First Things First

Ok, so, first things first. There are a TON of guides out on the internet about how to install OS X 10.6 on a PC. Most of them piggy-back off a few main ones, but there are a lot of guides that are unique in their own way. This is my attempt to give you a good one, well sorta. Here are the downloads you will need (I will post these again at the bottom):

Need:
EP45UD3P Snow Leopard (60 downloads) - Filesize: 1.48 MB – This is the tool I used to patch the USB drive with Snow Leopard on it.
DSDT Editor (68 downloads) - Filesize: 938.13 kB – This is a DSDT tool that allows you to patch your DSDT before compiling it and saving it to add to your Chameleon install.

Nice to have:
EFI tool (62 downloads) - Filesize: 2.75 kB – This is the tool that Dale built that turns all the terminal commands necessary to make Chameleon work into a small file so only is simpler. See further down with a quick how-to (or read the program yourself and see how it works if you know what you are looking at)
Extra folder (53 downloads) - Filesize: 881.87 kB – This is what my Extra folder currently looks like – so if you want to use my DSDT go right ahead, but no promises. I also updated my SMBIOS so that I could download Lion if I wanted to – but this doesn’t work for other reasons I don’t want to detail. I included UUID.kext in there because I was getting errors (see this forum).

So with that said here are a few things you are going to want to know – my specs:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G. This is a socket 775 motherboard. It has my processor:
• Processor: Intel QX6850 Quad-Core Extreme 3.00 GHz beast of a processor. Well in its day it was state of the art, not so much anymore, but it still is the most powerful processor I’ve owned. I know it consumes a lot of power, runs hot, blah blah but I’m not about to reinvest in the next generation, and if I can wait another 2-3 years before I feel out of date, fantastic. I’m writing this not as a guide, but as a recap because I am assuming I got lucky that this worked at all.
• Graphics: EVGA nVidia 8800 GT – this card has treated me so well, I don’t even know how to quantify it. Best purchase I have ever made. I think it was about $100 when I bought it a few years ago, still runs like a champ. Played Portal 2 with no issues (both on my Hack, and on the PC)
• Misc: if you clicked on my link for my motherboard you would see just what my LAN uses, and audio, but for those people who don’t want to click through, here they are:
  • Audio: ALC892 (EDIT: Holy crap, as I was just writing this I realized that Gigabyte states this is ALC892 – I was always under the assumption it was ALC888, thanks to Newegg. But it’s ok, because I got audio working assuming it was ALC888, and nothing broke yet – I guess that’s all that matters)
  • Networking: Realtek 8111D. This worked out of the box, but I listed it for reference.
  • Chipset: Intel P43 Express – I guess that’s where the “P43″ comes from in the product number…
  • Other Hardware: I have a few things I didn’t bother looking into whether it would break my install or not. For instance I have 4 1GB sticks of DDR2-800 memory (they only show up as 666 MHz for some reason, but I can’t say I care), I have a lot of hard drives I never bothered to unplug (120GB for Snow Leopard, 320 GB for Windows – already installed, 1 TB for all my junk, and a 200GB LaCie external hard drive from about 2004/2005 that I planned on using for Time Machine), a couple of TV tuners that I use in Windows, and a joystick and a steering wheel I use for games on Windows too – I left them all plugged in and had no problems.

That’s pretty much all I can think of hardware wise that is important. I’ll try to mention anything else I think of later.

With all this out of the way, time to go to disclaimers:

Disclaimers:

This is not meant to be a guide. This is just a recap as to what I did. I am not guaranteeing this procedure will work 100% for anyone else, and I may get some minor details wrong, or confused. I will do my best to link to all the other guides out there that helped me along the way, as this will be good for both me and anyone else to look to if a problem arises. Clearly this is my own website, so I am uploading files to it that I used so if I ever need to I can download them again for myself. I don’t trust that the sites I link to will stay active forever, so apologies if I offend anyone for hosting the files I used here myself. I am linking to your work so please don’t flame me for “stealing” your work as my own. I am being very up-front, none of these programs I link to I built myself. I simply found them, and used them.

Also, there may be newer versions of each of the programs I link to, and if you want to find a newer version of something I provided, or you think you can do better using something different trying to follow what I did, fantastic. I clearly didn’t follow any guide 100% myself so, yeah, that’s that.

History (feel free to skip if you want):

I bought a Dell PC as my first PC when I was in high school. I always wanted to learn about how computers worked, and I didn’t even know how to learn, much less did I know where to learn. So I naively bought a computer that was pretty cheap from Dell.com following all the marketing points they wanted to show me. I didn’t understand what made one 3 GHz processor better then another, I had no idea what made RAM work, so I bought it. Anyway, I planned on putting a nice, shiny new graphics card in it and it didn’t work. There was no PCI Express slot in it, so I thought, “well, computers need new motherboards all the time, so why don’t I just buy one, and replace it myself?” Well I don’t do that because it is A FREAKING DELL! They don’t let you. This one had its motherboard all turned around based on where I needed it to be, so I said “screw it” and bought components to build my own computer.

I ended up being dumb and buying components that were too cheap and I ended up with a bad computer with a nice graphics card. All in all for my first built computer it ran fine, and over the years I upgraded pieces at a time, a motherboard/processor here, new memory there, new case, new power supply – basically I never updated everything at once. So that is how I ended up with the computer the way I have it now. I haven’t bought a new motherboard, CPU or graphics card for about 3 years now.  I got a new case and CPU cooler to try to help cooling, but the major components are largely unchanged. So if you are looking for a guide as to what components you should buy to specifically get a nice Windows/OS X computer running, don’t copy me. Anyway…

I plan on just talking throughout this next part of my walkthrough. I might babble (like I am right now) and like I said earlier, may not state things 100% correct but this is more for my records then anything else, so I want to understand myself more then anything, not explain things 100% correct. With that said, let’s go!

Setup:

Here’s a short concept of what I did: I installed one of the hack builds for Leopard (like Kalyway or something) and did the restore method on an 8 GB thumb drive to get the Snow Leopard install disk bootable from my thumb drive. There are a few guides that explain how to do this, and I will list a couple here. I use this to install a vanilla version of Snow Leopard on my hard drive, use the USB stick to boot into that installation, and then install Chameleon bootloader on it, and I patch everything. I used Windows to extract my DSDT and I patched it through the methods I am going to explain, and all I really had to do was get the graphics working right, sound, and Flash. I think that’s all that was giving me problems.

I really don’t have the time, or patience in order to get all the correct information copied over to this blog. I am just going to hope that the article on lifehacker stays up to date in regards to having a formatted 8 GB thumb drive with a retail image of Snow Leopard bootable.

Here is the package you will use to patch the thumb drive:

• EP45UD3P Snow Leopard (60 downloads) - Filesize: 1.48 MB NOTE: This patch is NOT specifically designed for my motherboard. This is just the way I did it, and that’s all I care about. I suppose I could have just installed chameleon onto the thumb drive using some other guide, but this little package was the best for me. I also suppose if I used chameleon I could have used a Voodoo kernel extension to get audio working at the start, and things like that, but since I end up installing chameleon on the target hard drive right away, I don’t mind not hearing sound in the intro movie, and having the 100% perfect bootloader on my thumb drive. Something simple is all I needed.

Procedure:

Now that we have the setup of the flash drive ok, we can now install it. Here’s what to do:

1. Boot into the USB thumb drive. I did this by selecting F12 during BIOS boot, so that I boot into the thumb drive just this one time. Remember: FOLLOW THE GUIDE!! You need to set your BIOS so things like AHCI mode are enabled, that way OS X will understand your hard drives when it comes time to run and install everything. That seemed to be the only significant thing I had to adjust in BIOS, as everything else I adjusted was based on personal preference.
2. Once booted into the USB drive, select “itself” (I guess is the best way to describe it) from the boot loader to open the Snow Leopard installer. Open disk utility, and then format the hard drive you want to install on. At this point, use that hard drive to install Snow Leopard. Select whatever you want to as settings, but default should work just fine.
3. After reboot, you need to select the thumb drive again to boot into, only this time when the boot loader pops up, select your hard drive to boot. For me, when I did that most everything worked, besides audio (it seemed). Since we are using the extensions from the thumb drive, we are relying on that to interface with the incompatable parts of the install disk. I got the start-up movie to work for me too, and I got right to the main screen with no issues. (Video: Watch this video on the post page)
4. Now that Snow Leopard is installed we have a couple minor things to do to get OS X working perfectly. These are so minor that it’s crazy how quick and easy this is. First, we install chameleon onto the EFI partition (because I like to do it that way), set the Boot.plist according to BIOS, patch the DSDT, update OS X to 10.6.8, patch audio, and then uninstall Flash and install version 10.0.45
5. EFI tool (62 downloads) - Filesize: 2.75 kB – This is a little program that Dale made that automatically sets up Chameleon. What it does by default is initialize the EFI partition using the binaries from the Chameleon website. I am going to post the utility he gave me, as well as the binaries for the version of Chameleon I used in a bit (they will also be at the top of this post). Here are a few quick commands to know (and run everything in sudo mode) – init: (run by using “sudo ./efi init boot0_location boot1h_location boot_location“) – this works seemingly with every version of Chameleon I have come across. Another set of commands to run are mount and unmount. These are straight-forward and do what you would expect. The last command (that I know he programmed) is rebuild. This compiles the extensions that are in the Extra/Extensions folder. Since Chameleon doesn’t need this to be done, this command is optional, but if you would rather compile it this is the best way to do it. Also, something to keep in mind, you can specify a disk other then you current hard disk to use “efi” on, just use the flag “-ddisk#“, obviously specifying the correct disk. You still want to populate the Extra/Extensions folder with the correct kext’s (Disabler.kext, fakesmc.kext, OpenHaltRestart.kext), and use the right Boot.plist settings and use a patched DSDT.aml. After initializing the EFI partition and installing Chameleon, use the mount command and open the EFI partition to add these to the appropriate locations, then don’t forget to unmount when finished. I will show you the right Boot.plist settings next:
6. Boot.plist: Important! Use EthernetBuiltIn set to “yes” so that OS X registers the ethernet as being internal instead of external. This mainly makes sure that the App Store works, it’s the only things I know of that didn’t work that works now thanks to using it. I also used GraphicsEnabler set to “yes” just to be sure my graphics worked. Those were the main two settings I used – here is what the entire contents of my plist look like:
   
   This should be sufficient to get things working. I am going to post my Extensions folder that I am using on the EFI partition, as well as the Boot.plist, and other important files so you can skip just download them and put everything where they belong if you want too, I’m just being thorough. The next important thing to edit is the DSDT. Here is what I did for that.
7. DSDT.aml: go to this link to see where I got started figuring out how to patch my DSDT. Now before I get ahead of myself, notice at the end of the 3rd post that it was reported to use GeneratePStates and GenerateCStates, and maybe that will solve something – I’m not sure. I will play around with that myself. I suppose you can add it if you want, it’s really so straightforward to edit plists, so maybe you can just do it by default and be done with it.So now you can see that we need the utility to edit the DSDT with a couple of things. First things first, we need the DSDT. I got my DSDT from Windows. To edit the DSDT itself, I used this program: DSDT Editor (68 downloads) - Filesize: 938.13 kB which I got from this forum. Now, referring back to the original forum from this bullet, it looks like the following patches (found in the “patches” folder) need to be applied: DTGP, AHCI SATA (orange icons), HPET, IRQs, Shutdown, and LPC. Some of these may be redundant compared to some of the kext’s out there, but once you have your DSDT finished, you can take that anywhere you want.There is one final patch that needs to be done to the file though before it should be good to go, and that is to patch it in a way so that you don’t reset your CMOS every time you boot (and thus have BIOS scream at you to fix it every single time you restart). The solution is simple. The best example is in this forum post, but simply said, edit Device (RTC) and make sure the line that has the comment “//Length” after it says “0×02″ not something different. Like I said, simple, but necessary. Now that the patches have been applied, compile the DSDT, make sure all errors are taken care of and save the compiled version as DSDT.aml wherever you can find it later. If you followed the other bullets correctly, put that in the Extras folder on the EFI volume for Chameleon to use.
8. So now we have the installation of Chameleon all set, with the correct kext’s, DSDT, and plists, we need to do 3 things. First: install the Snow Leopard 10.6.8 combo update. This is what is most up to date for me. At this point you will need to restart, patching audio didn’t work until I restarted. Then you can use your favorite kernel extension installer (kext helper, kext utility). We need to use these because unless you use a Voodoo kernel, we need the default kext’s in the System to be replaced, EFI does no good. I posted the correct 2 kext’s for audio here too. While doing this I recommend uninstalling Flash using their uninstaller (posted), and installing version 10.0.45 (posted) to make sure flash videos don’t lag or stutter. I haven’t found a solution to this problem any other way, but if I do find a way, I’ll post an update. Then restart to get audio to boot up.
9. I think we’re done! Set your OS X drive as boot if you want, or keep Windows as the default and then F12 your way to the OS X drive as requested. But I have iLife ’11 working, the App Store, flash videos, everything. I know this was pretty wordy, but this really is simple once everything is set up. The hardest/most complicated/involved process for me was patching the DSDT since I had to get the raw file first, then patch it like 8 times and ways, and then compile it, but even that wasn’t bad – all the real work was pre-defined. That just leaves one more step:
10. ENJOY YOUR NEW MAC!!!

Oh my god. I think the single most important event in Mac’s recent history has just unfolded. In case you missed it, Valve has announced that Steam will officially be released for OS X in April. This is massive. This is ginormous. This is other-worldly huge.

Why? From the best of my knowledge, the only things that Windows has in favor of it over OS X is the fact that people mainly have used older versions of its software on Windows, and are used to the mechanics of it, and rely on the ability to use those same programs on newer versions of Windows. The second thing that Windows has over Mac is the games.

Windows has had Direct X on its side for a long time, but OpenGL is a VERY capable competitor to Direct3D, and has the advantage of being Operating System-neutral. In fact, most games have a very capable OpenGL mode. What this move for Steam does, though, is give all the Windows gamers a capable alternative to Windows with the same experience on Mac. Essentially, the slew of games that could only be run on Windows can now be run on OS X with little to no hassle. This is a MAJOR barrier that will be hurdled. Imagine all those gamers having to re-buy their games in order to play on the Mac as well as the PC. The way it was announced, no additional costs will be required for consumers to install their games on the Mac.

I can just envision it now:

Hi, I’m a Mac

And I’m a PC. Hey, Mac, whatcha doing over there?

Oh, hi PC. Actually I’m just playing the new Portal 2 game. It’s really great. The cake is a lie, I guess. I haven’t quite understood it yet, but this game rocks! Have you played it?

Yes, Mac, I just got it today. I was about to tell you the same thing. It’s really great, isn’t it? I actually have thousands of games I can play at a moment’s notice, most of which have received numerous Game of the Year awards. I bet you wish you could do that!

Actually, PC, I can. Most of the highest rated games you can play are here with me as well. It’s great. And if you already bought the game, you don’t need to pay another cent. It’s really quite great. In fact, I can even play this game with you, right now. Want to give it a shot?

No, Mac… I’m just going to go over another spreadsheet…

And, scene. Wow. I am still geeking out over this.

Of course not everyone will be a convert to OS X and Mac, it is still a pain to have to buy a special Apple package, but with the way things are going nowadays, Apple has just increased their potential customer base by millions. Macs could always run Windows side-by-side since Intel chips came along, but that required an additional purchase of Windows on top of the Mac.

With Office available on OS X, now Steam, and all the big programs like Adobe Creative Suite and iLife, and Final Edit Pro (not to mention Xcode), there is no better reason to make your next computer purchase a Mac. Games? Check. Productivity? Check. Video/Picture Editing? Check.

Add this on top of the most solid platform available, next to no viruses, and one of the simplest interfaces to ever come into existence, you would be insane not to buy a Mac.

So do it!!

So, iPad! YAY! I haven’t watched the press conference Apple threw today, so I have only been able to read what others have writen about the new iPad introduced to the world today. Here are a few of my thoughts on this “revolutionary” device:

Simply put: it’s a lot of overblown hype. I guess more specifically I mean that the hype it is getting too much hype. I’m not saying everyone who loves all the features and demos shown today are wrong, but the overall “buzz” for this is overblown. Essentially, in my mind, this is what the Kindle should be, and once again Apple has shown the way to the world about how exactly to lead the world in every electronics category you enter.

Operating Systems? Leads. Hardware? Leads (but I understand both of these go hand-in-hand). Smartphones? Leads. Portable music devices? Leads. And now? They will lead in the “medium sized application delivery system” category, that they just created. The only they don’t lead in is servers, and that’s just an opinion, I don’t have any numbers to back that up.

The Kindle now belongs to this category, as does Barnes and Noble’s new device. These devices are now painfully behind what Apple has introduced here today: a gorgeous color, multi-touch screen, with full iPhone/iPod touch application support, and the same, rock-solid portable OS that is found in the iPhone and iPod touch.

This all combines to be one awesome package, and is proof, yet again, that Apple is on top of their game.

Now that I’ve said that, here’s the problems I find with this:

This is essentially what the iPod touch SHOULD have been from the very beginning. All the other iPods are better portable music player values then the iPod touch. Sure, a case could be made that the iPod touch can and will kill the Nintendo DS, and the Sony PSP, but the issue with that for me is that now there will be little to no market for an iPod touch.

No one is going to want to make games for the iPod touch that is designed for the small screen, when the same effort could be made to expand the experience on a larger screen. Most games require an internet connection, anyway since they are anticipating being run on an iPhone anyway.

Now, though, the devlopers of apps have 2 clear targets: iPhones (and by association the iPads with 3G) and iPads. Games will be designed to run at the max resolution, and some productivity apps will be designed to run exclusively on iPads.

But logistics aside, who is going to use these? Travellers, for one, as they can now watch movies, listen to music and play games from their seat either on the train, or plane, or taxi cab. This experience will be AMAZING too. A gorgeous screen to watch movies and music videos and TV shows.

But how many people regularly fly anymore? Take the train? Not many. As I blogged about earlier, when I lived in the Bay Area, I rode the train often, and loved spending my time playing the PSP. But that’s a PSP, not this large, bright $500 “STEAL ME!” sign. Not that I expect the worst in people, but all it takes is one bad Apple (pardon the pun) to ruin the bunch, and this device seems a little too flamboyant to take out in public.

So that leaves long-distance travel. And again, who does that regularly? At MOST I fly a couple times a year. I don’t go on Amtrak, and I don’t take Greyhound. So for me (and millions of people like me) this iPad is a catchy and kind of cool device, that will never satisfy my needs at $500.

Perhaps if this were the price of a PS3, then I maybe could justify the cost of purchasing it, but as it currently stands, I would rather spend a couple hundred more dollars, and get a full-fledged laptop, and I know I’m not in the minority on this.

Yes, it has some cool features, and yes it looks sharp, great, and Apple continues to demonstrate itself to be a trand-setter, but I don’t see how this is “revolutionary” at all. It’s just a bigger iPod touch, and as such has a few new bells and whistles to go with it. That’s it.

There will be the obvious migration to your local Apple store to pick one up, and your obvious fanboys will pick one up, but I don’t see how this will benefit the average consumer in any meaningful way.

We’ll see!

See below for edits. Last edit: 4/15/2009

(Boot 132 Disk)

(Apple OS X Leopard [10.5.0] Retail Disk)

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2qjjst – (10.5.2 Combo Update)

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=91755 – (Graphics)

http://rapidshare.com/files/153774218/Archive.zip – (Sound, install with Kext Helper)

woot!!
Ok, so I know you are going to want to know what I did exactly, and while I am not 100% certain what worked and/or why, here is what you need to know.

First things first, here are my specs:

Intel QX6850 Quad-Core Extreme 3.00 GHz processor
nVidia GeForce 8800GT
Gigabyte P43-ES3G motherboard
- ALC888 Audio Codec
- LAN is, um idk
- go Google my motherboard for specs

Ok, now to start, I am using Robin’s Boot-132 boot disk, which allows me to load into the retail OS X (10.5.0) disk. This is important because for obvious reasons the retail disk won’t load all on its own, it’s meant for Mac hardware. I had to set my hard drives to be in ACHI mode in order for the OS X disk to see them. If I didn’t do this the disk simply wouldn’t see the hard drives. Hopefully I can change this, because to get back into Windows I need this setting off. I’m sure you can see why this is annoying!

So now that I have the retail disk loaded, I install OS X like normal, as if it were a Mac. Just partition a hard drive with the partition utility found on the disk, and partition it as Journaled. There are lots of guides about how to do this. Just know that my motherboard and processor combination had no issues installing OS X. I didn’t have any hangs or anything. The whole process was in very low resolution but whatever, can’t expect miracles.

So after I have OS X installed on the hard drive, I still have the issue of getting to it. I just used the Boot 132 cd again, only this time I didn’t use (9f) as my device to boot to, I used in my case I think 80 for the default hard drive. The boot loader can see the name of the drive so if the name matches what you named the drive when you partitioned it then you know you selected the right hard drive number here.

I have 3 internal hard drives that total 4 partitions, and an external hard drive. In my various attempts to do this it has ranged from 80 to 84 for the number that corresponded with the right hard drive.

But now that the drive is selected, just boot into it. If everything is ok you should still be good. Now for me a lot worked out of the box. Although the resolution was low, it still displayed a default resolution, so that was good enough. Audio didn’t work, but lan did, so I could go on the internet instantly to download the files I needed.

The first thing I did was download the update to get from OS 10.5.0 to 10.5.2. This is a combo update, and you can Google it, or you can click the link I have up top.

This did basically nothing from my perspective. Even though this update is supposed to have drivers for my 8800GT, it didn’t work. Still low res. Also audio still doesn’t work. But at this point it is 10.5.2 and that’s good. More up-to-date so that’s a win.

At this point I wanted to get my resolution working so I followed the instructions to the letter found on the link I posted up top. I had to hand-write the instructions on paper to know what to type when I logged in as single user mode.

At this point after I restart, booting from the CD didn’t work for me anymore, so I tried booting straight from the hard drive, and somewhere along the lines it put in a boot-loader. I tried booting with the -f flag (so I could implement the changes I just made), and viola! Graphics work!

(In case you were wondering how the CD failed me, if I tried to boot off the CD at this point, I would get the gray Apple logo just great, but when it was time to log in my monitor turned off. It sounded like my computer was churning, so maybe something was on that CD that conflicted with the drivers I just installed, but whatever it was, the CD was out)

Now I have internet, and graphics, next I need sound. This was horribly pesky to fix.

Basically, I tried everything. If you Google ALC888 you can see like 8 different solutions. What I did in the end is use the kext’s located at the link listed up top and installed them with Kext Helper. It worked!

To be fair I tried so many things first, so I don’t know specifically what put it over the top. I tried every other way I could find to get the audio working that didn’t involve me going into terminal (the only solutions I tried were packages or txt files I used with another program).

And now, I am at the point where I can type my results and display them here for you.

Whoo!

I know I haven’t gone into so much detail as I could have, but I am honestly tired of thinking about what works and what doesn’t. I am really only able to tell you what I did, I can’t tell you why certain things work and others don’t. At least you now know my motherboard and other important things about my system.

I couldn’t find any other posts anywhere regarding my motherboard, so I am posting this: GA-P43-ES3G works!!

FINALLY. WIN.

EDIT (4/15/2009)

Ok, so now I have gotten my computer all the way up to 10.5.6, so yeah, win.

Here’s what I did:

I went to apple.com and downloaded each update from 10.5.3 to 10.5.6. I did NOT download the combo updates, just the updates that took me from the previous version to the next version. I think combo updates (since they are for bringing something as low as 10.5.0 to whatever version I downloaded) I both didn’t need that, or want it. Plus it saved bandwidth and download size.

After I had gotten it to 10.5.2, I used this guide to update my computer to 10.5.3.

After using that guide, I got to 10.5.3 with relative ease. After the requisite restart I searched and found out I didn’t need to do anything to update to 10.5.4 or 10.5.5. I did it in steps still though, and once I updated to 10.5.4 and restarted with no problems, I did the same with 10.5.5.

At this point I had gotten through almost all of them with very little effort all things considered (which is great). After looking some more I found out 10.5.6 should be the same thing. After I installed it and restarted, I had an issue. (Gasp!)

After I restarted I thought it had failed (I was restarting in verbose mode just to see what was going on with each restart), and I noticed it had the same “MACH_REBOOT” message that I was presented with following the 10.5.3 update. This felt reassuring to me, so I simply hard rebooted in verbose mode, and viola! OS X Leopard all up-to-date.

So that one guide listed was basically all I needed. And now you know. I should post my specs on the OSx86 wiki page now…
End EDIT (4/15/2009)