We left off part 1 with a running system. Complete parts were assembled and a guest OS, either Windows or Linux, was installed to test the system components and make sure everything was running. Now on to OS X.
The ex58 chip set is not supported under Leopard 10.5.0 and our installation DVD is 10.5.0 so we can not just install leopard as we did previously with our EP45 build. Here we need a different route. First let us gather our parts.
Steps:
First we connect the hard drive we want to install leopard on to our working Mac system. You can accomplish this by directly connect to any available SATA port or to the USB to eSATA dongle to your laptop. Open up disk utility from Applications/Utilities and select the disk you have connected. Then Click on the Partition tap and select your desired partition scheme. For our drive we selected 1 Partition.
Put a name for it and make sure it says Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the format drop down menu. 
Now click on options and button and make sure that the GUID partition option is selected and then click OK. Click Apply and Disk Utility will start format the drive according to our selections.
Now we need to install Leopard on our fresh new drive. We start by inserting our Leopard DVD into our working Mac laptop or desktop and it should pop up a windows with an icon that says Install OS X. Fire up terminal from Applications/Utilities and type the following: Note that each line is separate.
cd /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/
cd System/Installation/Packages/
open .
A finder windows will pop up with lots of packages to choose from. 
We need only one, the OSInstall.mpkg. Double click on that file and it will start the Mac OS X Installer. We go through the option we want and when you get to the destination part we simply select the hard drive we prepared earlier. About 20 minutes later we have Leopard 10.5.0 installed on our fresh drive. Now we find the Combo updater we downloaded and double click on the dmg file, and run the installer but also making sure to select our fresh drive as our destination.
Final steps:
After the OSX installer and the combo updater we now have 10.5.7 or 10.5.8 depending on your selection installed and ready to boot. If you remember correctly, our build used eVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX275 and so we need to install the correct drivers for it. Navigate you browser to the Nvidia’s site to download these drivers or to eVGA’s site. We used these ones here from eVGA. Double click to mount the dmg and install the drivers.
Now we shutdown the mac and remove the hard drive and install it in our build machine. We also plug the EFIX(tm) Module in the first USB header. Booted up the machine and went into bios to set the EFIX(tm) to boot first and we have a working Mac.
Problems:
The X58 chipset and the core i7 for some reason run the clock fast when booting with EFIX(tm) version 1 but not with version 1.1. So if it is 9:00 pm in about 2 minutes real time it would be 9:04 and not 9:02 so time is twice as fast. This messes up a lot of programs like Growl and QuickTime.
In Part 3 we get rid of EFIX(tm).
Does 10.5.6 support i7 install or only 10.5.7 and newer?
Sparly_D i7 support is only in 10.5.7 and up.
Can’t wait for part 3! I am going to be building a similar system only a UD5 MB. This is simple and straight forward advise and I can’t wait to do my build in September. Thank you.
Great work on the tutorial. It really came in handy with the efi-x website being down this week. All I’ve got left to do is plug the hard drive in and wait for old 1.1 to boot up. I don’t think I can be bothered messing around with Chameleon so I’ll stop reading this series of posts now
Thanks for posting this I am trying to get an i7 system up and running but I, like most people have a 10.5.6 disk. Couldn’t find any info that was as straight forward as this. Btw where did you get the 10.5.7 updater from? I know Digi design Pro Tools (music software) has combo updaters…will these work?
Johnson, the updates are available on the apple website:
http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_10_5_7_Update OR
http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_10_5_8_Update
The retail disk doesn’t come in 10.5.7 so you will have to go via this method, unless efix 1.1 supports the retail snow leopard disk in the near future.
Plugged in the hard drive last night and it loaded perfectly! As it turns out though I need to buy a new keyboard as ps/2 connections don’t seem to be supported by macs / os x. Oh well. It’s not like they’re expensive.
Thanks again for the tutorial!
Andrew Clark: glad it helped and thanks for stopping by
J Johnson: here is the link for the combo update 10.5.7 just install it after leopard as stated above http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_10-5-7_Combo_Update
Great contribution guys and thanks for stopping by, We’ll try to post video tutorials in the future to better help the community , we need everybody’s input and comments.
Hi power_boz thanks once again for the info and the link to the combo update…I am waiting on parts to arrive for my new system so I’l let you know how it all goes once it’s up and running. Looking forward to trying out Logic and Pro Tools on this thing, it will be a great money saver if it works properly!
Hi guys, Just thought I’d let you know I managed to get my efix working with the i7 and it works great! I found a simpler way of installing the retail disk…rather than go through the terminal I simply put in the disk, clicked install and choose my external drive when it asked me where I wanted to install the volume (there’s even disk utility when you’re installing so you can format your drive). Much simpler for a noob like me.
I have had one minor issue though. I get a high pitched wine, (very quiet but annoying), through my sound monitors (speakers). I am using an mbox mini2 (external usb sound card). I don’t have this problem on my MBP. I know it could be a number of problems and I am hoping it’s something simple. Just wondering if anyone has had similar issues or may know what is causing this
J Johnson: the reason to use terminal is to get to hidden files but if you got to it that then great
As for you sound card, try using the built in one and see if it works. also did you update your efix firmware to the latest release? it seems to solve lots of issue.
Hey power_boz, yes I have updated to the latest firmware, my motherboard also has the latest firmware as well. With audio production we use external sound cards to take the load off the cpu and also to reduce latency. I don’t even have a sound card in this pc because there is no point. I have done some research though and it turns out it could be a ground looping problem. This is might be fixed by using a hum canceler or power conditioner. However, I’ve never had this problem with my Macbook Pro on the same setup.
I had issues with my Efix, couldn’t get it to work. I used an installer for retail OSX by digitaldreamer. It works great. I only have to work out my onboard sound issue. I need to install a kext to get it working in 10.5.8.
I don’t know what the issue is with the Efix module. It is a 1.1 and just boots into a blue then black screen with a cursor. Man, $200+ bucks and it is good as poo!
There is plenty of controversy with Efix these days and the method I used, using Chameleon boot loader is fantastic. It is prettier, customizable and there is tons of support. Yippee!
Sparly_D what sound issues are you having? I am getting hum and some pc noise through my sound monitors but I think this is more of a hardware problem than an efix problem. Other than that everything seems to work fine with me, although I am using 10.5.7, I have heard that 10.5.8 isn’t yet fully supported with efix yet.
Sparly_D for sound the correct kext to use is VoodooHDA.kext and install it using OSx86tools.
Dude i just got my EFIX v1.1 but i didn’t test it yet, will plug it sometime this week and see if its working.
j Johnson, EFIX V1 works fine with 10.5.8 everything is running correctly even the dual monitor problem was solved. the big issue with efix v1 is lack of snow leopard support but i think they are going to update it so it runs snow leopard.