The Hackintosh Thread

[smackababy]

Are there any build a Hackintosh services for you? The biggest crux if have is finding an OSX install to make the boot drive from.

 

[darth maul]

Are there any build a Hackintosh services for you? The biggest crux if have is finding an OSX install to make the boot drive from.

There are a few people selling complete systems on ebay. Not exactly a service per say, but its close, and some people have multiple systems up. And a few have a history on selling them on ebay.

 

[smackababy]

There are a few people selling complete systems on ebay. Not exactly a service per say, but its close, and some people have multiple systems up. And a few have a history on selling them on ebay.

I never thought of checking around eBay. I will have to look at that. I am holding off until the 16th though.

 

[vailr]

Are there any build a Hackintosh services for you? The biggest crux if have is finding an OSX install to make the boot drive from.

Besides the tonymac.com way of doing things, there are boot drive images available that can be used while in a Windows environment to create a bootable Hackintosh installer: bootable (on recent model Intel CPU PC's) thumb drive or bootable DVD.
Google search terms: olarila, Niresh, or iATKOS.

 

[destrekor]

Besides the tonymac.com way of doing things, there are boot drive images available that can be used while in a Windows environment to create a bootable Hackintosh installer: bootable (on recent model Intel CPU PC's) thumb drive or bootable DVD.
Google search terms: olarila, Niresh, or iATKOS.

That's the route I went, or at least, I used that approach in order to create an OS X virtual machine, from which I proceeded to grab the official .dmg through the app store.

 

[Noo]

Stupid question: Does time machine works with hackintosh? If I created a time machine backup onto a USB hard drive, will I be able to restore it if the hard drive in the pc fail?

 

[mdhazrin]

Hi All

sorry but im new here.

i have a 1st gen mac mini and would like to upgrade the motherboard and cpu.
i intended to keep the harddisk. i know i need to get a new RAM.

would any of you be able to recommend any motherboard and cpu?

i was looking at the following Gigabyte MBs. any comments?

GA-H81TN (rev. 1.0)
http://www.gigabyte.sg/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4752#ov
GA-B85TN (rev. 1.0)
http://www.gigabyte.sg/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4753#ov
GA-H87TN (rev. 1.0)
http://www.gigabyte.sg/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4754#ov
GA-Q87TN (rev. 1.0)
http://www.gigabyte.sg/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4755#ov


thanks

 

[vailr]

Your best option may be: upgrade to Apple's just released $499 Mac Mini.
This Mini-PC includes an Intel HD 5000 GPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856102055
Intel Iris Pro graphics 5200:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856164011
These devices use low voltage laptop CPU's, which are not generally available for use with "roll your own" builds.
Note: I would advise against building a Hackintosh using any Intel HD 4400 GPU devices, because there's no proper drivers available. You'd get a video display, but without proper OSX quartz driver support.
If you insist on building your own miniITX machine, just search on Newegg for a Haswell CPU that doesn't include an HD 4400 GPU. From those 4 Gigabyte minITX boards: the GA-H87TN looks best.

 

[Zaap]

i have a 1st gen mac mini and would like to upgrade the motherboard and cpu.

Actually planning to fit a miniITX mobo into the Mac Mini case?

It's possible, I've seen a few *very skilled modders* attempt it- but it doesn't seem like it's for anyone expecting an easy build. For example:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/others/121267-2010-hacmini-intel-dh61ag-i3-3225-mac-mini-casemod.html

Personally, unless you're a skilled modder ready to adapt things like a laptop heatsink/power supply to the mini-case, I'd suggest just build a decent Hackintosh in its own case with proper airflow, expansion options, proper video card capability, etc. I personally don't understand trying to recreate Apple's limited little boutique boxes with the endless options of the PC world (including plenty of kickass mITX options) but maybe that's just me.

I'd only judge a board's readiness for Hackintosh based on proof that others are using the same board to run OSX (right up to Yosemite) without issue, not just guessing based on... what really? Voodoo? Hope for the best?

Scour TonyMacx86 and see which boards are recommended. Not every board, even Gigabyte boards make great hacks- some have unique issues and quasi/incompatible components, others work great with little fuss.

 

[Kaido]

Actually planning to fit a miniITX mobo into the Mac Mini case?

It's possible, I've seen a few *very skilled modders* attempt it- but it doesn't seem like it's for anyone expecting an easy build. For example:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/others/121267-2010-hacmini-intel-dh61ag-i3-3225-mac-mini-casemod.html

Whoa, that's nuts! Although given the recent discovery that the new $499 Mac Mini's RAM is soldered in...:thumbsdown:

 

[destrekor]

Anyone experience issues with Nvidia GPU and flash video freezing after a few seconds, and only getting a black screen trying to play trailers in iTunes? (on Yosemite)

I recall having these issues before when I installed Mavericks, but I have updated both the Nvidia GPU and Cuda drivers, and I have re-added the correct ID into AGPM for the model.

I've got other issues that need re-fixing as well, like my P-states are back to only 2, and no sound device is even recognized again. That said, I want to get the GPU issue fixed first, because every now and then waking from sleep, or waking the display (PC is on but display is off) just doesn't work at all, and I suspect display server crash of some sort. Once I get that stable again I'll worry about audio and speedstepping.

 

[Kaido]

Anyone experience issues with Nvidia GPU and flash video freezing after a few seconds, and only getting a black screen trying to play trailers in iTunes? (on Yosemite)

What GPU?

 

[Kaido]

10.10 Hackintosh guide by Tonymac on Lifehacker:

http://lifehacker.com/the-always-up-to-date-guide-to-building-a-hackintosh-o-5841604

 

[destrekor]

What GPU?

560 Ti

 

[vailr]

There's an 11 minute Bob Roche Hackintosh video, showing installation of OSX 10.10 on a Gigabyte X99-UD4 motherboard with a 5820K CPU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx_RD7CduDM
One of his procedure steps includes cloning OSX from a GUID drive to a second MBR formatted drive. I've never seen that as a requirement before.

 

[destrekor]

So... I can't boot into OS X anymore.

First, I had downloaded/installed AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementInfo.kext, made sure permissions were good on it and rebuilt kext cache, then rebooted.

Booted fine. Ok. So I go onto my next target, getting my ALC889 (AppleHDA) to show up as an audio device. I had previously ran AppleHDA8Series.sh but I had actually removed the AppleHDA Audio ID injection (1) from my Clover config prior to that. So after digging around, I figured that after correcting the injection, I should rerun Piker's script.

Well, after ensuring correct permissions, rebuilding cache, and rebooting, bam... no more boot for you, my system says.
Using clover, I can't boot into safemode, into single-user mode, nor can I get into recovery, apparently.


Every time I tried booting any configuration, including without kext cache, it still locks up at what appears to be a CPU power management step. In most approaches, the last visible step is AICPUPMI, and shows two P-states. If I skip cache, it doesn't display that line.
Eventually, it moves to a screen that says "still waiting for root device."

WTH do I do?

FWIW, regarding power management: I have run ssdtPRgen, placed that ssdt.aml in the appropriate efi/clover directory (I had an old version in there from Mavericks), and I always had set Drop OEM SSDT.

The Intel CPU gadget seems to display a healthy CPU speedstepping, in that it shows the clockrate rising and falling smoothly throughout the range, sometimes only rising up so far, yet AICPUPMI only showed 16, 34, 44 as p-states, which is better than MSRdumper.kext showing 16,44.

 

[vailr]

So... I can't boot into OS X anymore

Well: there's always the option of: re-format and re-install.
For audio to work, I just use the latest MultiBeast. Except for that to work, the vanilla AppleHDA.kext needs to reside in it's unaltered location. I've generally avoided directly editing files like you're describing. "Keep it simple" is the best way for a successful Hackintosh.
Tonymac's boot method uses Chimera instead of Clover, and seems to work pretty well. I would advise leaving for last the CPU power management kexts and what-not. Get the basics working first: LAN, video, & audio. Then do a Time Machine or other type of clone backup, from which you could always quickly recover from, if needed.

 

[destrekor]

Well: there's always the option of: re-format and re-install.
For audio to work, I just use the latest MultiBeast. Except for that to work, the vanilla AppleHDA.kext needs to reside in it's unaltered location. I've generally avoided directly editing files like you're describing. "Keep it simple" is the best way for a successful Hackintosh.
Tonymac's boot method uses Chimera instead of Clover, and seems to work pretty well. I would advise leaving for last the CPU power management kexts and what-not. Get the basics working first: LAN, video, & audio. Then do a Time Machine or other type of clone backup, from which you could always quickly recover from, if needed.

I'm avoiding approaches like MultiBeast as Clover basically allows me to have a vanilla system, which, admittedly, was supposed to help ensure I could make backups and go about recovery far easier.

I have Time Machine active (plus a pre-Yosemite bootable clone partition from Super Duper)... but, what good is all that if I can't access the recovery drive during boot?


I feel like all I need to do right now is simply delete one kext from S/L/E, and boot without cache.

 

[vailr]

@ destrekor: MultiBeast can optionally not install Chimera or any other boot loader. If that's all you need from it, use MultiBeast to only install the audio driver.
What exact hardware (motherboard, CPU & video) are you using?
Did you create some kind of a bootable USB thumb drive OSX installer, in order to boot the target machine? Boot from that and then Terminal is one of the tools at the top menu bar.

 

[destrekor]

@ destrekor: MultiBeast can optionally not install Chimera or any other boot loader. If that's all you need from it, use MultiBeast to only install the audio driver.
What exact hardware (motherboard, CPU & video) are you using?
Did you create some kind of a bootable USB thumb drive OSX installer, in order to boot the target machine? Boot from that and then Terminal is one of the tools at the top menu bar.

My boot disk has been overwritten for another bootdisk. I really need to go buy a bunch of cheap USB sticks for recovery and live-boot purposes.

I boot use an EFI partition on my Mac system disk.


Relevant hardware:
Asus P8Z68 Deluxe (ALC889 onboard codec)
Intel i7-2600K
2x GeForce 560 Ti 2gb

I have a Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty (not PCIe - the classic cards), but that's useless in the Mac environment.
When in Windows, I sometimes switch speakers to the X-Fi, or just hookup the headphones to the X-Fi and mute speakers that remain on the onboard audio).

I haven't tried yet - but I might be able to boot my way into the supposedly bootable clone backup I had made using Super Duper prior to upgrading from 10.9.3 to 10.10. If that doesn't work, I guess I'm re-downloading the 10.10 installer on my iATKOS VM under Windows and making an installer again.

I thought I might be able to access the HFS+ partitions from a live Linux environment, but I've heard Linux cannot Write to HFS+ partitions when Journaling is enabled. I just want to delete one kext to start this off, ugh.

If I go with making a new bootable installer (ugh, re-doing the EFI configuration, blah*), I'll make use of Time Machine if deleting that file doesn't help.

*Dammit, and I made a backup of what was on my bootable installer disk, but of course that back up is on my Mac drive that I cannot access! All my EFI configurations and kext injections are, of course, completely inaccessible at the moment.
(whenever I get my MacBook, life will be much easier managing a hackintosh)

 

[Zaap]

^ I don't understand the problem here. If you made a bootable backup... then... BOOT the bootable backup. Otherwise, it's not really a bootable backup.

I'm not understanding what you mean when you say you "...can't access the recovery drive during boot". Did you test whatever this is? If it's actually bootable, then all you should have to do is select it from the BIOS and boot from it. Otherwise, as I said, you never actually made a *bootable* backup.

Superduper (and CCC as well) absolutely allow one to make bootable clones of a system, so if you did this, I don't see what the problem would be. Did you just make a DISK IMAGE backup, not an actual standalone clone on its own drive? If just a disk image, then yeah, you'd need to boot from another drive and restore the disk image to a drive before it would work. But I hardly see the point of all that without a proper bootable backup in the first place- kind of like having a spare tire... with no car.

 

[destrekor]

^ I don't understand the problem here. If you made a bootable backup... then... BOOT the bootable backup. Otherwise, it's not really a bootable backup.

I'm not understanding what you mean when you say you "...can't access the recovery drive during boot". Did you test whatever this is? If it's actually bootable, then all you should have to do is select it from the BIOS and boot from it. Otherwise, as I said, you never actually made a *bootable* backup.

Superduper (and CCC as well) absolutely allow one to make bootable clones of a system, so if you did this, I don't see what the problem would be. Did you just make a DISK IMAGE backup, not an actual standalone clone on its own drive? If just a disk image, then yeah, you'd need to boot from another drive and restore the disk image to a drive before it would work. But I hardly see the point of all that without a proper bootable backup in the first place- kind of like having a spare tire... with no car.

Well, I hadn't attempted that, because I didn't see it in clover.

And I haven't tried it today because I've gotten into some things in Windows that I want to wrap up before I reboot and start screwing around again.

I had previously tried the Recovery boot option in Clover (next to the Main system drive boot option), which failed to boot like the main OS. This may not even be an actual boot option for hackintosh systems, it just appears as an option due to vanilla-like install. Not sure. :\

I wanted to try every other route before I simply dove for the bootable backup of Mavericks. I figured there was a challenge, one I was hopeful could be conquered. I don't think this one can be, so once I get settled to reboot, I'll be giving that option a go and see what I can achieve.

 

[vailr]

I could be wrong, but I think I read that GTX 500 series video cards can be problematic in OSX. Here's 2 GTX 750 cards for under $100 after rebate:
http://slickdeals.net/f/7285144-evg...fter-rebate-w-visa-checkout-free-shipping?v=1
You shouldn't really need "a bunch" of USB thumb drives. One 8 Gb drive each for Mavericks & Yosemite should be adequate. A better investment would be: one or two spare SSD drives, so that you could have bootable Mavericks on one SSD, Yosemite on another, and Windows on a 3rd separate hard drive or SSD.

 

[destrekor]

I could be wrong, but I think I read that GTX 500 series video cards can be problematic in OSX. Here's 2 GTX 750 cards for under $100 after rebate:
http://slickdeals.net/f/7285144-evg...fter-rebate-w-visa-checkout-free-shipping?v=1
You shouldn't really need "a bunch" of USB thumb drives. One 8 Gb drive each for Mavericks & Yosemite should be adequate. A better investment would be: one or two spare SSD drives, so that you could have bootable Mavericks on one SSD, Yosemite on another, and Windows on a 3rd separate hard drive or SSD.

Well, multiple thumb drives would be for a Mac installer/recovery, a Windows recovery, and a Linux liveboot/installer (and/or a Tails drive). I've always obsessed over getting good quality/fast drives, but for this purpose, I realize the 3pack of 16gb jump drives I've seen at Costco should be plenty.

And yes, the 560 Ti's have been problematic. SLI is also basically a no-go for Mac. I'm not sure power management has actually been efficient for them.

But I'm holding off on upgrading until I can afford a good single-GPU card, and I'm pretty much set on the GTX 970 or 980. I don't think I'll ever go with SLI again, at least, not until I have a dedicated gaming rig that I'm not dual-booting with Mac. In the future, I'd really like a dedicated gaming setup in a sim-rig for racing and general gameplay (the Obutto R3volution chair, specifically), while I have a dedicated Mac machine built with best compatibility in mind from the beginning in an office setup.

 

[destrekor]

We're back - it was that simple, too.

Clover has the entry for the "Backup" bootable partition. First, let it be known that Mac takes FOREVER to boot and get into full gears (when recovering past session) when booting off of an HDD as opposed to SSD. My main installation is a dedicated SSD, but not the bootable backup.

Once inside, I just used the bash terminal (trying to do as much as I can from within it: some will translate to Linux CLI skills that I may need at my new job) to remove the suspected kext (AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementInfo.kext), and then rebooted into the Yosemite without a hitch.

Back to sound/video issues. Ugh.

Video: iTunes theatrical trailers (my test approach) just load into a black screen that does nothing.
Flash video in Firefox plays, but after 5-7 seconds, the video freezes. The system remains operational, but the video player itself freezes on a frame.

Audio: no audio device. The correct device, codec, and audio ID appear within IORegistryExplorer and DPCIManager, yet in System Preferences, there are zero output devices.

I have Clover inject "1", and AppleHDA8Series.sh generates AppleHDA.kext and AppleHDA889.kext and places them in S/L/E/.
I have set kext-dev-mode=1 to ensure unsigned kexts are indeed loaded, and I see these explicitly called out as being permitted for that reason.

I'm sort of working on a hunch that getting sound working will allow video to work as expected, but I'm not holding my breath. :\