Kakewalk: Minimal effort install (EP45, EX58, P55, G41)

[studio217]

anyone?

[Ahbond]

Hi All,

 

I'm having trouble installing with Kakewalk and have been trying it for almost a week. I miss my Aperture 3!!!

 

Kakewalk has been working fine for me when i'm using a 9400GT 512mb.

 

Apparently, i have to change my gfx to 9600GS 768mb as i need to return the 9400GT to my friend.

 

When i'm trying to install it with Kakewalk USB or CD, dark screen appears after the apple boot screen.

 

This is my current setup.

 

i7 920

9GB ram

Geforce 9600GS 768mb

Gigabyte EX58-UD4P

 

Appreciate if any kind soul out there can help me on this.

 

Thanks

Ahbond

[boombari]

I have the blank screen (no signal on monitor) on a 8800GTX !

 

I use Kakewalk ISO Version on boot, i try -x, but nothing.

 

What's the problem ?

[balthisar]

Just wanted to report a success on my first ever Hackintosh.

 

Gigabyte EP45T-UD3LR, 4GB, Intel 2.93 Ghz Core2 duo.

Gigabyte GT240 1GB

10.6.0 Retail

LG Blu Ray

Various SATA hard drives from the previous hardware in this box (ext3).

 

Unconfirmed: Digital Audio Outp. I'll confirm this in the next few days when I pick up my AVR.

 

Here's my brief, step-by-step (with problems and resolutions):

• Made bootable thumb drive per the instructions.
  
• Encountered black screen after the Apple logo at bootup.
  
• Googled, searched forums, etc., and learned to set "GraphicsEnabler" to "No" in the /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist.
  
• Installed OS X 10.6.0.
  
• Black screen on reboot.
  
• Don't do what I did: tried settings GraphicsEnabler in /Library/Preferences/SystemSettings/com.apple.Boot.plist, tried settings from EFI Studio, all to no avail.
  
• Do this: set GraphicsEnabler is the /Extra folder on the Mac volume.
  
• About This Mac... shows 2.23 GHz. Re-check package, should be 2.93 GHz. Change clock multiplier in BIOS from 8x to 11x (anyone know the "safety" of this? All past builds have had the right clock frequency automatically). Now runs at correct speed.
  
• Upgraded to 10.6.4, which recognizes my video card natively.
  
• Change /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist GraphicsEnabler back to Yes to enable Quartz Extreme.
  
• Unplugged the CRT monitor DB25, and connected to the 1080p set via HDMI. Works great. NO audio over HDMI.
  
• No audio period.
  
• Don't do this: a few pages back are instructions for enabling audio in 10.6.4. They didn't work.
  
• Do this: All that was needed was the kext from http://www.kexts.com/view/408-alc888_hd_audio_10.6.4.html (follow the instructions there).
  
• At this point, audio works with the earphones. I still need to see if the coax output works.
  
• Used Mac Fuse and fuse-ext to get the old stuff off the ext3 drives.
  
• Created a Mac software mirrored RAID pair on two of the non-boot drives.
  
• Currently copying a terabyte of data to same!
  
• BD mounts CD's and DVD's. I don't actually own any Blu Ray disks to test. About This Mac... indicates burning is supported, but I know that Mac OS doesn't support Blu Ray burning. I've read that Mac OS doesn't support Blu Ray ripping unless the drive is a burner, so I have a burner despite a need to burn on this machine.
  

[studio217]

Ok, I seem to have narrowed this down to what may be another issue.

I found that if I keep my apogee ensemble firewire sound device plugged in with EIST enabled I have the sound, if I unplug the apogee unit then the sound goes away, or if I disable the EIST function and leave it plugged in, but it cannot be both, and I would'nt mind just disabling the EIST and be good to go, but that Geekbench score dropping by almost 50% seems not right to me, so in conclusion it may be firewire/ESIT combination. Any ideas? Thanks again.

[balthisar]

Confirmed: no digital output neither via the optical nor the coax.

Oops, wrong. I guess it worked all along. Silly me for not knowing how the new receiver works with digital inputs.

[asmir6980]

Hi.

 

I am new to this hackintosh thing.

I have GA EP45-UD3LR board

Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6ghz

2gb ddr2

500gb HD

geforce 9500

Sata DVD-RW.

I have been trying to instal OSX with kakewalk but without luck.

I get KP on the apple loading screen telling me to restart my PC.

I cant even get to the instaler.

 

Can some one please point me to the right bios setings for this board.

 

Thank you very much in advance

[ProjectY]

Hi.

I am new to this hackintosh thing.

I have GA EP45-UD3LR board

Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6ghz

2gb ddr2

500gb HD

geforce 9500

Sata DVD-RW.

I have been trying to instal OSX with kakewalk but without luck.

I get KP on the apple loading screen telling me to restart my PC.

I cant even get to the instaler.

Can some one please point me to the right bios setings for this board.

Thank you very much in advance

Hi asmir6980

The information that you require is in the Guide that came with the installer (Kakewalk)

Ray

[asmir6980]

Hi asmir6980

The information that you require is in the Guide that came with the installer (Kakewalk)

Ray

Hi.

Thanks for the quick response.

My bios setings are same as in the guide but when it comes to the apple logo with the spining circle a get KP and is telling me to restart my pc.

 

Br:asmir6980

[ProjectY]

Hi.

Thanks for the quick response.

My bios setings are same as in the guide but when it comes to the apple logo with the spining circle a get KP and is telling me to restart my pc.

Br:asmir6980

Hi asmir6980

If you are using The Usb Install then Try the CD Install and vice versa.

Are you using MacOS 10.6.0 Retail ? and not an installer for another mac.

Thats about as far as i can go.

Ray

[zreon]

Great work on this! I can't believe how easy it is to install OS X nowadays. I had leopard installed about a year ago but I updated it and broke it then decided to give Windows 7 a try. I still had my macbook though and decided recently to go back to a mac for my desktop. Just updated it tonight to 10.6.4 with the automatic combo update and it worked flawlessly! Sound works and everything. Here are my specs:

 

Q6600 (stock settings for now)

Gigabyte EP45-UD3P

EVGA 9800 GTX

 

It sure does feel good to be back

[blackstripes]

I've successfully installed Snow Leopard to my machine using this software/guide, but I would now like to set up a RAID 5 array. Will I have any issues doing this? Am I going to have to get a separate controller card? Here is my setup:

 

GA-EP45-UD3R

Q6600

4GB Ram

[tubbiesss]

Hi,

I have a new system coming sometime this wk. Specs are as follows:

 

Intel Core i7 930 2.88 Ghz

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R

Corsair DDR3 Dominator 6GB (3X2G) CMP6GX3M3A1600C8

MSI Radeon HD 5970 2GB DDR5

2x WDC 150GB 10000RPM Velociraptor

WDC 1TB SATA3 64MB - Caviar Black

Auzentech X-Fi Forte 7.1

Corsair HX Series 850W

Asus DVD RW 24X

 

I'm trying to put the 2 raptors on Raid 0, then have a 100gb partition to install Windows 7 first, and the remaining 200gb for Snow Leopard (perhaps with Parallels)

I am in need of help on how to approach with the Raid. Bare in mind, I have never had any Raid experience and my knowledge only extends to my current system which is a decade old Pentium4

Would appreciate any help. Cheers.

[Going Bald]

Hi,

I have a new system coming sometime this wk. Specs are as follows:

 

Intel Core i7 930 2.88 Ghz

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R

Corsair DDR3 Dominator 6GB (3X2G) CMP6GX3M3A1600C8

MSI Radeon HD 5970 2GB DDR5

2x WDC 150GB 10000RPM Velociraptor

WDC 1TB SATA3 64MB - Caviar Black

Auzentech X-Fi Forte 7.1

Corsair HX Series 850W

Asus DVD RW 24X

 

I'm trying to put the 2 raptors on Raid 0, then have a 100gb partition to install Windows 7 first, and the remaining 200gb for Snow Leopard (perhaps with Parallels)

I am in need of help on how to approach with the Raid. Bare in mind, I have never had any Raid experience and my knowledge only extends to my current system which is a decade old Pentium4

Would appreciate any help. Cheers.

 

Why do you want to raid the Velociraptor HDDs? especially raid 0 (from Wikipedia ...Not a "True" RAID because it is NOT fault-tolerant. The failure of just one drive will result in all data in an array being lost. Should never be used in mission critical environments.) I would consider my OS drives as "mission critical" and put Win7 on one drive and SL on the other. Then get a couple more 1TB drives and do a raid 1 or raid 5 on them for storage (minimum 2 drives for raid 1, minimum 3 drives for raid 5 - personally, if I was doing video or photo editing I would use raid 5 or get a 4th drive and do raid 6 for faster access to files and better recovery if you lose a drive)

[starobrno1]

Hey guys I´m installing SL with the Kakewalk CD on my X58A-UD3R, i7 930 cpu, Corsair Dominator Extreme Edition memory. One things confusing me what the heck do I set the memory speed to in bios? I mean the cpu can´t handle 1600, not what it say in the specs anyway. If I want to OC it I guess it might be good running them at 1600 but as long as I don´t do I gain anything by doing it?

 

I´m a bit worried bout the DSDT in the Kakewalk CD seems it´s modified for videosupport and I want to use my two good old 7300gs 512 pcie cards and my NVinject.kext that works so good with these cards. I´ve already had it up running with a CCC harddrive so I know it works but that was a clone from another install with another DSDT.aml (I booted with the Kakewalk CD). Is it the usuall graphics enabler=no in the plist?

 

(Install is about to finnish now, cool to see if it works.)

 

I´m greatfull for any help I can get

Thanks from Sweden

 

No it did not work I get video probs black screen when its rebooting, gonna see if I can remove that DSDT with my other hack.

[macsys]

Hi folks,

 

is it possible to use the kakewalk-CD for my motherboard

Gigabyte EP 45 DS4 ?

 

thx

[tubbiesss]

Why do you want to raid the Velociraptor HDDs? especially raid 0 (from Wikipedia ...Not a "True" RAID because it is NOT fault-tolerant. The failure of just one drive will result in all data in an array being lost. Should never be used in mission critical environments.) I would consider my OS drives as "mission critical" and put Win7 on one drive and SL on the other. Then get a couple more 1TB drives and do a raid 1 or raid 5 on them for storage (minimum 2 drives for raid 1, minimum 3 drives for raid 5 - personally, if I was doing video or photo editing I would use raid 5 or get a 4th drive and do raid 6 for faster access to files and better recovery if you lose a drive)

Thank you for the reply.

It sounded like a pretty solid idea when purchasing the 2 drives. Thought the speed boost was worth the risk and I can't seem to remember when a drive has failed on me *knocks wood*. But I never had any experience with the velociraptors though. Current rig is using an old 75gb raptor but I'd assume I shouldn't compare the 2 drives.

Thank you also for the RAID 5 suggestion, but I don't think I'd be needing a raid on my storage drive. I was aiming to just get faster boot, and hopefully faster application loading time. Plus I only have 5 slots on my CM Sniper case, and I don't plan on filling all of them; 2 velocis, 1TB caviar black, and I plan on placing 1 of the drives from my old system, and leave the top most drive bay empty for the 5970 to breath.

Would it be a really grave mistake to risk the 2 OSs (or rather 3 including Parallels) installed on a RAID 0?

[binh514]

Hi everyone

 

I lost my sound after I put d00d's DSDT in 10.6.4 does someone know how to fix this ? The green jack doesn't work but the rear ( black ) works.

[Going Bald]

Thank you for the reply.

It sounded like a pretty solid idea when purchasing the 2 drives. Thought the speed boost was worth the risk and I can't seem to remember when a drive has failed on me *knocks wood*. But I never had any experience with the velociraptors though. Current rig is using an old 75gb raptor but I'd assume I shouldn't compare the 2 drives.

Thank you also for the RAID 5 suggestion, but I don't think I'd be needing a raid on my storage drive. I was aiming to just get faster boot, and hopefully faster application loading time. Plus I only have 5 slots on my CM Sniper case, and I don't plan on filling all of them; 2 velocis, 1TB caviar black, and I plan on placing 1 of the drives from my old system, and leave the top most drive bay empty for the 5970 to breath.

Would it be a really grave mistake to risk the 2 OSs (or rather 3 including Parallels) installed on a RAID 0?

 

Not really. The problem is having the 2 OS's on the "same" HDD. When you make a raid 0 drive, you are essentially combining the 2 hard drives into one drive. Windows doesn't like to share boot space (although tonymacx86 has a really good 'howto' on dual booting from a single drive). It can be done, but if you do a software raid in OS X, Win7 won't recognize it as a valid raid array. If you do it in Win7, OS X won't like it either, so the only way to get both is to use bootcamp or parallels to install the Win7 WITHIN the OS X software raid or buy an OS X raid card. Really, the best, easiest and fastest access time for either OS is to give them each their own HDD. My boot time for Win7 is about 15 sec to the login screen after I select it from the boot list and about 25 sec to SL login screen if I let the bootloader time out and load SL. Actually, the fastest boot time would be from a small solid state drive. A 32 Gb drive would be plenty big enough for SL (takes up about 7.6 Gb with all apps I have installed) and a 64 Gb for Win7 (my Win7 Ultimate 64 bit takes up 37 Gb with all languages and Office 2008 Pro loaded) and the prices are coming down nicely. You can get a 32 Gb for less that USD$100 and a 50 - 64 Gb for less than USD$200. I've been keeping an eye on the pricing because I want to get one of these: http://www.orbitmicro.com/global/q14ss-p-4527.html and then just plug in the HDD with the OS I want to use now and any file storage drives I want or need. It takes standard 2.5" notebook drives and is hot swappable, so I can swap out the storage drives as needed. Still waiting for the price to come down some more on the SSDs.

[dj_scout]

Hi guys!

 

I just update my system to 10.6.4 and find some problems:

 

1. Sound don't work (I try to boot with -x-f flags)

2. SleepEnabler don't work

 

Did anybody fix it?

[tubbiesss]

Not really. The problem is having the 2 OS's on the "same" HDD. When you make a raid 0 drive, you are essentially combining the 2 hard drives into one drive. Windows doesn't like to share boot space (although tonymacx86 has a really good 'howto' on dual booting from a single drive). It can be done, but if you do a software raid in OS X, Win7 won't recognize it as a valid raid array. If you do it in Win7, OS X won't like it either, so the only way to get both is to use bootcamp or parallels to install the Win7 WITHIN the OS X software raid or buy an OS X raid card. Really, the best, easiest and fastest access time for either OS is to give them each their own HDD. My boot time for Win7 is about 15 sec to the login screen after I select it from the boot list and about 25 sec to SL login screen if I let the bootloader time out and load SL. Actually, the fastest boot time would be from a small solid state drive. A 32 Gb drive would be plenty big enough for SL (takes up about 7.6 Gb with all apps I have installed) and a 64 Gb for Win7 (my Win7 Ultimate 64 bit takes up 37 Gb with all languages and Office 2008 Pro loaded) and the prices are coming down nicely. You can get a 32 Gb for less that USD$100 and a 50 - 64 Gb for less than USD$200. I've been keeping an eye on the pricing because I want to get one of these: http://www.orbitmicro.com/global/q14ss-p-4527.html and then just plug in the HDD with the OS I want to use now and any file storage drives I want or need. It takes standard 2.5" notebook drives and is hot swappable, so I can swap out the storage drives as needed. Still waiting for the price to come down some more on the SSDs.

That highlitghted section is what I am most worried about

Will utilizing the Marvell RAID from the Gigabyte motherboard be of any help?

I almost opted for a SSD, but I read that they have write limitations. I don't want to be caught someday not being able to do anything more on my OS drive and have to migrate and reinstall everything on a new HDD while rendering the $300+ drive useless (OCZ 120GB costs about $350 where I'm from).

So if I am to install each OS separately, would a 150GB be enough for SL + Win7 in parallels + Photoshop CS5 + 20GB worth of games + and little room to spare to decompress HD movies when required?

If its enough, I might just take that route without touching RAID.

Thanks again

 

EDIT:

If I am to take the OSX software RAID route, and run Windows7 through Bootcamp, is there any performance degrading when compared to an actual Windows 7 installation? And would the normal drivers work flawlessly on Bootcamp? I've only experienced Bootcamp on an old MacBook, and all the drivers was installed automatically from the CD that came with it. I'd assume it won't be as smooth a ride with a Hackintosh system?

[Going Bald]

That highlitghted section is what I am most worried about

Will utilizing the Marvell RAID from the Gigabyte motherboard be of any help?

I almost opted for a SSD, but I read that they have write limitations. I don't want to be caught someday not being able to do anything more on my OS drive and have to migrate and reinstall everything on a new HDD while rendering the $300+ drive useless (OCZ 120GB costs about $350 where I'm from).

So if I am to install each OS separately, would a 150GB be enough for SL + Win7 in parallels + Photoshop CS5 + 20GB worth of games + and little room to spare to decompress HD movies when required?

If its enough, I might just take that route without touching RAID.

Thanks again

 

EDIT:

If I am to take the OSX software RAID route, and run Windows7 through Bootcamp, is there any performance degrading when compared to an actual Windows 7 installation? And would the normal drivers work flawlessly on Bootcamp? I've only experienced Bootcamp on an old MacBook, and all the drivers was installed automatically from the CD that came with it. I'd assume it won't be as smooth a ride with a Hackintosh system?

 

You could load SL + Win7Pro + Photoshop CS5 + FinalCut Studio and 20GB worth of games and still have 80 or 90 GB left on a 150 GB HDD. Plenty of room to run everything without touching raid.

The reason you have to run Wndows through bootcamp or parallels on a MAC machine is because MAC machines run on EFI, not BIOS and don't have the bios drivers Windows requires to run, so the MAC OS runs an emulation program to fake out the Windows operating system to make it think it's running on a PC, something like using fakesmc.kext in /Extra to fool SL into thinking it's running on a MAC. Running Windows through Bootcamp from a MAC OS will always be slower than a separate install because of the emulation software and it will never run as well as if it were a separate install. Is there some particular reason why you would need to run Win7 from within SL? The only advantage I can see is that it allows you to run Windows from SL as if Windows were an app, do whatever you need to do and then quit Windows without ever shutting down SL. Until I built my current box, I've always kept the OSs on separate machines and this is the first time I've set up a dual (actually triple) boot system and I don't use raid for the OS because it never seemed to buy me any advantage in speed. Using a small 10k or 15k rpm HDD for the OS gives me all the speed I need. If you want to install both on the same HDD, I wouldn't bother with BC or parallels, I would use tonymacx86's install procedure, give SL 25Gb, Win7 50Gb and leave the other 75Gb formatted FAT32 for shared storage.

[tubbiesss]

You could load SL + Win7Pro + Photoshop CS5 + FinalCut Studio and 20GB worth of games and still have 80 or 90 GB left on a 150 GB HDD. Plenty of room to run everything without touching raid.

The reason you have to run Wndows through bootcamp or parallels on a MAC machine is because MAC machines run on EFI, not BIOS and don't have the bios drivers Windows requires to run, so the MAC OS runs an emulation program to fake out the Windows operating system to make it think it's running on a PC, something like using fakesmc.kext in /Extra to fool SL into thinking it's running on a MAC. Running Windows through Bootcamp from a MAC OS will always be slower than a separate install because of the emulation software and it will never run as well as if it were a separate install. Is there some particular reason why you would need to run Win7 from within SL? The only advantage I can see is that it allows you to run Windows from SL as if Windows were an app, do whatever you need to do and then quit Windows without ever shutting down SL. Until I built my current box, I've always kept the OSs on separate machines and this is the first time I've set up a dual (actually triple) boot system and I don't use raid for the OS because it never seemed to buy me any advantage in speed. Using a small 10k or 15k rpm HDD for the OS gives me all the speed I need. If you want to install both on the same HDD, I wouldn't bother with BC or parallels, I would use tonymacx86's install procedure, give SL 25Gb, Win7 50Gb and leave the other 75Gb formatted FAT32 for shared storage.

Didn't realize 150GB could get me a fair bit.

I am not familiar with EFI, but if it undergoes emulation, I guess it wouldn't run as fast as native Windows installation.

I was trying to run Bootcamp Win7 because I was still trying to run RAID, and to avoid conflicts, I figure I could have Win7 in the OSX RAID. But if there is a performance slowdown in doing that (which possibly could be worst than the RAID slight boost), I might just skip the overall RAID thoughts and install each OS on separate drives. I just wish we had this discussion earlier, and I would've gotten a 300GB veloci, saving $80 and go with the single drive dual boot.

So RAID aside, can I just plug in drive1, install Win7, unplug drive1, plug in drive2, and install OSX, and every time I need to choose an OS, select it through BIOS? Or just have both drive plugged and pick the drives correspondingly for each OS?

On a side note, I have set up my system and did a temporary Win7 install to test all the hardware are in working condition. And I just timed my boot time. Took 23sec from the black starting windows screen to the blue welcome screen. and another 8sec till the cursor no longer have a circle on it. Nowhere as fast as yours and its a fresh installation too with only VGA driver and nothing else. Any idea why? Is yours running on a 15k rpm drive?

Is there a SATA 15k rpm drive?

Really appreciate all the input you've provided

 

another EDIT:

PC have MacDrive to access Mac storage, do Mac have something to access NTFS? Or is FAT32 the only way to go?

[Going Bald]

Didn't realize 150GB could get me a fair bit.

I am not familiar with EFI, but if it undergoes emulation, I guess it wouldn't run as fast as native Windows installation.

I was trying to run Bootcamp Win7 because I was still trying to run RAID, and to avoid conflicts, I figure I could have Win7 in the OSX RAID. But if there is a performance slowdown in doing that (which possibly could be worst than the RAID slight boost), I might just skip the overall RAID thoughts and install each OS on separate drives. I just wish we had this discussion earlier, and I would've gotten a 300GB veloci, saving $80 and go with the single drive dual boot.

So RAID aside, can I just plug in drive1, install Win7, unplug drive1, plug in drive2, and install OSX, and every time I need to choose an OS, select it through BIOS? Or just have both drive plugged and pick the drives correspondingly for each OS?

On a side note, I have set up my system and did a temporary Win7 install to test all the hardware are in working condition. And I just timed my boot time. Took 23sec from the black starting windows screen to the blue welcome screen. and another 8sec till the cursor no longer have a circle on it. Nowhere as fast as yours and its a fresh installation too with only VGA driver and nothing else. Any idea why? Is yours running on a 15k rpm drive?

Is there a SATA 15k rpm drive?

Really appreciate all the input you've provided

 

another EDIT:

PC have MacDrive to access Mac storage, do Mac have something to access NTFS? Or is FAT32 the only way to go?

 

The 15K rpm drive is a scsi I have on another machine. I don't think they make a SATA yet, maybe a SAS. The time I gave for Win7 boot was from the time I selected it in BIOS, not from power on. I will time it when I get home and let you know. As far as install goes, Kakewalk comes in 2 parts - build your USB or CD with Kakewalk and do your install and reboot with the USB or CD inserted and update to 10.6.4. Then download and unzip kakewalkboot and run the .pkg file to install the AsereBLN bootloader, or alternatively, you can use tonymacx86's [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] to install the Chameleon bootloader - your choice. The Kakewalk boot package lets you boot without having the CD or USB inserted and, at the end of the BIOS post when it says "Verifying DMI pool data..." the next screen is the Darwin bootloader and you have 3 seconds to hit any key to stop the timer and give you a list of operating system disks available to you, but if you let it time out it will automatically boot from whichever HDD is set as first in the BIOS boot order. The Chameleon bootloader do the same and will stop after the BIOS post and show you some icons for the drive instead and you don't have to worry about the 3 second time to hit any key.Question for you - when you installed Win7, what port was it attached to and did you change the bios to AHCI before you installed?

SL can read, but not write to NTFS files, however, there are several apps that will allow you to write to NTFS - I just don't like to use them, so I use FAT32 if I want to share files.

[Going Bald]

Didn't realize 150GB could get me a fair bit.

 

On a side note, I have set up my system and did a temporary Win7 install to test all the hardware are in working condition. And I just timed my boot time. Took 23sec from the black starting windows screen to the blue welcome screen. and another 8sec till the cursor no longer have a circle on it. Nowhere as fast as yours and its a fresh installation too with only VGA driver and nothing else. Any idea why? Is yours running on a 15k rpm drive?

 

OK. did some timing from system powered off to Darwin screen and from darwin screen to log-in screen and from log-in screen to desktop - all disk activity completed/startup programs loaded, etc.

Both Win7 and SL are installed on WD Velociraptor 10k rpm HDDs

Power on button push to Darwin screen - 37 seconds, hit key to stop timer. Select SL drive.

Hit enter and 28 sec to log-in screen - select user and type in password - hit enter - 15 sec to desktop and no disk activity. Shutdown. Power on button push to Darwin screen - 37 seconds, hit key to stop timer. Select System Reserved (Win7 boot - DO NOT select Windows NTFS - it will get you "Verifying DMA pool date..." forever - or until you reboot) Hit enter - 35 seconds to sound chime and log-in screen, select user/type in password - hit enter - 10 seconds to desktop and no disk activity, all icons normally in systray present (nothing still loading in the background.

 

So, not counting time spent selecting a user and typing in passwords, for SL ~80 seconds from power on to desktop ready to go (add another 2-3 sec if I let the Darwin timer time out and boot into SL by default) and for Win7 ~ 82 seconds from power on to desktop ready to go. (93 seconds from power off to PC-BSD desktop, but it is on a 7200 rpm HDD)