Updating to 10.5.6

Following the recent post where I restored a backup to return to 10.5.5, I’m now back to 10.5.6 with no apparent problems so far. The research into the 10.5.6 waking from sleep issue was confusing with some conflicting advice, so here is a brief summary of what I did and the results.

The original problem was that after updating to 10.5.6 using software update my hackintosh would appear to sleep but had shut down, so hitting the power button resulted in a full startup rather than a brief waking from sleep. Before upgrading I had made a bootable backup using Carbon Copy Cloner so this was restored to get back to a fully working 10.5.5 system.

SpyBoyCH left a comment on the original article pointing to a post at netkas’ blog, suggesting a hackintosh requires a patched DSDT under 10.5.5 before the 10.5.6 update would work correctly. The comments on that page contained a link to the pcwizcomputer site where a GUI tool to produce a patched DSDT could be downloaded. There is also an app called the Universal OSx86 Installer which aims to do all the post install patching in one step, including kexts, bootloader and DSDT patch. I decided to try this since it allows the downloading of a complete kext package for your specific motherboard. It didn’t work as expected, no doubt because I’m not starting with a fresh install.

After restoring the backup again I did a bit more searching and found a post on the pcwizcomputer blog explaining that while a DSDT patch was required for the 10.5.6 beta, it was no longer needed for the final release. So what caused the sleep problem? Another search turned up a couple of suggestions. The first was remove any software mounting NTFS partitions like Paragon NTFS and Macfuse, the other was to enable the ‘Restart automatically after a power failure’ option in Energy Saver. The first didn’t make any difference for me, and the second worked.

I experienced another problem with USB devices during the upgrade. After installing 10.5.6 I had lost sound, so took the lazy route of running OSX86tools to reinstall the required drivers. After this I suffered a kernel panic whenever trying to access a usb SDHC card reader. This was solved by re-installing the 10.5.6 update then using OSX86tools to just add the audio drivers. Seems to be working fine now, sleep is good and I haven’t found anything not working so far. I’m starting to wonder just how important these point updates are since Leopard has matured into a stable and responsive OS on my hardware. I guess us hackintosh users are just an obsessive bunch who want to be running the latest software.

As ever, many thanks to all the people who post this essential information to the blogs and forums. I didn’t discover any of this stuff myself, it’s just presented here to help those like myself who need a pointer in the right direction.