Hey everyone,

I'm relatively new to the whole Mac OS X86 thing but I'm working my way through it.

My setup is as follows:

* Intel D945GNT board w/ GMA 950 onboard video (BIOS date 5-19-06)
* Pentium D 805 Dual-Core 2.66ghz
* 2gb DDR2 RAM
* (2) 160gb SATA 3.0 drives

I loaded OS X 10.4.6 and after installation, my graphics were all messed up on the first reboot with a black screen except for a grey bar then went down the entire right side of the screen.

I was able to work through this by booting into safe mode (with -x for those who don't know...took me a while to find). I fiddled with this for quite a while and tried to copy the AppleIntel950.kext, AppleIntelGMA950VADriver.bundle, AppleIntelGMA950GA.plugin, and AppleIntelGMA950GLDriver.bundle files from the /system/library/extensions_disabled_10.4.6 folder to /system/library/extensions but that didn't work. After that, I rebooted again in safe mode and removed the AppleIntel915.kext, ApppleIntel915GA.plugin, AppleIntel916GLDriver.bundle files from the extensions directory.

This worked swillingly and I was able to boot into OS X. It popped up an error however that read:

System extension cannot be used.

The system extension "/System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelGMA950.kext" was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling it, or contact the product's vendor for an update".

I removed the AppleIntelGMA950.kext file from the extensions dir and OS X now boots up properly with no errors.

My new problem comes when I try to run Final Cut Express. Apparently, Quartz Extreme support is not enabled on my card. From everything that I have read, QE is enabled on the GMA 950 up to 10.4.6. How can I enable Quartz Extreme? Am I missing a valid .kext file for the GMA 950? Is anyone else having this problem? I have dug through the forums forever but haven't found anything similar.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks very much!

Did you make sure to repair permissions after you copied the files into the extensions directory? This can be done from the Disk utility.
Also you need to delete the following after any changes in the Extensions folder.:
/System/Library/Extensions.mkext
/System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
--
I would suggest :

Remove all instances of AppleIntel915* from your Extensions folder.
Copy all instances of AppleIntel950* from the disabled folder into the Extensions folder.
Delete the mkext and kextcache files as indicated above.
Then reboot.

I think it may solve the problem. I hope

Unfortunately it didn't work.

I tried removing the cache files, resetting the permissions, then rebooting and I am still getting the same "system extension cannot be used" error.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

I FIXED IT!

I had to do a chmod and chown on the AppleIntelGMA950.kext file. After a reboot, FCE is working properly!



Reboot and I'm good to go! Life is good.

I'm getting the same black screen / grey bar problem with an IBM T43 with the GMA915 chipset after connecting an external monitor.

Which kexts should I try to move or delete? I assume by deleting the AppleIntel915 kexts I would lose QI/QE support, at least then I could troubleshoot from the OS instead of from the command line.

Any help would be very appreciated, thanks

JT

You need to delete all instances of AppleIntel915* from your /extensions folder and delete the kextcache files as well.

Rebooting will lose your QE support, but then just copying the GMA950 files and chmod should help.