Every time I try to install OSX86 on my PC, it always gets stuck in a restart loop and I don't even get as far as the installer interface. Is there any way of fixing this?

Its most likely some other hardware issue rather than the CPU. What is the rest of the specs of the computer?

nForce 630i (I think) chipset on my motherboard, 4GB RAM and (at the moment) 1x250GB SATA hard drive.

What version of OSX86?

I'm afraid I have no idea what that is. Sorry.

Sorry I edited my post after I realised you said you couldn't even get to the installation screen. Perhaps the issue is with the copy you have. Does the system even attempt to boot from the media? Do you get as far as the apple logo boot screen?

When darwin loader shows up press F8 and type in -v. Post what you see here.

iATKOS 5i



I just did that, and I didn't see anything that looked like an error message. It said "Starting Darwin x86" then the screen went blank and the PC restarted.

Ok, well the E4500, the 630i a sata drive and 4gb ram should work fine with OSX86, what's your gfx card? Other than that I would suggest a bad copy/bad burn. try iPC (PPF5) or iDeneb 1.4. I've found iPC to be the best of the bunch for nforce chipsets.

I used to have an ATI Radeon X1550 but that broke so I got an Nvidia Geforce 9500GT about a week ago. It didn't work with either card. I will try iPC.

I'll also try burning a new copy of iATKOS 5i, but at 2.4x instead of 16x.

EDIT: Tried it and it still didn't load. iPC it is, then.

The 16x burn could very well be the cause of the problem. I never had much luck burning such things at max speed so always use 4x. Make sure you get iPC PPF5, PPF5 is the most up to date and it saves having to apply each PPF update to the iso manually. A couple of other things to keep in mind should you get to the install, use the nVdarwin driver for your graphics (just pick the one that matches your video ram), if you have nVidia's gigabit ethernet then use the eno nVidiaLAN driver (will say by eno in the description), install the OSX86 Tool Utility and you will also need the Seatbelt.kext 10.5.5 fix. You'll want to select the Voodoo kernel also, I think the Vanilla only works on Intel chipsets.

Just tried iPC (burnt at 4x) and it still rebooted. What is going wrong? I have literally tried everything. I even tried putting the disc in another CD-ROM drive which (as expected) didn't help in the slightest. I have disconnected all but my OS hard drive and made a 40GB Ext3 partition for OSx86. I have set up Acronis OS Selector. I seriously don't know what to do.

I'm about all out of ideas then, there must be some hardware issue somewhere. From what you've said about your specs there should be no issues booting the media (not a SATA DVD drive is it?). Installing can be a bit trial and error but there is some other problem if you can't even get that far. Only thing I can think of is to unplug anything not being used, like usb dives ect, disable onboard sound and LAN and try to boot with minimal components to at least rule those out as being the cause. Try also disabling power management in the BIOS (Speedstep) and reset any overclocking if applicable.

The DVD drive is IDE. I unplugged everything, the Ethernet cable, the speaker cables and all the USB devices and I disabled onboard sound and LAN. I don't even know how to overclock my CPU and I don't think my BIOS has Speedstep (at least I couldn't find any option for it) but for some reason it still keeps rebooting. I really don't know what's going on.

EDIT: I have had a bit of a brainwave. According to the InsanelyMac website, 4GB RAM can be problematic and can result in crashes. Seeing as how OSx86 (Tiger) used to work on my PC before I got the Core 2 Duo processor and before I bought 4GB RAM. I'm going to try taking out 1 or 2 GB later. I'll let you know if it works.

Have you followed the instructions? (i.e. selected the options)

I don't get as far as the options.

I just tried removing 2GB of RAM and it still didn't work. I've tried removing the FireWire card and disconnecting the floppy drive. Looking now, I think I might actually have a 610i chipset. It's either 610i or 630i. It would explain everything if the 610i chipset was severely incompatible or something, but I doubt it.

Have a read through THIS thread, if there is going to be a definative answer it's probably there.

you could go for the boot-132 idea, its boots a bootloader and it lets you install with the retail disk

ive it on a Intel Celeron D 1.8GHz with 2GB of DDR2 ram, its good and it lets you update it to 10.5.6

Go into your BIOS and make sure that your SATA controller is set to AHCI (IIRC) or IDE if that's not available. That might help.

I also didn't have much luck with iDeneb, but iPC installed perfectly (on an AMD system nonetheless). So you might want to try another OSx86 distribution as well. They're all not created equally. Also, be sure that you're installing nothing less than Leopard 10.5.6 (10.5.7 was released just recently).