Hooray ye olde swashbuckling, grogg drinking plank lumpets! I’m writing this post on my very first hackintosh which I got to work after 3-4 days of fiddling around and reading, reading, googling, reading, and so on. You get the picture. I have to say, once I got myself the right parts, it was darn easy to install OS X and with the great tools provided by folks like puru.se (Kakewalk) or in my case (haveing a Gigabyte P55-UD5 board) “iBoot + MultiBeast” from TonyMacx86 it was actually rather easy. No command line hacking, no manual kext fiddling. :)
I started this “just for fun” because on one hand, I wanted to get myself again a dedicated gamer PC (I know, but I just can’t stop..). I also wanted to try out this hackintosh thing once and see if I could get it working. Why? Well, just “because”. And in the end, I now replaced my iMac with this very hackintosh setup.
The hardware
- Gigabyte P55-UD5 (Bios F8)
- Intel i7 860 (quad core @ 2.8Ghz, overclocked to 3.8 Ghz)
- 2 x 2GB OCZ HyperX DDR3 Memory (overclocked to 1600 Mhz)
- nVidia GT 240/1GB
- A hotswap harddrive bracket which allows me to *physically* swap Win/OS X
Notes
- If in doubt, boot into safemode using “-x” at the Chameleon-Bootloader prompt. Chances are high that your graphics card’s chipset isn’t natively supported. Booting into safemode allows you to install and run OS X for the first couple of times until you got the drivers properly working.
- Forget booting off of USB devices. Get a SATA CD-ROM drive. Saves a lot of pain and nerves.
- RTFM(&forums), *before* ordering the parts :-)
- RTFM, especially the parts about BIOS settings :-)
- Patience is a virtue: you’ll reboot about a hundred times but eventually you’ll manage to get it working. :-P
- Once you get everything working properly, create a CarbonCopy off your OS X drive for easy recovery.
It really comes down to a simple rule: Look at the different hackintosh-methods, then buy the parts which most successful installations use. Not the other way around. The problem in my case was that the motherboard I was looking for initially is already EOL so I had to take the next best thing which turned out to not work using Kakewalk. So I stumbled across tonymac’s iBoot + MultiBeast method. This however didn’t work with the ATI card I bought initially and also, trying to install everything from USB devices turned out to be a huge source for all sorts of bugs and weird behaviours. So in the end, I got myself a SATA DVD-ROM and a cheap nVidia card to fill the gap until the fermi-based cards get a couple of revisions and OS X support. :-)
I guess I learned more about OS X trying to get it to boot on a non-Apple system than by using it every day for 12 hours in the past 5 years. :-)