D430 is not honoring the Bypass System Password on Reboot setting. Every time that I "restart" OSX, the D430 asks me for the system password.

I've been slowly testing out my first OSX installation on the Latitude. Sleep does not seem to be working at all. First, should I update from 10.6.3? I followed the EDP/Documentation instructions from Pre through Post Installation and 10.6.3 is what my SL installer disk had. I guess I must have missed something somewhere. My symptom is that when the laptop goes to sleep, the display goes out, and I think the drive spins down, but the green power indicator lights (button and bezel) stay solid and do not slowly pulsate. Nothing will wake the laptop. I must hold the power button until the machine shuts down and then restart. Okay, I put it to sleep while plugged in, removed the battery, and put my ear against the hard drive, and I'm pretty certain it is still spinning. Fan is definitely still blowing too. My test installation here is a D430, 1.2GHz, 2GB RAM, 240 GB MK2431 hard drive, A09 BIOS. There are two slightly unusual things in my laptop. I have a Dell DW 1505 Wifi card installed. According to the seller it is Broadcom, BCM94321MC. It works great so far, but I mention it in case it could be affecting sleep. The listing in Apple System Profiler under "Ethernet Cards" says: Name: pci14e4,4328 <snip> BSD name: en1 Kext name: /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Plugins/AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext version: 422.91.27 The only odd thing is that in the upper pane, under "Card" it says Intel Wireless 3945, which seems odd since this a Broadcom based card. Second, the Toshiba MK2431 has not been commonly used. Could it be preventing sleep somehow? I have configured my BIOS settings according to the "BIOS settings-D430" thread. I performed steps 1 and 2 in the article, "Getting Sleep to work on your Dell Latitude". https://osxlatitude.com/index.php?/topic/2036-bios-settings-d430/ http://www.osxlatitude.com/getting-osx-sleep-to-work-on-your-dell-latitude/ Any other ideas? I don't need to click the SystemPreferences/Security "Require Password" box, right? That sets the OSX software security, which is different from the BIOS based security. Or do I? Anyway, everything else seems to be great so far. I just can't seem to get this to work, and it's frustrating, since the forums are full of (well a few anyway) postings on just what to do, and it seems to work for everyone else... If you think it could be the Wifi card or the hard drive, I have a DW 1390 I can swap in. The hard drive is tougher as I'm using the 80GB I have on hand as my working XP drive. I might have a 60GB drive I can test with though. I really wanted to get the 'n' support and larger drive capacity. I will appreciate any helpful or humorous suggestions, Jeff

Because the drive model has come up once or twice (archives), I think it's worth mentioning that my install of Snow Leopard over the last couple of weeks was onto a Toshiba MK2431 240 GB drive in my D430. I'm not completely finished testing yet, but so far, things look good. The OS is up and running. I've rebooted a few times. The System Preferences I've checked seem to be working properly. I guess I should check drive sleep to make sure that works okay. I currently have it disabled, as I enable more things and try them. The MK2431 is down to about <$85 on Ebay and Amazon these days. It was ~$75 for a brief time while Geeks.com had stock. Of course, $70 will get you a terabyte in a 2.5" SATA drive. Ah, well. When I ran the PassMark disk benchmark under Windows Vista, before I did the OSX install, the reported disk score was 203. Which is pretty decent amongst 1.8" drives. The MK2431 has mixed reports regarding compatibility with the D430. What I finally found is that Windows XP simply won't install on the drive, but Windows Vista will, and I've corresponded with a fellow who has installed Win7 on an MK2431 in a D420, although I haven't tried Win7 on my D430 yet. So the drive works, but not with Win XP. I did not run into any difficulty (other than a message that lspcidrv/kext" was installed improperly) following the instructions here in order to install Snow Leopard and it seems to be working fine. Once I'm done testing my SL installation, I'll move on to a multi-OS system with Win7 and SL.

I received this same message this weekend (6/15/2013) while doing an install on a D430. I went back and ran MyHack again (can't remember which option, and don't have the menu in front of me) and then EDP again and did not receive the message on the second try. Basically, I went back in the installation process to the step right after the Apple installer on the myhack USB stick finishes a somewhat normal Mac OSX installation and reran those steps. I did not get the message on the second try and so far everything seems good, but I have not tested extensively yet.

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.

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.