November 26, 2008

Hackintosh!!!

Filed under: Blog,OS X — Tags: , , , , — Jimmay @ 3:22 pm

mac osx leopard

Well, we got it up!! I’m not sure if Robin became aware of the OSx86 Project through me, or if he was drawn to it organically; hell I guess I don’t even remember how I heard of it, so I guess I could have heard of it through him…

Anyway, thanks to some great help from community members in those forums and thanks to the Wiki there, Robin has gotten his very own Hackintosh up and running!!

After getting us getting laid off, Robin lost his access to a powerful computer. He had an old mac sitting around that didn’t even have a 1 ghz processor in it, nor did it have a DVD drive. With the lack of a computer monitor, he had to plug it into our TV! Yeah I know :) .

Well searching through what was available online and through Apple directly, he decided it was time to try to build his very own Hackintosh. This has been a goal of mine for some time, check out my about page. He checked out the parts on the OSx86 Project Wiki, and looked to get compatible parts from places, most of which, if not all of which, ended up coming from NewEgg.com.

With some assistance of people having gotten their own ‘hacks’ up in chat rooms, it looked like the right parts had been chosen. Of course the next part came of the excruciating wait of shipping, which was not aided by the fact we had no jobs.

By the time the packages were set to arrive, a small error was going to result in a further delay in the shipping process, so Robin made two trips up to get all the rest of the equipment.

Finally, with all the parts here, assembly commenced!

Building a computer, whether a tradition PC with Windows, or with Linux or any other Operating System, the process is straightforward… get a case, a power supply to power it all of course; a motherboard which connects everything together; memory, like the stuff you use in your digital camera, only better; a hard drive (or two, or three I guess if you want, but you need at least one); a graphics card (if one isn’t built into the motherboard – for good graphics a stand-alone graphics card is best); a CD or DVD drive, I prefer DVD; and you need any other add-ons you might dream of. A monitor is required of course as well as a keyboard and mouse.

Anyway, after putting these things together we discovered that the processor Robin chose would not work with his motherboard unless he updated the bios. Unable to understand how to do this without having SOME processor in there, we were fortunate to have one of my newer processors hanging around waiting to go into my computer.

We place that one into the motherboard, and presto! It works! At this point we needed to update the BIOS so we installed a copy of Windows XP on it in order to download a bios updating tool off the CD that came with the motherboard. Once this was done, we put in Robin’s processor, and that worked too!

So now came the impossibly hard task of trying to get Mac software, to understand and run on PC hardware. Fortunately there are MANY ways to do this, and after only a few attempts, OS X was running on his computer.

Though once we got it on there (it took about 2 days to get it right, no joke), there was the process of getting the kernal extensions on there to get the graphics card and all the other peripherals.

Once OS X was running, at this point the computer bolted to Robin’s room, and from there I only hear of success or failure, so the processes he went through I was out-of-the-loop on, so I don’t have any details on that :( .

On the bright side though, I was able to use a newly burned version of the Kalyway OS X 10.5.2 disk to get OS X working on my computer – but I am having the darndest problem: the Vista bootloader gets corrupted every time I un-plug that hard drive, or even simply install OS X onto the other hard drive. So I can get OS X working and fine and all, but not having a 3rd hard drive, I need to wipe the OS X drive in order to install Windows XP on it, which then is able to fix my Vista bootloader.

Yeah, it IS a big pain-in-the-neck. Hopefully I can get this figured out in some time, but at least KNOWING the Kalyway disk will work is a step in the right direction, so until I actually NEED OS X on my computer, I won’t worry about it.

Well, that’s about all I think I can share about what has happened so far here, so hope you enjoyed the triumph!!

November 2008
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AL Standings:

TeamWLGB
Baltimore2714--
Tampa Bay25162
Toronto23184
NY Yankees21195.5
Boston19217.5

AFC East Standings:

TeamWLTGB
New England1330--
NY Jets8805.0
Miami61007.0
Buffalo61007.0

NHL Standings:

TeamWLOLPTS
Boston49294102
Ottawa41311092
Buffalo39321189
Toronto35371080
Montreal31351678

NBA Standings

TeamWLGB
Boston3927--
New York36303
Philadelphia35314
Toronto234316
Brooklyn224417