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Asus P5N7A-VM

DiaboliK

By DiaboliK,
in OSx86 10.5 (Leopard)

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dgsga
dgsga
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Okay guys, here's all the files I've used for my installation as well as the procedure I used. Its simply for your testing purpose and I take no credit in this since all the files were collected either from this thread or somewhere else on this forum. Proper credit belongs to DiaboliK, freshcocoa, dgsga and many many others. Also please DON'T take this as a guide, as this installation is not perfect, I'm still having the following problems:

 

1. According to dgsga, I shouldn't be needing all these kexts after flashing in his BIOS, so I'm still trying to figure that out (waiting to see if dgsga would shed some light on this).

 

2. Although you don't need NVKush to have a working installation of SL, I'm having problem with choppy graphics performance and NVKush solved that problem for me, however, with NVKush installed it limits me to use only 32bit mode.

 

 

So here it goes.

 

1. Put the new BIOS rom under the root of a NTFS or a FAT32 drive in your machine (windows's C drive is a good candidate). Restart the computer and press ALT+F2 to get into ASUS EZ-Flash, locate the BIOS rom file and flash it to your board. (Please take caution with flashing BIOS, if the flashing process is interrupted in anyway it could result in a dead board)

 

2. Follow freshcocoa's tutorial, create a USB Snow Leopard installation drive. when you reach the part where he tells you to create the "extra" and "extensions" folders, all you need is "fakesmc.kext" inside the "Extensions" folder. With the new BIOS you just flashed in, DSDT.aml is not needed.

 

3. Reboot and press DEL at boot to go into BIOS setup. make sure the following is set:

A- Under "Storage Configuration" make sure SATA Mode is set to "AHCI Mode"

B- Advanced ->MCP7A make sure frame buffer size is set to 256MB (or less)

C- Under USB Configuration, make sure USB 2.0 Controller is ENABLE while controller mode is FULL SPEED

D- Go to USB Mass Storage Device Configuration and set your thumb drive's emulation mode to Hard drive

Set your USB flash drive to the first boot device in the boot order and save and exit.

 

4. Keep following freshcocoa's guide on installation from USB drive.

 

5. Once your installation is finished and booted into Snow Leopard, follow freshcocoa's guide on installing Chameleon on your hard drive. (NOTE: UNPLUG YOUR USB DRIVE BEFORE YOU PERFORM THE INSTALLATION, for some unknown reason, having two different drives on the machine with Chameleon installed cause problem with one of them turning unbootable, maybe its just me)

 

6. Create Extra/Extensions on your root hard drive, and put fake.smc into Extensions folder, smbios.plist into Extra folder.

 

7. Install kext utility into your Utilities folder, and start dragging the following kext onto kext utility (you have to do it one by one, just be patient)

-LegacyAppleHDA.kext

-IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext

-OpenHaltRestart.kext

 

8. install JMicronATADriver.dmg

 

9. Open Terminal and enter the following command

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/
MacOS/TextEdit /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
/com.apple.Boot.plist

above command should be all one line, the line breaks here are due to forum formating

it will ask you for your password, type it in and hit enter. It should open the com.apple.boot.plist file in text editor so you can edit default boot flags.

First lets set the graphics mode to match your screen's native resolution, so when you boot up, the boot screen will also be in the proper resolution, give you a more Apple factory feel :o

Add the following lines

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1920x1680x32</string>

make sure you replace the resolution with your monitor's native resolution.

Optionally, if you will be installing NVKush, insert the following as well:

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=i386</string>

This will make your machine to boot into 32bit kernel by default.

 

10. reboot, and if you want to install NVKush, now is the time to do it. after installation, reboot again and if everything goes according to plan, you should have a stable working Hacintosh now.

 

 

 

Notes:

- I've read it somewhere on this thread saying that only the two black ports on the motherboard is really AHCI compatible, but just for the sake of experiment I've put both of my hard drive (SL and Win7) into SATA1 and SATA2, its been working without a problem so far.

 

Hope your installation goes well, and please share any problems you've encountered or any new discovery, like I said above, this installation is not perfect yet, and I'm just hoping by sharing our findings and problems, we could eventually get a perfect working setup, and I could put up a detailed tutorial for this board, lastly, don't thank me, I don't deserve any credit on this, without the great help and experience from the experts on this forum there is nothing I can do.

 

Organizing information and writing guides is about the only thing I'm capable of doing to give something back to this forum.

 

 

Here is the download link for all the files InstallationFiles.zip

 

Hi!

 

Not sure why your'e having the choppy graphics as I've made sure the GFX entry in the bios DSDT table is using the correct values for NVCAP etc. Are you using the MacMini smbios.plist as this Mac Model is closest in spec to the Asus board, and will ensure that power management is working correctly including with graphics. Fixed a problem with choppy audio for me. The Apple JMicronATA kext only works in 32-bit mode, maybe this will be fixed in future editions of SL. Sorry I can't be of more help!

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2006C6
2006C6
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Quick question - is there anyway for dual monitor support without NVKush etc or strings with stevenmaclover's install?

 

Also had full shut down - I then installed the strings for my 8800 GT 512mb card (to get dual monitors) then the 10.6.1 update - no longer have shut down :) I re-installed the kexts as per stevenmaclover instructions after the update - still no shutdown

 

ideas?

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stevenmaclover
stevenmaclover
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Hi!

 

Not sure why your'e having the choppy graphics as I've made sure the GFX entry in the bios DSDT table is using the correct values for NVCAP etc. Are you using the MacMini smbios.plist as this Mac Model is closest in spec to the Asus board, and will ensure that power management is working correctly including with graphics. Fixed a problem with choppy audio for me. The Apple JMicronATA kext only works in 32-bit mode, maybe this will be fixed in future editions of SL. Sorry I can't be of more help!

 

First of all, thanks for the kind reply,

 

I'm not sure how heavy do you use your hacintosh, because the choppy graphics is not noticeable if you just open iTunes and listen to music ;D

 

Try to keep on hitting CMD + N to open a whole bunch of finder window, arrange them randomly so they don't just stay in one pile but all over the screen, now try to minimize a few of those window, the minimizing animation gets choppy for me when I did this. like I said, I'm no expert on BIOS, so I'm not sure if my flash is indeed successful, is there a way I can tell if it succeeded? when I flashed it with Ez-Flash, I didn't get any error message, but when I rebooted and enter BIOS setup, all my settings were there unchanged, I know those are suppose to be stored in CMOS and not the BIOS, but just for the fact that everything is left unchanged makes me wonder if I really have a successful flash.

 

Again, thanks for the great work!!

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chris_rock
chris_rock
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I am using dgsga's mod bios and nearly everything seems to work perfectly for me. Thanks to all of you who made this possible.

However..I have issues changing the resolution. Everytime I change resolution in system preferences a blue screen appears.

Also games started with a resolution different from the resolution set in system preferences (1920*1080) turn into a black screen.

My monitor (HP 2309m) is connected via DVI. Is the NVCAP wrong for me? Any hints?

Thanks

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Joao Santos
Joao Santos
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Posted
I am using dgsga's mod bios and nearly everything seems to work perfectly for me. Thanks to all of you who made this possible.

However..I have issues changing the resolution. Everytime I change resolution in system preferences a blue screen appears.

Also games started with a resolution different from the resolution set in system preferences (1920*1080) turn into a black screen.

My monitor (HP 2309m) is connected via DVI. Is the NVCAP wrong for me? Any hints?

Thanks

 

What games are you trying to run?

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dgsga
dgsga
Posted
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@ stevenmaclover

 

Sounds like your bios did flash correctly, CMOS is only reset if you are flashing a different bios version. Just going from, say, 514 to 514 will not affect CMOS.

 

NVCAP value in DSDT was extracted from the NVIDIA ROM which is itself part of the bios. The bios I posted recently supports dual monitors and does not need any extra graphics enablers. Remember that I have not put a DSDT entry for a second graphics card in the PCIE slot as I don't have one.

 

Tried your suggestion and all seems smooth. Remember that the embedded graphics in the mobo shares memory with the system itself. It has no memory of its own and will never perform as well as a discrete PCIE graphics card. You could try overclocking the IGPU in the bios....

 

Cheers

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savestheday
savestheday
Posted
Posted
I am using dgsga's mod bios and nearly everything seems to work perfectly for me. Thanks to all of you who made this possible.

However..I have issues changing the resolution. Everytime I change resolution in system preferences a blue screen appears.

Also games started with a resolution different from the resolution set in system preferences (1920*1080) turn into a black screen.

My monitor (HP 2309m) is connected via DVI. Is the NVCAP wrong for me? Any hints?

Thanks

 

I had a similar problem with Animantium's DSDT....anytime I switched away from the source and back, it was just a blue screen. I fixed it by using FrodoKenny's video section in his DSDT and importing it into Aniantium's.

 

Since dgsga's method doesn't use a DSDT, you may need to ask him how he did it. I was going to flash with his BIOS but now you're giving me 2nd thoughts!!!

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dgsga
dgsga
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I had a similar problem with Animantium's DSDT....anytime I switched away from the source and back, it was just a blue screen. I fixed it by using FrodoKenny's video section in his DSDT and importing it into Aniantium's.

 

Since dgsga's method doesn't use a DSDT, you may need to ask him how he did it. I was going to flash with his BIOS but now you're giving me 2nd thoughts!!!

 

Hi!

 

I'm puzzled why we don't all get the same results with the same bios or DSDT etc. I used a little app called NVCAP Maker to extract the NVCAP value from the nvidia 9300 rom embedded in the bios. Other values in the graphics section of the DSDT are the same as in Frodokenny's. Have attached the DSDT.dsl I used to mod the 512 bios with, maybe this will help? Ive used this bios with single and dual monitors without problems. Weird.... :robot:

DSDT.dsl.zip

NVCAP_Maker_1.4.zip

9300.rom.zip

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chris_rock
chris_rock
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Hi!

 

I'm puzzled why we don't all get the same results with the same bios or DSDT etc. I used a little app called NVCAP Maker to extract the NVCAP value from the nvidia 9300 rom embedded in the bios. Other values in the graphics section of the DSDT are the same as in Frodokenny's. Have attached the DSDT.dsl I used to mod the 512 bios with, maybe this will help? Ive used this bios with single and dual monitors without problems. Weird.... :)

 

..connected my monitor via VGA and now I've neither problems changing the resolution nor experienced the problem with games. It's really confusing :)

Did you try single monitor via DVI?

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stevenmaclover
stevenmaclover
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@ stevenmaclover

 

Sounds like your bios did flash correctly, CMOS is only reset if you are flashing a different bios version. Just going from, say, 514 to 514 will not affect CMOS.

 

NVCAP value in DSDT was extracted from the NVIDIA ROM which is itself part of the bios. The bios I posted recently supports dual monitors and does not need any extra graphics enablers. Remember that I have not put a DSDT entry for a second graphics card in the PCIE slot as I don't have one.

 

Tried your suggestion and all seems smooth. Remember that the embedded graphics in the mobo shares memory with the system itself. It has no memory of its own and will never perform as well as a discrete PCIE graphics card. You could try overclocking the IGPU in the bios....

 

Cheers

 

okay, I'm not going to give up here....

 

I've re-flasehd my BIOS again with your later upload, the one label P5N7A.ROM instead of the old one I had (FINAL_SLIC.ROM), stripped nvkush.kext and rebuilt my mkext, reboot. Open 8 finder windows spread across the screen and hit SHIFT-OPTION and click on one of them's minimize button, this minimize everything in slow-motion, and again it was choppy, I just have no idea what's wrong here, is there a possibility that there are actually different revision of the same board? I'm going to try re-installing my whole OS X with a new SL image, see if that make any difference....

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General_Cartman
General_Cartman
Posted
Posted
FYI: 10.6.2 works

sleep works

 

analog audio didn't work. needed to install appleHDA to enable analog sound.

 

Using 10.6.2 here, but as I'm using LegacyAppleHDA.kext from my USB boot loader I didn't need to do a thing. Updated just like a real mac.

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GuyToronto
GuyToronto
Posted
Posted

Just last night, finally upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.1. Got it all to work. Then 10.6.2 arrived, so I did that upgrade.

 

Now audio DOESN'T work. Tried reinstalling the AppleHDA in the Extras folder. Ran the Kext Utility. Tried a couple different dsdt.aml files. Nothing.

 

My system profiler:

Intel High Definition Audio:

Device ID: 0x104382FE

Audio ID: 12

Available Devices:

 

NOTHING

 

My extensions

 

root/Extra

- com.apple.Boot.plist (have -v flag 'cause I like verbose mode)

- DSDT.aml (I believe the one I'm using right now is from the Freshcocoa blog)

- Extensions.mkext (have deleted and rebuilt this every time I change something)

 

root/Extra/Extensions

- AHCIPortInjector.kext

- AppleHDA.kext (dated Aug 14, 2009 from Freshcocoa blog)

- ATAPortInjector.kext (wondering if I even need this, since only using SATA, no ATA)

- Disabler.kext

- fakesmc.kext

- IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext

 

Bootloader

- used Chameleon RC2 then replaced root boot file with Netkas PC EFI v10.5

 

Any help? Suggestions as to what to try? Not a huge deal, as I have USB audio speakers as a backup.

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Joao Santos
Joao Santos
Posted
Posted
Just last night, finally upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.1. Got it all to work. Then 10.6.2 arrived, so I did that upgrade.

 

Now audio DOESN'T work. Tried reinstalling the AppleHDA in the Extras folder. Ran the Kext Utility. Tried a couple different dsdt.aml files. Nothing.

 

My system profiler:

Intel High Definition Audio:

Device ID: 0x104382FE

Audio ID: 12

Available Devices:

 

NOTHING

 

My extensions

 

root/Extra

- com.apple.Boot.plist (have -v flag 'cause I like verbose mode)

- DSDT.aml (I believe the one I'm using right now is from the Freshcocoa blog)

- Extensions.mkext (have deleted and rebuilt this every time I change something)

 

root/Extra/Extensions

- AHCIPortInjector.kext

- AppleHDA.kext (dated Aug 14, 2009 from Freshcocoa blog)

- ATAPortInjector.kext (wondering if I even need this, since only using SATA, no ATA)

- Disabler.kext

- fakesmc.kext

- IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext

 

Bootloader

- used Chameleon RC2 then replaced root boot file with Netkas PC EFI v10.5

 

Any help? Suggestions as to what to try? Not a huge deal, as I have USB audio speakers as a backup.

 

Do you use the modded bios by dgsga?

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General_Cartman
General_Cartman
Posted
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use the modded bios with the attached LegacyAppleHDA.kext installed into your extra and that will allow you to use the vanilla AppleHDA.kext. I'm running 10.6.2 with the onboard sound working fine using that method.

 

DGSGA - I notice AHCI port injections isn't functioning correctly on your bios. Without using AHCIportinjector.kext by AHCI controllers are listed as unknown in system profiler.

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dgsga
dgsga
Posted
Posted
use the modded bios with the attached LegacyAppleHDA.kext installed into your extra and that will allow you to use the vanilla AppleHDA.kext. I'm running 10.6.2 with the onboard sound working fine using that method.

 

DGSGA - I notice AHCI port injections isn't functioning correctly on your bios. Without using AHCIportinjector.kext by AHCI controllers are listed as unknown in system profiler.

 

 

Thanks for pointing this out!

 

Am not at P5N7A at the moment but will post fixed bios ASAP!

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savestheday
savestheday
Posted
Posted
use the modded bios with the attached LegacyAppleHDA.kext installed into your extra and that will allow you to use the vanilla AppleHDA.kext. I'm running 10.6.2 with the onboard sound working fine using that method.

 

DGSGA - I notice AHCI port injections isn't functioning correctly on your bios. Without using AHCIportinjector.kext by AHCI controllers are listed as unknown in system profiler.

 

If you open the Audio Midi app and choose the digital out, does it show Encoded Digital Audio in the drop down on the right? If not, it's not passing DTS through.

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savestheday
savestheday
Posted
Posted
Thanks for pointing this out!

 

Am not at P5N7A at the moment but will post fixed bios ASAP!

 

So I completely reimaged my HTPC box last night using your BIOS and kexts and everything is working flawlessly! Thank you!

 

I can confirm the SATA stuff is missing tho it's not a big deal since I don't think it affects performance.

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dgsga
dgsga
Posted
Posted
So I completely reimaged my HTPC box last night using your BIOS and kexts and everything is working flawlessly! Thank you!

 

I can confirm the SATA stuff is missing tho it's not a big deal since I don't think it affects performance.

 

Here is the updated bios with fixed SATA device-id. Thanx to all on this thread!

P5N7AV2.ROM.zip

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