Installing Mac OS X 10.6.2 on AAOD250 with SnowyWindOSX

Hi guys.

I am trying to install Snow Leopard onto Acer Aspire One AOD250 that I just bought. It has Win7 starter and I want to have dual boot. I don't have access to MAC and I don't have external DVD drive. I was trying to follow mechdrew's guide, but the distro won't boot. It just boots into Win 7 like there is no bootable USB inserted.

Here is what I tried. I have a SnowyWindOSX distro and Hazard's distro. I tried to use both - no difference. I tried to use all 3 methods offered by mechdrew to make bootable USB's. All of them (imagewriter, dd with volume command prompt (alternative 1) and dd with harddisk command prompt (alternative 2)) give the same result - one small usb drive with about 48MB used and the rest unallocated and another large (I have 8 GB) with an image on it that I can't see from Windows.

Then I insert them into USB on the AOD250 (small drive closer to the power cord), press F12, choose to boot from either and nothing happens - it just boots into Win7 again.

I have BIOS v1.27, I don't see anything related to the legacy USB support or USB Wake up there.

Does anybody know what am I doing wrong?

Thanks a lot.

 

I figured out what the problem was. It turned out that ImageWriter created correct NBI image, but OSX image was created incorrectly (memory stick issue?). Alternative 2 method by mechdrew worked flawlessly!
I am so happy to see both Win 7 and OSX on my netbook!

However, I still can not figure out how to make it dual boot properly. It seems to work just fine if I boot from NBI flash drive. I have 4 choices there: Win 7, Acer Recovery, OSX and OSX installer (from another flash drive). But I can't make it boot from my HD. I tried to set the OSX partition active with fdisk and then install Chameleon in OSX - the only thing I get at reboot is black screen with blinking cursor - it does not boot into OSX for some reason. If I set Win 7 partition active, it boots into Windows just fine without any prompts but I can't boot OSX...

How do I make OSX boot from hard drive? Is there a way to transfer that bootloader from the flash drive onto HD?

Thanks.

 

I've seen that some of snowywindosx users reported that they do have sleep working.

Could somebody post his dsdt dump, so I can compile it for every distro/vanilla ?

I'm working on custom dsdt patch for AAO's, and sleep is the last thing I need to fix to make 100% vanilla AAO patch.

 

I don't have sleep working as of now... If I use menu or close lid it reboots. I have not tried NBI 0.8.4 yet...

Could someone, please, help me figure out how to make it boot properly. I am totally lost as how to make it work. I'll try to be more specific about the problem.

I have one harddrive (AAO D250, 250GB) with 4 partitions on it: 12 GB Recovery partition (recovery), 102 MB system reserved partition (primary), 147 GB NTFS partition with Win 7 (primary, boot) and 73 GB Partition with SnowyWindOSX (primary). I did not touch the first two ever and split the 3-rd for Win7 and OSX.

The only way to make Win 7 boot is to make system reserved partition active. Then Win 7 boots just fine, but I can't boot into OSX in any way. In Windows with Disk management or DISKPART:
If I make the 3-rd partition active I am getting the error BOOTMGR is missing Press cltr+alt+del to restart. If I make 1-st partition active, it boots into Acer eRecovery and offers to restore to factory default. DISKPART, however shows 5 partitions (1,2,3,0,4), where 0 is shown as Extended and 4 is shown as Logical. They are both 73 GB and Offset is 159GB for both (these are OSX, but why there are two partitions). I can not make either 0 or 4 active, because of an error "The specified partition is not a primary or logical volume".

The only way I can boot into OSX is to boot from NBI memory stick that I used for installation. In this case I have 4 choices: Acer eRecovery, System reserved, Windows and SnowyWindOSX. If I try to boot into Windows I get BOOTMGR is missing Press cltr+alt+del to restart. Options 1 and 2 boot acer recovery and Win 7 just fine. Option 4 boots OSX.

Now in OSX I tried to use NBI 0.8.3 and install Chameleon 2 NBI. It sees the target (SnowyWindOSX), it says that installation is fine, but nothing changes - I can not boot OSX at the beginning, and I can't see Chameleon. From terminal in OSX diskutil shows 2 disks (the HDD and memory stick that I use to boot OSX), HDD has 4 partitions (not 5) which are identified as disk0s1, disk0s2, disk0s3 and disk0s5 (4 is missing) with the last being OSX. I can flag the last partition as bootable (active), but then the only thing I get at the reboot is a blinking cursor and black screen. And the same thing again. 3-rd partition active - BOOTMGR is missing, 2-nd active - boots into Win7.

Please help me sort this out.

 

Solved. Not sure exactly what was wrong. I think that first I created OSX partition with Disk Management GUI and there was something wrong with it. Deleted the partition and recreated it with diskpart. Everything went fine. Tried Dalton63841's method with dsdt.aml file. Did not work. Could not boot anymore.

 

As some others have noted above: while OS X installs using this method, it kernel panics all the time (at least on an AOD250-1042).

 

I can share my experience installing SnowyWindOSX final on my Acer. So far I am very pleased with the distro and the way it works. It has been rock solid stable, almost everything works, it hasn't paniced a single time after complete install. But I understand that everyone's experience is different.
I have Acer Aspire One D250-1584 (model no. KAV60) with 250 GB 5400 rpm HD Atheros AR5B93 wireless chipset, 1GB RAM (533 Mhz (?)) The first install of OSX (when I partitioned HD incorrectly, see my post above) was very smooth, no KP at all. After install it booted fine, I intalled NBI_083F, it paniced once in the middle (while updating GMA950 graphics), I rebooted and then installed NBI without problems. After that I didn't test it much but tried to figure out how to put chameleon in place. After all I killed the partition again and reinstalled from beginning. This time I partitioned it correctly (4 parts: Recovery, System reserved, Win 7 and OSX). This time install of OSX was fine, but install of NBI was painful. It paniced about 10 times, but every time panic was later and later in the install process. I noticed that it helps if "nothing happens" during install. Don't let screen go black, don't insert or remove flash drives. etc. (probably just superstitions). Anyway, after the NBI install finally went through the system was solid stable. Not a single KP. Everything works so far except ethernet (Atheros AR8132 chip, solution would be very much appreciated), sleep (it just reboots, I tried dsdt.aml from another form and it just killed the entire system, I could not even boot into safe mode, so I reinstalled the entire OSX again; I also see clamshell.kext in the list of files and it does nothing; solution would be appreciated) and display mirroring (GMA950 chipset; external VGA works, jut mirroring causing problems). Atheros wireless WORKS FLAWLESSLY! I haven't seen anybody say it. I haven't tested MIC but it has controls working.

About Atheros chipset. In my experience it is by far THE BEST chipset anyone can wish for. It is draft n, has great sensitivity and transmit power. 1) In Win 7 you can change MAC within driver settings (many require 3-rd party software or do not allow at all). 2) It is fully supported in Backtrack 4 giving you endless possibilities of what you can do with it (if you don't need that all, it is just very well supported in Linux) 3) It works FLAWLESSLY OUT OF THE BOX with SnowyWindOSX (after NBI_083F, of course), works with VPN clients too. There is nothing I could wish for with this chipset that I don't have (external antenna connector)

I also did startup and shutdown benchmark against WIn 7. (I have the same soft installed on top of Win 7 and OSX, almost nothing so far..)
Guess who won...

Startup: Windows 7 (1 min 20 sec), OSX (35 sec)
Shutdown: Windows 7 (20-45 sec), OSX (3 (yes three!) sec)

Hopefully there will be solutions for those 3 very minor things that I mentioned. Actually Meklort could have included this netbook in the list of supported, because it already is. Maybe there are a lot of H/W configurations and I just have a favorable one for OSX, and others are not so...

 

Thanks to the great advice of people here, I was finally able to jump out of my osx 10.5.8 installation on my D250-1924 and move onto 10.6.2 via SnowyWindOSX . However, "sleep" has been an absolute nightmare. Even attempting to sleep from the main menu causes my machine to reboot, and go into this endless, continuous cycle of loading up (progress bar shown) with a dimmed screen and then rebooting. Non-stop, over and over again. Can't boot to single, can't boot via cpus=1, nada.

I'm reading here that people were able to get "sleep" going OOB. I never could, even when i installed the latest SleepEnabler.kext from Meklort. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

 

aspirefanatic:
Repair permissions using disk utility from your Leo install disk.

 

Seaniko7, thanks so much for the advice. Worked like a charm and got me back from the constant reboots! Might I ask what you or anyone did after a SnowyWindOSX install to get sleep working? I keep trying with different Sleepenabler.kext files but nothing works...

 

Not sure if this will help anyone or not. I have an AOD250 purchased a DW1510 Dell Wifi Card. Using this distro I got constant reboots.
Narrowed it down to IOATAFamily.kext once I deleted it it worked like a charm. I had to add a step though. I had to install SnowyWind to
a thumbdrive then remove it and using a windows computer ran transmac and removed the above kext from the System/Library/Extensions
folder. Once that was done, I installed to the hard drive like the directions. Then booted the thumbdrive into OSX edited the hard drive
removing the same kext. And it has worked flawless so far.

 

Nightsbird, I feel your input may be of use to me. I bought a DW1510 and installed in my D250. I did everything asper the directions, installed OSX but after the installation when I am asked to reboot I get a kernel panic precisely refering to IOATAFamily.kext.

I installed Transmac on a Windows PC and opened the ISO file looking for System/Library/Extensions folder to remove the kext and then burn a new DVD from that ISO but I couldn't find it. Is this what you meant or were you able to reboot after installation and then deleted the kext from the actual installation?

If you could maybe give me some more specifics I would very much appreciate. If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate also.

Thanks

 

anyone else get an install failed error? i thought i may have created a bad copy of the dvd so i burned another one but i still got the same error. i read somewhere that it could be some hardware conflict that's why i wanted to see if anyone else ran into this error. there were 2 sources to download snowwindosx from on that website, i used torrent to download on the copy i have but i'm trying to download the megaupload version and see if that works. but if any of you have any suggestions, please help. thanks.

 

Anyone had success getting sleep to work? I just got my D250 up to 10.6.4 this weekend and have everything working except sleep. I tried everything i could think of from mekhort (sp? ) blog and other stuff like sleepenable/ lid sleep/ etc etc.

Basically now i am running "insomiax" which essentially makes it so your machine CANT go to sleep even when you close the lid. That works for now, but i would obviously really prefer allowing my machine to sleep as it will get hot or if i dont have it plugged in the battery would drain right away. I like this better than closing the lid as that forces it to reboot and i am afraid if i keep doing that it will screw up my system? I love this machine but i really really want sleep!