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...

Two more related questions I have not seen explicitly answered... I understand that one needs a Broadcom Wifi card in order to have OSX support. Is it still necessary to modify the card ID? Once the card ID is modified to appear to be an Airport card, will it still work in Windows in dual boot systems?

I have the Media Base (undertray) and a PR01. However, if the DVI did not work with the D6x0, it seems unlikely that it would work with the D430. Was much effort put into getting the DVI port working? What I really want to know is whether the simple, obvious things that a neophyte like me might try have already been tried. That tells me what level of effort would be the minimum for me to solve it. I think I'll start with SL. I hope I'll have time to try the others, but I've been working up to this for almost a year now with only a few hours here and there available. I hope I'll have time in the next couple of weekends. I coach LL baseball in the Fall and Spring, and it's like adding a second job. Thank you for answering my questions.

First, thank you to all the folks who have put so much time and effort into getting OSX on the D430. I've been (mostly) a Mac guy since '92, and bought a D430 with docking station (parallel port) to run my chip programmer (Needham EMP-30). Then I kind of fell in love with the D430 with XP, and then I found this site and discovered that I might be able to have OSX and the D430 together. Anyway, I hope to have time in the next few weekends to try this. I have three questions for which I have not found clear answers. The answer is probably here somewhere...but searching has not turned it up. 1) Is there support for the SD card slot? I think the answer is no, but all the (non-OSX version) fields in the compatibility chart for the D430 dual core are blank. Should one use the compatibility chart entries for the D420, single core, when looking at specific compatibilities for the D430 dual core? 2) Will any of the docking stations work? I prefer dual monitors for my desktop setups. If I could use the D430 with a docking station for my desktop configuration, that would be ideal. Most of the docking stations have a DVI and a VGA port, providing dual monitor (while built-in LCD disabled) support. 3) Reading some of the threads, I see that Herve feels that Snow Leopard is the better choice on the D430, at least for performance reasons. Is that still true. Any compelling reason to go to Lion? I have a Snow Leopard DVD and a Lion USB stick, so I could go either way. My current home Macs have not gone beyond Leopard, so compatibility with my existing Macs is not a reason to go to Lion. Thank you.

Yes, latest BIOS on the laptop. I don't believe that Toshiba has released any updates for the hard drive. The drive is used in Ipods, but that's not a magical disqualification. There's a physical or software reason when equipment is incompatible. In this case, it's frustratingly close to compatible, given that it works like a dream in Vista but stubbornly refuses to be visible to XP.

My ultimate ambition is to have a triple booting D430 with OSX, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. That's a lot of stuff for one of these little guys, so a large capacity hard drive seems like a good idea. So I bought a couple (I have more than one D430) of the MK2431's by Toshiba to provide 240GB of capacity. My ultimate question for this thread, which I've moved up here, because I wrote way too much background, is: Do you have any suggestions for getting XP installed on this hard drive? I am going slowly, testing one OS out at a time. And since XP was already on the D430, and I need XP for my chip programmer (connects through the parallel port on the Media Dock), That's what I tested first. I'm sorry that I'm not going to discuss OSX immediately here, and if that's a problem, I'll go somewhere else, but I haven't found the Windows forums such as Anandtech especially knowledgeable (willing to help, but not very knowledgeable) on this topic, and I'm hoping that the folks here may have focused on the issues involved a little more closely. From reading the forum topics, it appears that no one has reported back on using the MK2431 with OSX. When I reach that point, I will share my experiences. Anyway, where I am now is that the XP installation disk will not install XP to the MK2431 because the XP installer does not detect a hard drive. I've been chasing this issue for about three months off and on (not a lot of spare time), so I've tried many things and am pretty much out of ideas. 1. Windows XP installer does not see MK2431 hard drive. 2. Windows Vista installer does see MK2431 hard drive and installs and runs just fine. 3. Trying to install XP after installing Vista, the XP installer still doesn't see the hard drive. 4. XP with slipstreamed AHCI drivers from Intel's Rapid Storage Technology update does not see hard drive. 5. Slipstreaming astore.inf (not sure about spelling, also contained in RST update) in addition/instead of ahci drivers does not help. 6. The MK2431 is 512 bytes per sector logical, but 4096 bytes per sector physical. 7. Looking at various drives with Gnome Partition Editor on a Live CD shows the MK2431 as a DOS style partitioning (MBR?) with an NTFS partition. This is exactly the same as the stock 80 GB drive which does work with XP. I tried various partitioning schemes without success. 8. The drive works great as an external drive in a USB enclosure but the XP install disk won't install to the external drive. So, it comes down to the fact that Vista installs and XP won't. What driver or capability does Vista have, which XP lacks? And is there some way to add that capability to XP? The drive is an Advanced Format Drive as shown by the 4096 byte physical sector size. The folks at anandtech.com thought I should install the latest AHCI drivers, even though the interface is not SATA, on the theory that this would add support for Advanced Format Drives. It didn't help. My current hypothesis is that updated AHCI drivers in XP do add support for Advanced Format Drives, but the AHCI drivers only work on SATA interfaces. Whoever created the updated drivers assumed that all AF Drives would be SATA and didn't bother to add AFD support to the drivers for IDE interfaces. Yet, in Vista, such support seems to exist. It is entirely possible that the MK2431 is the *only* AFD with a PATA interface. All other AFDs seem to be large capacity SATA drives. My hypothesis may be down a completely wrong alley... I would appreciate any helpful or humorous comments. Once I get XP loading, I'll move on to OSX, but this is where I'm starting. Or, if it just isn't possible to get XP to load, I'll have to re-evaluate my plan. Maybe see if Win 7 in XP mode will work properly with my chip programmer's software and the parallel port in the Dell dock.