Ongoing Adventures of a “Hackintosh”

Being the dork that I am, I’m always on the lookout for new dork things to do.

One of the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while was get OSX running on a non Apple PC. Personally, Apple is a company that pisses me off more than any other. They make good products but their business practices just fucking annoy me. You want a black macbook? Fuck you, you can only get it in a specific configuration with a tiny ass screen. Let’s not even touch on the fact that its $300 more than the white model and the only difference? An extra 60gb of hard disk space. Want more RAM in your mac? Fuck you again, another 2GB is going to cost you $200. Never mind the fact that the hardware is the same shit you put into a regular PC. 2GB of RAM in a Dell is going to cost you $50 dollars.

Oh but wait, you’re paying for the privilege to use OSX. The BEST FUCKING OS ON THE PLANET!! IT JUST FUCKING WORKS! AND IT LOOKS FUCKING SIIICKK. Well, something like that.

Anyways, I’m not against OSX at all, I think it does a lot of things right. Unified UI for one. That’s pretty nice. I don’t think its the easiest thing to use and things could be organized in an easier manner but for the most part its pretty slick. That’s probably where my interest in getting OSX running on my PC comes from. That and it’s a dork challenge. Some impressions of what I’ve done so far are below the fold.

Keep in mind this isn’t a guide or HOWTO. Just some thoughts some of you might be interested in.

Before you start, you need to have a drive formatted with HFS+, the filesystem OSX uses. If you’re a PC user, chances are you won’t find a way to do that easily. What you’re going to want to do is format a partition as FAT32. If you try and bootup with a NTFS formatted drive, the installer won’t detect the partition. Once the installer has loaded use the Disk Utility to format the FAT32 partition as HFS+.

At work we have some new AMD64 X2 machines I custom built with Tech Club kids. I downloaded the kalyway 10.5.1 dvd that works (with a bit of tweaking) on AMD chips. If you wanted the installer to load you couldn’t use a SATA drive. Apparently, the SATA driver for nVidia chipsets isn’t very good. Second, theres some patches to install with the DVD. For some reason, perhaps due to a burning error, the install would fail about 50% done saying it couldn’t access some files on the DVD. Anyways, that failed. Didn’t try burning a new DVD.

At home I’ve got an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. 2.1 GHZ with 4GB of RAM. Much more similar to the configurations regular Apples come in. I put the DVD into my drive and boot up into the installer with no issues. My first attempt at installing failed halfway through. I had forgot to format the FAT32 partition as HFS+. After formatting the partition, the install was a success.

Unfortunately, becuase I’m pretty much an idiot, I deleted the ext2 partition I had on that drive. Thats the partition that had my GRUB data on it. (GRUB being the linux bootloader Ubuntu uses). GRUB doesn’t keep everything on the MBR, most of the configuration stuff is found in the /boot directory on the drive. Once that was gone, GRUB was hosed. I wasn’t able to get it working again in the short time I tried.

Anyways, once I get the bootloader situation worked out and I can actually boot into OSX, I’ll let you know how it works out. Based on the ease of the install (minus it not installing its own bootloader), I’ve got high hopes.

posted by chantron on August 9, 2008 and tagged as apple, Computers, osx, osx86.