The personal blog of Jason Parks

This is a tutorial on how to install OS X 10.6 on a Dell Vostro 1510 and 1520. It is mostly for my own sake when I crash one of my laptops and cant find my Time Machine backup. There are actually quite a lot of tutorials out there on how to do this on various other hardware setups, however I had a hard time finding info about Vostros as Hackbooks. This is  surprising, as they are so similar to real Mac books. Hopefully others will benefit from the months of research and trial/error it took me to get these installs just right. The Dell Vostro 1510 and 1520 are almost perfectly matched to the specs of a Mac book Pro 15 with:

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T6670 (2.20GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)

15.4 inch WXGA Anti-Glare LED Display

3GB DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz, 2 DIMM

Integrated 1.3MP Webcam and Digital Mic

Dell Wirelessâ„¢ 1397 802.11b/g Mini Card

NVIDIA® GeForce™ 9300M GS 256MB

The most compelling reason to create a hackintosh instead of buying a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro is price. I purchased this laptop directly from Dell for aprox. $650.00 and if I had purchased the same specs directly from Apple, I would have payed over $2000.00

You will need the following:
1. Dell Vostro 1510 or 1520
2. A retail Snow Leopard Installation disk
3. Snowboot Boot disk available here or here
4. Either the 1510 or 1520 zip files which includes DSDT, boot.plist and all the kext files needed for a perfect install.
5. Chameleon boot loader available here

The first step is to burn the Snowboot iso to a cd. Then boot the Vostro from this disk. Once the system is booted and the drives are displayed, eject the boot disk and insert the retail Snow Leopard disk. Wait for the drive lights to stop flashing, and hit F5 to refresh the drive list. Select the installation disk and hit enter. Once the installer boots, select your language and the in  the upper menu bar select utilities, disk utility. Select your drive and partition with a single partition. You can name it anything you like as long as the volume name does not include spaces. I used MacintoshHD for my volume name. In the options tab select GUID partition table instead of MBR. Next allow the system to complete partitioning and exit the disk utility. Then complete the installation as usual. Once the installer completes and the system reboots, replace the installation disk with the snowboot disk and reboot. When the drive list menu shows up select the volume you installed SnowLeo to (MacintoshHD) and boot. At this point you should be able to see the welcome screen. Go thru the rest of the installation process and user creation. Once the installer completes and it boots to your desktop, copy the 1510 or 1520 zip file and the chameleon installer to your desktop. Run the chameleon installer and make sure it is installing to the correct drive. (MacintoshHD) Then extract the correct zip file to your desktop. Next we do the following:

1. Copy the files in /Vostro1510/Extra or Vostro 1520/Extra to /Extra on MacintoshHD

2. Copy com.Apple.Boot.plist to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.Apple.Boot.plist overwriting the one that is already there.

3. Copy dsdt.aml to root of MacintoshHD

4. Delete /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext

5. Delete /System/Library/Extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext

6. Copy VoodooPower.kext VoodooHDA.kext and VoodooPS2Controller.kext to /System/Library/Extensions/

7. Delete /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Keyboard.prefpane

8. Copy included Keyboard.prefpane and Trackpad.prefpane to /System/Library/PreferencePanes/

9. Run Kext Utility to repair all extension permissions and create the necessary kext caches.

10. Run disk utility and repair permissions for your Snow Leopard volume (MacintoshHD)

11. Reboot into a working 32 bit Snow Leopard

12. Enable QE/CI for your graphics card. If you have a Intel Graphics adapter it “SHOULD” just work. On my Vostro 1520 I have a Nvidia GEForce 9350M GS which works correctly with the included com.Apple.Boot.plist that has the kernel flag for graphics enabler turned on. Otherwise search Google for a supported enabler for your setup.

13. All that’s left to do now is enable the wireless card with the included shell script(drag on a terminal window and follow instructions) reboot and run software update……

Currently I have everything working except the media card reader and the integrated biometric finger print scanner.

***Please note:

For support using this guide, please refer to the insanely mac forum located HERE

***Update 10.6.2 breaks wireless, simply rerun the broadcom script in the zip file and then rerun kext tool and reboot.

Apparently the Vostro 1510 works WITHOUT a DSDT.aml file so ignore that portion of the tutorial if you DO have a 1510

I did NOT create or modify the included files or utilities. I simply collected them from around the net and packaged them in the included zip files for the sake of convenience. Thanks to all who DID create the included files and tools without which none of this would be possible.

I DID purchase a legitimate copy of OS X 10.6

While I am mostly writing this so I can remember how the next time I hose my laptop, hopefully this will serve as a guide for those with similar hardware. Let me start out by saying that I have purchased a full version copy of OS X Leopard. Here are My system specs:

The laptop itself is pretty sweet, with the exception of the graphics card and chipset which are very difficult to find kext files for.

I started out by installing Zephyroth 10.5.1 which is the ONLY version of Leopard I could install without getting the dreaded “Still waiting for root device” error. You can find this version on the web if you know where to look. If you don’t know where to look, you probably have no business installing OS X in the first place. In order to boot from the install disk we have to change some things in the bios first. Boot the laptop and hit f10 to enter the bios. Once there go into the security tab and create a boot password. We have to do this because for some reason the motherboard needs a few extra seconds to load the hfs+ partition or else you will receive “cannot parse com.apple.Boot.plist” error. Once this is done, hit f10 to save changes and reboot. At the Darwin boot prompt hit f8 and boot with -v for verbose mode. Once the install disk is loaded, choose your language and the select utilities, and the disk tool. Partition your drive you intend on using with the default options of HFS+ with journaling and naming it MacintoshHD. Go into the options and make sure it is using MBR, if not change it, select ok and then ok again to partition. After the disk utility finishes, close out and install using the default options. Once the install reaches “about a minute left” it will stall. You can tell it has stalled because the drive activity light stops showing any activity. Shutdown the computer by holding the power button, reboot to the install disk and finish the install with all the same options. Do not repartition. The install will finish very quickly this time because it only has another 150 mb to install. After finishing the installer will reboot the computer, but we are not done yet. The installer was unable make the partition bootable, as well as installing the wrong keyboard and mouse kext files. Reboot to the install disk and after selecting your language, select utilities and open the terminal. From there enter the following command {cp -R /System/Library/Extensions/applePS2Controller.kext
/Volumes/MacintoshHD/System/Library/Extensions/applePS2Controller.kext} and hit enter. This copies the correct kext files to your installed drive.
Then type {fdisk -e /dev/hda0} “assuming you installed to your primary harddrive” if you installed to your slave then it would be /dev/hda1 etc. after you hit enter your comand prompt will change to fdisk> type update hit enter. Then type f1 and hit enter “assuming you installed to your first partition” then type w and hit enter again. You will receive a warning saying it could not access drive exclusivly. This is ok, type y to continue and then enter q to quit the fdisk utility. then type reboot and hit enter. After rebooting you should hit f8 again and boot with the -v flag. Now you should be able to go through the set up process and create your user, timezone, password etc. Once you complete this process you should have a pretty well working Leopard install with a few exceptions. To fix the resolution, I used the Katana installer (included in the install files below) which includes Callisto v3. I then installed the pcmcia slot by using the PC Card 10.5.2 beta 3 installer, which you can find at forum.insanelymac.com. Now you should have a completly working install including full resolution and working pcmcia card slot. In order to get scrolling to work with the synaptics touchpad, go back into the terminal and type
{ rm – Rf /System/Library/Extensions/applePS2Controller.kext/Contents/Plugins/
applePS2Trackpad.kext}. Then using the OSX86 tools which you can find by googling , repair the permissions, repair extension permissions, delete kextcache and touch extensions folder. Once this process completes, you will have a perfectly working install which we are about to break!!! In order to update, I used the 4minds 10.5.4 combo updater which is already patched for AMD processors. Before we can run this though, we HAVE to install a fake EFI bootloader. I used the newest version of Chameleon Bootloader. Just install to your MacintoshHD volume and reboot. You can find both Chameleon and the 4minds combo updater on the web. Google is our friend!!! After installing the 10.5.4 update, my keyboard and trackpad could not be found, no matter what I did. I tried replacing with the 10.5.1 applePS2Controller to no avail. I ended up using the PS2keyboardfix.pkg from a 10.5.6 iPC disk I had lying around. I also installed the ACPIfix, PowerManagement fix and Batterymanager from the same disk. after this I installed the 10.5.5 update called “Modified-PKG-2008-September-15″ This updated me to 10.5.5, but now my Bluetooth doesnt work, and I cant connect to network shares. I searched for hours for a fix to the network share issue, and finally came across a forum post that solved it for me. The problem is that in /System/Library/Filesystems there is a symbolic link that points to the incorrect kext file. Open the terminal, which along with google, is our BFF and enter the following commands.
{cd /System/Library/Filesystems (hit enter)}
{rm afpfs.fs (hit enter)}
{ ln -s /System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare/afpfs.kext afpfs.fs (hit enter) }
now reboot, and you should be fully functional!!!! (with the exception of bluetooth which I am still working on.)

Install Files including all kext’s and Katana installer can be found HERE