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The Crudiest How To guide for installing OS X onto the 900HA without BIOS flashing that I could throw together…
Purpose: To show that it is possible to successfully boot OS X on an Asus Eee PC 900HA without resorting to modified BIOS flashes…
Warning and Foreword: This guide is by no means constructed by anyone or anything resembling an "expert" or overly knowledgeable person. There are likely other…even better…ways to accomplish the tasks described here. The information contained herein could result in unforeseen damage to your computer and/or personal information. If you are at all squeamish, uneasy, or undecided about seriously wacking around with the innards of your Eee PC's workings…then please step away from the keyboard and pretend you never entertained the idea of doing these things… This guide and all the tools used in it are the work of other far more important and learned folks than myself and all credit should go toward the hard work exhibited by folks like Toonces, Fassl, Mackerintel, and others that gave their best to produce tools that make all of this possible.
Tools you will need:
A successfully booting OS X86 install disc
A live CD or other means of booting Linux on your 900HA
A working Hex Editor and knowledge to use it
OS X w/Chameleon installed on your Eee's hard drive
Mackerintel's Chameleon w/DSDT Override files
My initial goal was to create a 900HA that triple booted Windows XP, Ubuntu EEE, and OS X, and as soon as my Eee arrived…I set out to make it happen. I've got all three booting today and here's how I did it…
1.) I wiped the hard drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP SP 3 onto a 40GB NTFS partition.
2.) I then booted my Eee PC with a USB stick of Ubuntu Eee in the "try first" mode.
3.) I used GParted to create the following partitions (these are just my preferences of course…modify them as you see fit…)
Partition 2 = 60GB NTFS (Primary) …to become my Mac OS X install volume
Partition 3 = 30GB EXT3 (Primary) …to become Ubuntu / mount
Logical Partitions:
Partition 4 = 4GB Linux Swap
Partition 5 = ~15GB NTFS …to become a shared HFS+ drive later…
4.) I installed iDENEB v1.3 10.5.5 by following along one of the many guides written for the 901 and 1000H Eee PC Versions floating around on the web…I installed onto the NTFS partition that I had created earlier in GParted…The only caveat (and an important one!) is that I formatted my Mac OS X install volume as unjournaled HFS+! This is necessary to move files back and forth between OS X and Linux as far as I know…
5.) At this point Mac OS X would not boot successfully upon restarting…so I booted once again into my linux live USB Stick…I mounted my Mac OS X install volume under Ubuntu and then through terminal I created a DSDT_Files folder on the root of my OS X install volume and I copied all of my previously downloaded files (the DSDT Patcher files and the Chameleon with DSDT Override) to it.
6.) Then I rebooted back into my Mac OS X install disc and opened the Terminal. I attempted to execute Fassl's patcher without modification by directly executing the patcher…but it failed to extract the DSDT from my BIOS. So…I had to manually extract the DSDT by performing the following command:
ioreg -lw0 | grep DSDT > Desktop/ioregdump.txt
6b.) Rebooted…back into the live Ubuntu stick…from there I once again mounted the OS X volume and opened the ioregdump.txt in a Hex editor. I searched the file for the DSDT table and selected and copied all of the hex values from this table (and only the hex values!) to a new file and saved it as dsdt.dat in the same folder that my DSDT patcher was in on my OS X volume.
6c.) Rebooted back into the OS X install DVD…open terminal once again and this time performed the following steps:
cd /PATH/TO/DSDT\ Patcher
./Tools/iasl -d dsdt.dat
Then…
./DSDT\ Patcher dsdt.dsl
This built my dsdt.aml file to use with Chameleon w/DSDT Override.
7. I then copied this dsdt.aml file to the root of my Mac OS X install volume. I also copied the boot file located in the modified Chameleon install that was previously downloaded and overwrote the existing Chameleon boot file that was located there…
8. I then performed my install of Ubuntu EEE on my 900HA on my partition 3. When completed…I entered into my new install of Ubuntu and made the following addition to my menu.lst file in my /boot/grub directory.
# This entry added to boot Mac OS X on /dev/sda1
title Mac OS X (10.5.5 iDENEB)
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
9.) Rebooted…from my GRUB menu…I selected my Mac OS X install option…and voila! Welcome to Mac OS X on the 900HA!
Possible side effects:
- I have not been able to get power management properly working in Mac OS X after performing this mod. I don't know if it is related to this process or not…but I certainly believe it could be attributable to it.
- The computer will not fully power off by itself. It will reboot…but not shut off…this is perhaps related to the power management issue…I'm too stoopid to know :)
- Also…on a warm reboot…the internal Keyboard and Mouse do not function. I can plug in a USB Keyboard and Mouse and get them working…but only a cold boot into OS X will allow the built-in keyboard and mouse to function. It's strange…and my pea-brain will not provide me enough oomph to figure out why this is happening… FWIW I did read a post on the InsanelyMac forum that echoed this flaky behavior…so maybe I'm not alone…(This behavior was resolved by installing the OpenHaltRestart.kext…but the no-shutdown issue remains…)
- Of course…just like everyone else…I have been unable to get Ethernet, Built-in Wifi, or normal audio working on the 900HA yet. (I do have sound output working by using Audieee…but everyone here is surely aware of the limitations behind using this method…).
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