30 January 2012

Hackintosh Install Log

I'm rather late to the Hackintosh scene (technically, super early because I hackintoshed while in 7th grade and then took a long break), but since I feel the steps are still ill-documented, despite efforts such as InsanelyMac and other sites, I have decided to write up my comprehensive install log for my system configuration.

System

  • Intel Xeon E5540 2.53GHz @ 3.96GHz, 80W
  • 24GiB DDR3-1600MHz
  • Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB

Prerequisites

  • A bootable flash drive imaged with the Snow Leopard installer and iBoot. 
  • A hard drive just for Mac OS X
  • A working knowledge of Mac OS X and operating systems (good for debugging)

Log

  1. In the BIOS, change the SATA configuration to AHCI and sleep/suspend to S3. Possibly turn off overclocking to eliminate a confounding variable. Change the boot order such that the flash drive is first.
  2. Boot the computer. iBoot should show up with a choice for Install Mac OS X. Select it and press enter.
  3. Go through the installation as you would on a normal Mac. You may have to run Disk Utility and format the disk prior to installing. 
  4. After installing, the system should reboot to the flash drive. Now iBoot should show two options, Macintosh HD and Install Mac OS X. Select the former.
  5. Go through the setup assistant.
  6. Download the Mac OS X 10.6.8 combo updater from Apple's site and MultiBeast from tonymacx86. Run the system update, but do not restart. Then run MultiBeast with the following options selected: EasyBeast and System Utilities. Eject and remove the flash drive installer. Now restart.

    Well, that's unfortunate. Looks like EasyBeast kernel panics when trying to boot. At least it boots with iBoot.
  7. Install custom sound and ethernet drivers according to step 7 in Lifehacker. Reboot.

    Guess what, it hangs again. I rebooted with -v and it stops at USBMSC Identifier... Let's actually partition the disk into two partitions so that we can use one of them as a Time Machine backup so we don't have to reinstall every single time.
  8. To get sound, use the VoodooHDA.kext in the Post Install folder in Lifehacker.
  9. To get graphics, use OSX86Tools to retrieve the hex codes for boot.plist. You'll probably also need to do the same thing for networking (otherwise the App Store does not work), but the process for two devices is different: save the hex codes of each to respective plists and use the built-in utility to merge the plists into the boot.plist
  10. Reboot and voilĂ ! Well sort of; the information in About the Mac is hilariously wrong.


Credits