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 (95 downloads) - Filesize: 1.48 MB – This is the tool I used to patch the USB drive with Snow Leopard on it.
DSDT Editor (106 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 (95 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 (87 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hot, blah blah but I’m not about to reinvest in the next generation, and if I can wait another 2-3 years before I feel out of date, fantastic.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 (95 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- EFI tool (95 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:
- 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. - 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 (106 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- ENJOY YOUR NEW MAC!!!