| Toby ( @ 2008-05-02 13:55:00 |
| Entry tags: | hack, mac |
Hackintosh guide
Since some people expressed interest, here some notes on the install:
0. The Mac nvidia video drivers apparently do NOT auto-detect which DVI port you've connected the monitor to. You should make sure your monitor is plugged into the DVI port closest to the motherboard now. (For most people that's the right one.. I suppose if it doesn't work and goes blank later, you can always swap to the other DVI port)
1. Before starting the install, boot into Windows or Linux, and note down the details about what video card, network chipset, motherboard chipset, motherboard, you have.
2. After booting the install DVD, it gave me a couple of screenfulls of verbose text output, then appeared to have got stuck - it was trying to find the install media, and looked like it had given up and said "Jettisoned Kernel Linker". However, after about FIVE minutes, it suddenly leapt into life again, and booted into graphics mode and continued with no more undue pauses. I don't know why it did it, but if it happens to you too -- be patient at that stage.
3. Once the installer gets going, you'll get to a point where it asks you where you want to install Leopard. Unless you have a totally blank hard drive in the system, there will be NO drives listed here! So go to the menu bar, and select "Disk Utility" -- this is the equivelent of fdisk. Use it to repartition your harddrive to have at least one partition (of at least 10 GB) that is formatted as type "HFS+ (journalled)". Once you've done this, apply the changes and then Quit the Disk Utility. The installer will re-appear, and now you'll have an option of where to install to (as the name of the partition you created).
4. At the next step or so, there'll be a button labelled "Customize". Ignore the Yankee stupid spelling, and click it. This pops up a tree of tickyboxes - you'll now want to wander through this, selecting appropriate chipsets as per your notes from (1).
4.1. If you have a recent Intel CPU, you can select the newer kernel (9.2.2-modified), otherwise I guess go with the default. There were some notes there about AMD CPUs requiring one of the other kernels to be selected.
4.2. I selected the newest ACPIPlatform option, and everything seemed to work for me. Apparently laptop suspend/resume doesn't work properly with it though, so i guess you should use the older options if you have a laptop..
4.3. The motherboard/SATA chipset stuff should be obvious.
4.4. I think it's OK to select multiple sound and network chipsets if you're not sure which one is right.
4.5. Apparently the word on the street is to NOT select any video drivers now, and just concentrate on getting the system up and running.. then once you're going there, adjust it later. However, I suppose it can't hurt to select the right video card now, and if it doesn't work, and gives you a blank screen, you can always just re-install again.
5. Once you've done all that, continue with the install. It takes a while (at least 15 mins) but doesn't require any interaction after it kicks off, so go and get a beer or some tea. At the end of the process it'll say "i'll reboot now" and will automatically reboot after a couple of minutes. So if your computer automatically boots into the CD drive or windows or something, you could get confused by that behaviour! Perhaps you should have changed it in the BIOS earlier.
6. The computer should reboot and boot into OSX! Note that if you already had a boot-loader, like Vista or Grub or XP, the installer WILL NOT have replaced - ie. you'll need to add a line to Grub to boot into OSX yourself. I just installed onto a spare hard drive though, so it was fine.
7. If you find your network card doesn't appear to have set itself up, then click System Preferences, then Network. If there's at least a MAC address listed, then try this.. Go into 'Advanced' options, and find the tab where you set things like speed and half/full duplex.. and force them to whatever is appropriate for your network. (Probably 100baseT/Full-Duplex). After I did that, stuff worked itself out on its own.
I did note that the Realtek drivers included were for a different model of network card to mine though, so I went to the sourceforce project for the correct OSX drivers for my card and installed them instead. *shrug*
8. If you didn't elect to install extra video drivers earlier, but yet you don't have accelerated video at this point, then you'll want to install them. There are some helpful guides on how to do this at http://forum.insanelymac.com so I won't duplicate their effort.
I followed the guide for my card (nvidia 8800GT) and it worked perfectly first time.
If you have an older video card you'll probably just be fine with the defaults or the ones in the installer though. I just had to be difficult ;)