The Hackintosh Project, part 4 of 4

The following contains computer hardware talk. You have been warned.

The following is very, very boring. I’m sorry. Don’t read this.

I promised you boneheaded delays, and I believe I have delivered.

In fact, I’ll even give you some newbie mistakes that I knew about before embarking on this project that I went ahead and made anyway.

But first, let’s see the lovely (mostly) assembled behemoth of a computer.

This MIGHT look small to you, but I was vastly unprepared with how monstrous a mid-sized tower would be. The thing comes up to my knee, and has an even greater depth!

I won’t spend time with the gory details of assembling the beast, what you REALLY came to read is on the software side. Just look at this other photo and try to identify the all the different gadgets and dodads.

Ignore my complete lack of cable management for the moment; I’m procrastinating on that until I finally put a discrete graphics card in the thing.

So, away we go.

Hack attack

The zeroth step in this whole process is to download and burn a disc image for the iBoot utility, which will create a boot disc capable of, in turn, loading Mac OS X. As it’s a simply image burning operation, you can accomplish this under any operating system you wish (or have to).

If you have access to a Mac that can download Mountain Lion from the App Store (my old MacBook Pro was one model too old for that), you won’t need iBoot at all. I needed it, so I did it.

With a computer assembled of acceptable components, the first order of business is to cripple your RAM. No, really. If you have more than 4GB, take some extra sticks out. If you only have 8GB sticks of RAM, borrow one from your neighbor. Also, if you are using a GeForce 6XX video card, you’ll want to remove that too. Use integrated graphics or another compatible video card during installation.

Hey, I never said this would be simple.

So now that we’re sure our hardware is ready for installation, it’s time get your BIOS UEFI settings in order.

Depending on your motherboard, you’ll want to update the firmware. Using my Gigabyte board, I upgraded to the newest on-beta firmware, F11, and loaded the optimized defaults. From there, few changes are needed. Set the bot priority to CD-Rom, Set the Extreme Memory Profile to “Profile1.” If you’re using the Intel integrated graphics like I am, set Init Display First to IGFX and the Memory Size to 64MB (Mac OS X will use as much memory as it so chooses, but it likes to start from here). Finally, set the mode of the luck hard drive that will hold OS X to AHCI mode.

If you’d like to dodge a few issues, disable Wake from LAN (if you’d like not not automatically reboot after every power down) and disable Wake from Thunderbolt Devices (unless you like kernel panics when you use them).

Okay, ready to go. Boot from the iBoot CD, and it’ll take you to a new boot menu. Remove the iBoot CD, and replace it with the Snow Leopard Install disc (still available from Apple store for $19.99, and the last version of Mac OS X distributed on an optical disc. If you have more than one optical drive, don’t get smart. Put the Snow Leopard disc in the same drive iBoot was in.

Refresh this boot menu by pressing F5, and Snow Leopard awaits. Hopefully, you’ve hooked up a hard drive before this. And, hopefully, the hard drive is less than 1TB in size, and uses 4KB sectors. If not, well, no worry. The Snow Leopard install disc comes packed with a disk utility, so you can partition that sucker.

And partition, you’ll want to anyway. In order to properly boot, you’r hackintosh’s hard drive has to have a GUID partition table. Once you’ve done that, format your new partition as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Return to the installer and get to installing. When it asks you to restart, swap the iBoot disc back in, you’ll need to to… boot.

This time, when iBoot loads, you’ll see your Snow Leopard-ized hard drive. Selected it and get through the setup process (or just hit command-Q to quit out of it and move on faster).

So now we have Snow Leopard, but it’s not very stable on this shiny new Ivy Bridge hardware. Our goal is Mountain Lion, so let’s update Snow Leopard to the version that actually has the App Store.

But… there’s a catch. When you commit to making a hackintosh, you commit to never, ever using the software update utility again. Why? It’s complicated. It seems to break the kernel patches, devastating your machine. System software updates aren’t even the thing to avoid; I had to nuke my system and start from scratch just updating iTunes.

So, to get to download the update package from Apple’s support site. While you’re there, get the Installer updater as well. It will save you a night of frustration later. Trust me. Oh, Zod, trust me.

While we’re picking things up, the next tool in our mackintosh box, MultiBeast for Snow Leopard (version 3.10.1) will be needed as soon as you have finished the installer update and the combo update. The combo update will ask you to restart. You MUST run MultiBeast after installation, but before restarting, else you’ll have a useless install.

As the Snow Leopard install is simply a means to an end, don’t worry too much about your MultiBeast options here. Just check the “EasyBeast” box, install and reboot.

Whew! We’re in the home stretch now

With a (hopefully) successful boot up, you now have access to the App Store, where you can buy Mountain Lion, load it onto a USB stick, and perform a clean install.

It’s a pretty simple process, and uses another tool, Unibeast, to get the job done.

First, go buy Mountain Lion from the App store (It’s only another $19.99, you cheapskates.) It’s a hefty file, so be prepared to wait for it. In the meantime, you can hop into Disk Utility to prepare your 8GB or larger USB drive to be your installation medium. Partition the USB drive and, instead of what we did with the hard drive, give it a Master Boot Record. Then format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

When the Mountain Lion installer has downloaded, the App Store may ask if you run it. Don’t. You will be sorry. Instead, download and run Unibeast for Mountain Lion (currently version 1.7). Make sure the Mountain Lion install file is in the same folder as the Unibeast application, and make sure you have already installed the Installer Update I mentioned earlier, or this will fail.

Unibeast is pretty no-nonsense. It;ll ask you if you need support for legacy USB options or for laptops (I did not), and it’s off to the races.

Reboot from the USB drive. A similar second bootloader to the one found on the iBoot disk will load. Select the USB drive there, and the Mountain Lion installer will load.

I lost another day at this point. I thought I’d be cool and perform a simple update install. Doing so wrecked the kernel. There were ways and means to address this issue using terminal commands, and I spent many an hour wading through the junk. Then I stopped being dumb and realized that erasing the drive and performing a “clean” install of Mountain Lion was way easier and way faster.

So do it right the first time, install Mountain Lion and restart when prompted. Leave the USB stick in, you’ll need to get back to its bootloader for this final step. This time, when it loads, select your hard drive instead of loading from the USB stick.

Mountain Lion will load, and it will have issues. Your resolution will be out of whack. Your keyboard will work, but the system will claim it doesn’t understand it. All of this will be solved shortly. Go back to the TonyMac download page and get out last tool, MultiBeast for Mountain Lion. When you run it, you’ll be able to select boot modes, drivers and kernel patches that will make everything all right.

Because the options are so varied, if you dare try this I recommend looking at the TonyMac forums. There, people have uploaded screengrabs of their selections in addition to what hardware they used. If you’re a fan of things working correctly, feel free to ask questions and copy setups.

I should also note that it is perfectly safe to use the Migration Utility to restore files, users and applications from an old Mac if you are indeed migrating as I was forced to. This was a lifesaver for me.

And, at long last, you have labored to create the hackintosh. If it boots up correctly, find a spare hard drive and clone your known-working disk to it. If things need more tweaking, or you have made an error in your MultiBeast setup, it easily can be fixed by running MultiBeast again and selecting different options. At this point, you may safely put your RAM and GTX 6xx card back in… as well as any other device you may have removed in the hopes the process would go more smoothly.

The good news is that if you screw up, you can start right back at the Mountain Lion Install, thanks to your trusty USB stick.

And the other good news is that I can stop writing. My goodness, this is going to ruin the look of the site until it gets pushed into the archives.

All’s well that ends well