First boot in iPortable

I decided a few weeks back to take all of my Macbook's older hard drives and install them in Falcor. FYI, you can do that. A notebook 2.5" SATA drive has the same data and power connections, and your power supply is supposed to be able to detect if your SATA drive wants 12 volts (as the 3.5" ones will) or just 5 volts (as the 2.5" notebook varieties will). Definitely, absolutely, without exception!!! CONSULT. YOUR. POWER SUPPLY. DOCUMENTATION. You don't want to accidentally fry a perfectly good SATA drive.

I ended up disabling the big hard drive in the BIOS, so that iPortable wouldn't be confused by all the booting options. I don't know if that was necessary, but I do know that it took a crapload of configuration to finally get iPortable to boot (I don't recall it being so problematic the first time).

A few recollections of things I did in the BIOS

FIRST OF ALL: I am using a modified P5Q PRO TURBO firmware. I'll post an update with the name of the firmware image and where to get it


I enabled ACPI 2.0 support and AHCI


Removed the Windows drive as a boot option, and disabled that SATA port entirely, actually (payback for it being so picky about having other bootable partitions around when I was reinstalling Windows 7. I actually had to unplug and/or disable all the other bootable SATA drives!)


Setting the front audio mode to AC97 instead HD Audio seems to help.

Also, I had been plugging the USB drive into a conveniently place USB 2.0 hub on my desk, but it kept hanging during startup, and when I tried on the USB ports on the front of my tower, it worked right away.

The boot flags I used when it finally worked were:

boot: -v -f -x PciRoot=0

So here I go, gonna try a fresh installation of iPortable (hopefully the last one). This is Snow Leopard 10.6.2. Once you've followed the included instructions and you've restored the image to your USB drive and made sure it's bootable, you'll basically have a SL install similar to what you have when you install the regular way, after the DVD is done copying its files to the hard drive, and after it reboots itself. To save space, this image doesn't include the super-cool opening credits (oh Apple! You had to have opening credits on your OS. Of course, right? :)

So we will blow through the setup, skip the registration and migration assistant (Oh god... do NOT do the Migration Assistant at this stage, on the USB drive there will not only not be enough space if you want to migrate your stuff from another OS X installlation, but it will take hours upon hours, if you are copying files and media and apps and what not).

First and foremost, let's get everything configured correctly. We want the following hardware functionality:

1. Networking - works OOTB (out of the box) for me
2. Sound, and then... hopefully...
3. Full graphics accelleration with QE/CI/OpenGL
   
   I don't need to be able to play Half Life 2 (though theoretically, I certainly freakin should be able to!). I just want to be able to watch videos up to 1080p with HDMI, either from directly from the HDMI port or using a DVI-to-HDMI adapter (my HP monitor only has HDMI and VGA). Cover flow and Front row would really be nice, too. It's supposed to be the equivalent of a $2,700 Mac Pro, dammit! So yes, it would be nice to have hardware accelleration on interface animations like Exposé, and to be able to use desktop apps like Bumptop 3d :D

But first things first. On the very first boot of iPortable, you need to run the DSDT GUI app per the instructions (again, really great instructions, so I'm not going to bother repeating all that stuff).

After that, I'm going to reboot and go ahead and make an image of the installation (probably going to use Chronosync, or possibly one of the apps included in iPortable). Once we're running on a hard drive, things will run a lot faster.