I have been hearing about Psystar company in Florida, that sells Mac compatible PCs for under $600. Matter of fact, it was Apple’s lawsuit that led me to their site to learn about the existance of this open EFI project that makes it all possible. From the sound of it, it was feasible for me to go out, purchase a copy of Leopard 10.5.4 and run on my PC. Wow! This is interesting. So, I decided to give it a try.
My PC is Q6600 based Quad Core 2.4G Intel machine from Gateway. DX440X is the model number. It has Sigmatel based On board sound card – STAC9227 chips, Intel CH9 IO set, Intel 82562V NIC and NVidia 8500GT card. So, without tweaking anything, I just wanted to try. So I followed the instruction as to how to create a patched DVD. There are many patched DVDs floating around torrent sites and as long as you have a legitimate copy of Leopard, I think you should be OK.
First boot off of IDE drive gave “Still waiting for root” message. A quick search gave me a solution – Use external USB drive. So I did exactly that. Voila, I have a work in progress machine now. Unfortunately, it still waits for something. Hmmm, what could it be? I quickly launched my live GParted DVD and created a manual blank partition for OsX to see. This time, it went all the way to install screen. Good. Now, I just chose my newly created blank partition and using Disk Utility, created a Journaled OsX file system. Soon, my pc was copying files to OsX partition.
FIrst time it rebooted, I was simply amazed at how easy it was for someone to install Leopard on a PC. My first attempt yieled semi working Hackintosh. Somehow, not all the programs were copied. For example, browser would not launch. Quick scan of the system revealed another dark area; none of my drivers were loaded. So, I decided to blow this out and try another distribution.
I used my GParted and created a blank partition after my Vista partition. I burned iAtkos 4i – which is 10.5.4 and booted off of my external USB driver. Upon starting, the choice given was a lot simpler. So, I chose basic package and NVidia driver, Intel 8225X Driver, STAC9200 sound driver and Athros wireless lan driver. Upon reboot, I was greeted with properly detected video screen. Wow, this might actually work. So, I plugged in my USB 802.11G based wireless card. The first thing is to find the driver. Luckily, I know it is Zydas based card so I quickly googled for zydas1211 osx driver. I found one and installed it immidiately. But, it refused to work! Hmmm. Time to dirty my hands. I know when generic drivers are used, you must make entry for your hardware id somewhere. I checked and found a plist file that I needed to edit. Quickly I did a hardware lookup and found the Vendor ID and Product ID. I entered two numbers and voila! I had a wireless LAN. Quicky, I launched Apple Updater and patched OS. I browsed the web and found proper driver for my NVidia card and installed it. It gave me ability to span across multiple screens; Nice!. Next is sound. I spent numerous hours searching for Sigmatel 9227 driver. I tried them all, and nothing works. OK, luckily I use USB Lexicon sound card for better recording, and it worked flowless. Out of box, my USB sound worked. OK, what next?
I put a DVD into my internal IDE dvd player and DVD Player gives an error message – Can’t find dvd player. Hmmm. Strange. I put it into external usb dvd player and it says the same thing. Quick scan of my hardware revealed that, my IDE dvd player was not loaded. Somehow, IDE was not working. My SATA was working fine but IDE was not. Strange. Also, DVD Player won’t play from external devices. This is Apples doing. So I installed VLC and it played just fine.
I downloaded lots of programs and tested on this Hackintosh. They all worked. I have no problem updating using Apple Updater. This is incredible. They have defeated Apple’s golden lock!
To test my dual booting ability, I chose Vista on bootloader that OsX placed automatically. On my first boot, I got error message. I know this to be true when you change active partition on windows machines. Quick scan on the internet said repair option on Vista DVD will fix this. Quick launch of Vista fixed my loading problem. However, I want Vista to handle booting options. So, I changed my active parition back to Vista and copied CHAIN0 file to C:\ root and used bcdedit to make entry on boot screen of Vista to launch OsX as one of options.
Now, I have a dual booting Vista and OsX! Ok, let me go a little bit further. I installed Parallel on OsX and see if I can run Vista partition on OsX. Unfortunately, I have two Vista partitions and Parallel wont launch and use if it sees multiple Vista partitions. Well, there goes that.
I still have IDE issue and my Avermedia TV Card issue but, I think overall, this Hackintosh is really usable. Running Microsoft Office 2008 was painless. Using MacFuse and NTFS-3G gave me a read-write access to windows partitions. MacDrive on Vista gave me read write access to HFS+ partition. I am going to try VMWare on Vista to read Mac installations later.
So, what did I do next? What about a portable flash install of OsX? Well, using Pacifist, I was able to install OsX on my 8 GIG flash drive! I created a HFS+ partition and opened iAtkos 4i package using Pacifist. Using all to other disk option, I installed OsX on flash drive. The only thing I am working it is “bless” the proper folder to make it bootable. So far, it won’t boot off of it. I know bless is the command that makes it possible. I am still working on it. But, imaginge if I can simply stick a USB flash on a machine and load OsX!
I am impressed with how much work OsX86Project prople have finished. They made almost possible for a layman to insert a Leopard DVD and install it on his / her PC. OsX still has ways to go in the area of hardware support, but for anyone remotely attuned to technology, this is a great way to have two OS on one machine! Besides, Quad core Macintosh would have cost me over $3000! You should try it too.
Thanks to :
Posted by simonjko 