Sony Vaio VGN-T240P laptop problems
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Kris Tilford
May 17, 2012, 4:33:41 PM5/17/12
to HQ-A - Hackintosh Questions & Answers
I went ahead and made an effort, now I'm stuck.
Got 512MB more RAM, so it's a 1GB total now.
Repartitioned 60GB HD into two 25GB & one 5GB.
One 25GB has XP Pro, the 5GB is a Sony recovery partition.
Chameleon from iATKOS works fine, will boot any partition.
XP Pro boots normally still.
I was installing OS X onto the new 25GB partition.
Got an iATKOS v7 10.5.7 DVD to boot normally, and install normally.
Problems:
1) boot won't complete, stops at:
using XXXX buffer headers and XXXX cluster IO buffer headers. (where
XXXX changes with RAM amount installed)
Solution appears to involve using older ACPI extensions, but I can't
install these because I can't boot anything. I've got MacDrive demo so
perhaps I can delete the installed ACPI extensions from XP, but I
can't replace them with the correct ones and get the ownership &
permissions right. I can boot Ubuntu CDs, but they won't allow me to
change or delete anything on the OS X partition because I "don't have
permission". I'm stuck.
2) DVD drive no longer recognizes ANY DVD including new, commercial
movie DVDs in pristine unused condition. This is strange because many
of the burned DVDs such as the iPC 10.5.6 LIVE DVD, or the iATKOS
would either start to boot, or complete boot prior to the repartition
& installation, but now, the DVD unit doesn't work and the ONLY thing
that changed was the addition of 512MB RAM. When the BIOS boots, it
only shows 1014MB instead of 1024MB, so I'm assuming it uses normal
RAM for VRAM also?
I've tried cleaning the lens on the DVD drive, it still works and will
boot CDs of all types, but will not recognize or boot any DVD at all.
I don't know why it would work right up until installation of OS X,
and then stop completely? I'm going to remove the extra RAM module
just to see if it's possible adding RAM can disable the DVD?
3) The BIOS (Phoenix NoteBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0) is very rudimentary,
does not support USB booting, but does have a setting for "Floppy
Boot" which is from an external Sony floppy drive that I do not have.
I've attempted booting many external USB drives including Sony DVDRW
drives, HDs, etc. and never got anything to boot, although the laptop
DOES seem to "poll" the drives, meaning the DVD or HD will spin up,
and do some stuff for a while before abandoned by the BIOS. No Mac
formatted USB stick with bootable OS X installer will boot. I'm
thinking perhaps a USB stick with floppy disc boot blocks copied might
work? Some people say that even with the real Sony external USB floppy
drive that ONLY DOS floppies boot, and not Windows floppies. Seems
strange, but I don't know PC stuff.
On the plus side, this old 2005 laptop had a battery recall, and Sony
is evidently going to send a brand new battery for this laptop free,
so that's one good thing.
Got 512MB more RAM, so it's a 1GB total now.
Repartitioned 60GB HD into two 25GB & one 5GB.
One 25GB has XP Pro, the 5GB is a Sony recovery partition.
Chameleon from iATKOS works fine, will boot any partition.
XP Pro boots normally still.
I was installing OS X onto the new 25GB partition.
Got an iATKOS v7 10.5.7 DVD to boot normally, and install normally.
Problems:
1) boot won't complete, stops at:
using XXXX buffer headers and XXXX cluster IO buffer headers. (where
XXXX changes with RAM amount installed)
Solution appears to involve using older ACPI extensions, but I can't
install these because I can't boot anything. I've got MacDrive demo so
perhaps I can delete the installed ACPI extensions from XP, but I
can't replace them with the correct ones and get the ownership &
permissions right. I can boot Ubuntu CDs, but they won't allow me to
change or delete anything on the OS X partition because I "don't have
permission". I'm stuck.
2) DVD drive no longer recognizes ANY DVD including new, commercial
movie DVDs in pristine unused condition. This is strange because many
of the burned DVDs such as the iPC 10.5.6 LIVE DVD, or the iATKOS
would either start to boot, or complete boot prior to the repartition
& installation, but now, the DVD unit doesn't work and the ONLY thing
that changed was the addition of 512MB RAM. When the BIOS boots, it
only shows 1014MB instead of 1024MB, so I'm assuming it uses normal
RAM for VRAM also?
I've tried cleaning the lens on the DVD drive, it still works and will
boot CDs of all types, but will not recognize or boot any DVD at all.
I don't know why it would work right up until installation of OS X,
and then stop completely? I'm going to remove the extra RAM module
just to see if it's possible adding RAM can disable the DVD?
3) The BIOS (Phoenix NoteBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0) is very rudimentary,
does not support USB booting, but does have a setting for "Floppy
Boot" which is from an external Sony floppy drive that I do not have.
I've attempted booting many external USB drives including Sony DVDRW
drives, HDs, etc. and never got anything to boot, although the laptop
DOES seem to "poll" the drives, meaning the DVD or HD will spin up,
and do some stuff for a while before abandoned by the BIOS. No Mac
formatted USB stick with bootable OS X installer will boot. I'm
thinking perhaps a USB stick with floppy disc boot blocks copied might
work? Some people say that even with the real Sony external USB floppy
drive that ONLY DOS floppies boot, and not Windows floppies. Seems
strange, but I don't know PC stuff.
On the plus side, this old 2005 laptop had a battery recall, and Sony
is evidently going to send a brand new battery for this laptop free,
so that's one good thing.
Christian Wacker
May 17, 2012, 5:44:35 PM5/17/12
to hq...@googlegroups.com
You could see if you could get PLOP booting from a floppy and boot a USB flash disk from PLOP. It should work if you have a USB floppy. PLOP should also be able to be installed via Windows on your main partiton.
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Kris Tilford
May 17, 2012, 6:08:06 PM5/17/12
to hq...@googlegroups.com
On May 17, 2012, at 4:44 PM, Christian Wacker wrote:
> You could see if you could get PLOP booting from a floppy and boot a
> USB flash disk from PLOP. It should work if you have a USB floppy.
> PLOP should also be able to be installed via Windows on your main
> partition.
> You could see if you could get PLOP booting from a floppy and boot a
> USB flash disk from PLOP. It should work if you have a USB floppy.
> PLOP should also be able to be installed via Windows on your main
Chameleon has a way to select any device within the I/O Device Tree.
While USB isn't in the I/O Device Tree, Firewire is, so if I can get
the correct Firewire Device Tree ID then I should be able to boot a
Firewire optical or HD? Has anyone got experience booting via
Chameleon Device Tree boot flags? I'm not sure how I find this I/O
Device Tree info from within WinXP or Ubuntu Live disc? It would sure
be cool and nice to boot an external Firewire drive on a PC, so this
would be a major new tool for me if it would work?
Christian Wacker
May 18, 2012, 1:53:48 AM5/18/12
to hq...@googlegroups.com
I've booted Firewire disks on my PC before, but i was using a native boot option. If you can get chamelion installed, then you should be able to boot almost anything. I don't know much about device trees, but i know it should automagically detect almost any device plugged in and bootable. It worked for me to just plug in whatever i had. Make sure it is powered up before booting.
The alternative is to create another partition on the hdd so that you can copy the osx install disk straight to it and boot chamelion into that partition. I've done that before when i had issues with either bad ODD or just issues with slow USB drives.
The alternative is to create another partition on the hdd so that you can copy the osx install disk straight to it and boot chamelion into that partition. I've done that before when i had issues with either bad ODD or just issues with slow USB drives.
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