Guide written by OnyX

OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard Vanilla Retail Installation

Requirements

1. An existing installation of OS X 10.5 Leopard2. An extra partition or a spare HD to install Snow Leopard.

3. A patched dsdt.aml to get rid of the cmos reset4. Necessary kexts

5. Chameleon 2 RC36. Patience {Optional}

The guide In a few words:

Basically the whole procedure is really simple.Here is what we are going to do. From a working OS X installation we are going to install Snow Leopard on a seperate HD or partition. After the install finishes we install some kexts necessary for Snow Leopard to run on PC, kexts necessary for hardware to work and the dsdt.aml file to get rid of the cmos reset. If done correctly then we are able to boot in Snow Leopard.

For the following guide i will use one HD with 2 different partitions. On the first partition 10.5 Leopard is installed and on the second i am going to install 10.6 Snow Leopard.

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1. Partition the hard drive

Assuming you aware of the basics of OSX86 and you have installed OS X on a pc before go ahead and boot from Leopard DVD. After the welcome screen open up Disk Utility and partition your hard drive as following: One partition for Leopard and another one for Snow Leopard. Before partitioning your HD make sure you select GUID and not MBR from within Disk Utility. After partitioning your HD go ahead and do all the necessary steps to install Leopard until you got a working installation of 10.5 Leopard in which of course you can boot in.

2. Install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Before starting with the installation of SL there is an important step you have to make so we don't screw up the permissions. While at Leopard environment head over the partition you are going to install Snow Leopard into and right click at it.From the menu that pops up select "Get Info" and you should see a checkbox that says "Ignore ownership on this volume". Authenticate using padlock and untick the checkbox.

After doing this step, mount your Snow Leopard .dmg file or insert your Snow Leopard DVD in the drive.After that launch terminal and type:

cd "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages" open OSInstall.mpkg

That will bring on the Snow Leopard installation window. According to your needs customize the installation by clicking customize and selecting the features you need. Once done with this continue with the installation at the partition we made earlier for Snow Leopard and wait till the installation finishes.

!DO NOT RESTART AFTER THE INSTALLATION FINISHES!

3. Bootloader installation

At this point we have Snow Leopard installed but we can't boot from it. The boot loader we are going to use is Chameleon 2 RC3 which has full Snow Leopard support.

You can download Chameleon 2 RC3 under "Bootloader" folder from here: http://bit.ly/DATs3Go ahead and start the Chameleon installer.

Make sure you install it NOT in Snow Leopard's partition but at Leopard's partition.

4. Installing necessary kexts.

As said earlier it is essential to install some kexts in order for Snow Leopard to run on a PC. The kexts you must, no matter what, install are the following:

Files Download LinksFakeSMC v2 http://bit.ly/15jt7kOpenHaltRestart http://bit.ly/rK7nCPlatformUUID http://bit.ly/PkVAkNullCPUPM http://bit.ly/125TQy

* At the platformUUID.kext make sure to enter the UUID of your Snow Leopard partition. To do this open the Contents/info.plist inside it and paste the UUID you get from Disk Utility at the string line.Save it and you are done.

Place these kexts in the S/L/E folder of your Snow Leopard partition. To install these kexts run the following command

sudo -scd /Volumes/<<[SnowLeopard]>>/System/Library/Extensionschown -R root:wheel *chmod -R 755 *

5. Generating a DSDT.aml

You need a patched DSDT to stop the cmos reset.This procedure can be a little tricky and requires some patience but is essential to do it and basically its the hardest and most time consuming step in the whole process so get on with it.

A. The short version:You generate a DSDT.aml file using DSDT Patcher made by PCWiz. Then using iasl you edit the file and make sure you replace the "8" or whatever number it may be at the "Length" section below Device RTC with a "2"

Device (RTC){ Name (_HID, EisaId ("PNP0B00")) Name (_CRS, ResourceTemplate () { IO (Decode16, 0x0070, // Range Minimum 0x0070, // Range Maximum 0x00, // Alignment 0x02, // Length ) })}

B. The long version: http://www.projectosx.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=515

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After generating and patching the DSDT.aml file you must place it on the Chameleon/Extra folder. Since we have already installed Chameleon on Leopard's partition go in the root of the volume and copy/paste the DSDT.aml on the "Extra" folder.

If however you find it difficult to make this step you can always download a DSDT.aml found on the internet by someone who has the same configuration as yours and try it.

6. Hardware specific kexts

According to your hardware you might want to install some extra kexts that will make things easier. Make sure you need these kexts and that they are needed for your hardware to work,otherwise you might install something you don't need and break hardware that already works. For example kexts relating to ps2 keyboards and mouse (for laptop users mostly), sound etc.

You can find many of these kexts (among with many usefull aplications) under "Drivers kext (Sterowniki)" folder in this link: http://bit.ly/DATs3

7. Reboot

After installing the necessary kexts and completing the above steps feel free to reboot your PC. In the chameleon screen choose the Snow Leopard partition and boot from it.If everything goes fine you should see a nice intro video and your Snow Leopard's welcome/customization screen.

Since you are running on Vanilla kernel you can use software update to upgrade to 10.6.1 which is the latest version of Snow Leopard until now.

8. Troubleshooting & Tips

A. If you are not able to boot into OSX try using these flags at the Chameleon bootloader screen: -x -v arch=i386

The -x flag will make OSX boot in safe mode.The -v flag will make OSX boot in verbose mode showing what causes the problem and you can not normally boot.arch=i386 will boot in 32-bit mode.

B. Chances are that after a successful boot you might get some hardware not being recognized by OSX. The main reason for that is incompatible kexts. To fix these problems i suggest you delete these kexts and then use EFI Studio to generate EFI strings for your hardware,

You can download EFI Studio under "Applications for OSx86" folder from here: http://bit.ly/DATs3

C. If you want to boot in 64-bit mode type this at the chameleon boot-loader screen:arch=x86_64. You can check Software section under System Profiler to if 64-bit Kernel and Extensions are enabled. Keep in mind that even in 32-bit mode you can still run 64-bit applications.

9. Credits

Credits go to:

SaCleoCheater for his amazing will to help anytime and his very simple to understand guide found here: http://bit.ly/lXCKV

Electro for providing a full set of kext's, applications, boot-loaders, etc here: http://bit.ly/DATs3

Many thanks go to everyone on the OSX86 scene who make this possible with their applications and difficult projects such as Netkas, Voodoo team, PCWiz etc.

Hope you find this guide useful.____________________________________________

An Old Skool user