You’ve picked your Kalyway or iATKOS OSX86 distribution, made all the preparations, so now it’s time to actually install it!

As a side note; as with my other OSX86 posts this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive walk-through. Instead I want to explain some of the things I learned and let you know more about the process. This way you’ll be in a better position to make the right choices yourself as you learn what’s actually happening.

This post is written from the point of view of using Kalyway, but if you’ve chosen iATKOS then don’t worry. The differences are minor and easy to figure out.

Warning!

Unless you’re very lucky it will take several install attempts to get a working system. I strongly recommend you try one package at a time until you find what works. E.g find the working CPU packages before you start selecting Video/network packages. Also be sure to keep track of which packages you have tried.

Beginning Setup

Place your patched Leopard DVD in the tray of your DVD drive, make sure “Boot from CD” is enabled in your BIOS, and restart your machine. When the machine restarts you should hear the DVD start to spin and see some text from Darwin, the OS X boot loader. After this you’ll be at a command prompt ready to start the setup.

(Note: All commands should be entered without “quotes”).

If you’re using Kalyway at this point you can type “vanilla” to test whether your hardware will run with an unmodified kernel. Mine doesn’t so I can’t tell you what a successful test looks like, but if your machine reboots itself the test failed

At the command prompt you can press enter to continue normally, or “-v” to switch to verbose startup where each step of the process is displayed on screen. Verbose is especially useful for diagnosing “Kernel Panic” problems, a situation where the kernel encounters an error during startup. We’ll talk more about this later.

Disk Preparation

After the initial OSX startup screens the first task is prepare the partition or disk where you’ll be installing OSX. This is done by using Disk Utility which is in the “Utilities” menu bar. If you are setting up a dual boot machine I’ll assume you’ve already created a separate partition as described in the preparations post and you can skip the next paragraph.

If you’re installing OSX on an empty disk then you must first create a partition table for the disk. The partition table  is what defines the layout of your disk and there are two choices,  “GUID” (Globally Unique Identifier) or MBR (Master Boot Record) table. You can think of a GUID table as being Mac-only so if you plan to dual-boot either now or later then you must choose an MBR table. To create a new partition table select the “Partition” tab and choose a new scheme (1/2/3/etc partitions). Make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and apply the changes. Note: This will erase all data on your disk. If you are setting up a dual boot follow the next paragraph instead.

If you’re installing onto an existing partition then you will need to format the target position to the Mac’s HFS+ (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) filesystem. If you’re reinstalling OSX make sure you still do this to prevent old files causing conflicts. To format a partition first select it the left hand list. The names you see here are likely to be entirely different from those you see in Windows/GParted etc so verify the information at the bottom of Disk Utility is as you’d expect. To perform the actual format click the “Erase” tab, choose a Volume Format of “Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and select “Erase”.

After you’ve got a freshly formatted Mac OS Extended partition, you can exit Disk Utility and return to the installation program.

Package Choices

Proceed through setup and look for the “Customize” button since this is how you select the packages needed to get OSX running on your PC. The exact packages you see will depend upon whether you’re running Kalyway or iATKOS, but they share a lot in common.

Vanilla kernel or not: You first package choice depends on whether you are able to run the Vanilla/Stock kernel or not. Only Core Duo chips have a chance of using the vanilla kernel. As mentioned above you can test this with the Kalyway DVD before starting setup, but with iATKOS you will have to try it and see.

If you choose the vanilla Kernel make sure you also choose the vanilla ACPI. Similarly, if you CANNOT run the vanilla Kernel, make sure BOTH the Kernel and ACPI packages are unchecked.

CPU Patches: There are two other packages that may be required to get a working machine; SSE2 and CPUPowerManagement. These are for CPUs which do not support SSE3 instructions, and for motherboards where the power management interface is sufficiently different that it causes problems.

In my experience the CPUPowerManagement package is often the cause of trouble for some machines. Don’t worry, if you need to disable it by installing should be able to fix power management later.

Driver Packages: Although there’s a good selection of drivers for ATI/NVidia cards, the selection of network and sound drivers are very sparse and you’ll likely have to install additional kext files after setup. Try and pick the correct package for your ATI / NVidia card based upon whether it’s desktop/laptop, and the amount of memory. My Geforce 8800 works perfectly with NVInject. Multi-monitor and hardware acceleration function fine in OSX (I was surprised, but delighted).

Boot Packages: To boot the system you will need a package that handles whether your drive is uses an MBR or GUID partition scheme. Some OSX86 installations will set this automatically for you, with others you must choose. If you are able to choose you must pick the package that corresponds to your choice in Disk Preparation. For most people, this will be MBR.

Installation and on!

At this point you should have selected all of the appropriate packages so continue through until setup begins. After setup completes your machine will reboot and you will end up with one of several results.

The next post in this little series will cover these problems in more detail and show how to achieve the result you want but I’ll briefly explain what you may see after install and what it means.

1) Your Windows/Linux login screen

You have a boot partition on your disk with another OS and this is being used instead of OSX while booting. As far as I know this can happen with iATKOS since it leaves your existing boot choice intact. To fix this you need to either configure dual-booting on your existing OS, or flag your OSX partition as the boot partition using something like GParted. When you have done this you may still encounter #3 or #4

2) The Leopard Startup video

(or if you left your machine for sometime, a screen which asks to help identify your keyboard)

This is great! It means your computer can boot and run OSX!

There’s a catch however - If you’ve just completed installation then the chances are your machine booted from DVD and the OSX installer found and booted your OSX disk partition. When you eject the disc you may still encounter #3 or #4.

3) A black screen with a blinking cursor or error message at the top left corner

This can happen when your OSX partition cannot be booted from. In my experience this can occur with Kalyway, or when trying to setup a dual-boot machine. To fix this you usually need to repair/set information on whichever partition you wish to boot from (e.g. Vista/OSX).

GParted will allow you to make this choice by setting the flags on a partition. If you find you can no longer boot from your original partition then you may need to repair the information it contains. How to do this depends on your OS, for Vista pop in your setup DVD and choose “Repair” during setup.

4) A machine which boots and either before or during the Apple startup reboots, then does this continually in a loop

This signifies a hardware incompatibility during the boot process. If your machine reboots before the Apple logo then it’s likely to be a kernel error, e.g. your machine cannot run the vanilla kernel. If it reboots during the Apple logo then it’s a Kernel Panic. Kernel Panics are when the kernel encountering a fatal error during startup.

If you enter -v at the boot prompt then each stage of the boot process will be displayed and if a kernel panic occurs the problem kext (Kernel Extension) will be displayed. This should help you identify the package involved (e.g. PowerManagement).

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Good luck, and don’t be disheartened if things don’t work the first time. It took me three or four attempts and a lot of Googling before I was rewarded by the Leopard startup video - and it then took several more hours of googling before I had things booting from disk instead of DVD