Hackintosh Update

Let me just say that I’m not a fan of the word “Hackintosh”, I don’t really know what else to call it. Sure, I could call it OSx86 but some people might not pick up on the meaning of it. Ya know?

Anyways, I was able to get my bootloader issues worked out.

You may recall that I foolheartedly erased my Ubuntu partition and with it my /boot directory (doh!). What’s important about the /boot directory is that its where GRUB keeps the config files for booting your OS. Without it, GRUB doesn’t know what to do!

I don’t think I mentioned this before but the hard drive I use is a 320gb SATA drive. Originally it was my primary OS drive but I now use a 32gb Raptor (SKREEE!!!) for that. This drive was split into two separate partitions, an NTFS one that took up about 280GB of data and an ext3 partition that took up the remaining 50gb. I’m not exactly an organized person and my hard drives prove exactly that. The NTFS partition on that drive is actually and old XP install that I kept around because I didn’t feel like sifting through all the files on there. I’ve got about 200gb of data on that partition and it’s a royal pain to sort it all out. So when I went to do my OSX install, I erased the ext3 partition (which held my Ubuntu install) hoping to avoid messing with the ton of data I had sitting a few sectors over.

So with that gone I had two partitions on a hard drive that couldn’t boot. I couldn’t find an easy way to install GRUB onto a non linux filesystem as I kept getting error 17 when trying to install it to the NTFS partition. Same deal with the HFS+ partition. So what I did was resize the NTFS partition to about 20GB smaller and used the free space to install Ubuntu and along with it, a working GRUB.

Now since installing OSX on regular PC hardware is a rare thing, GRUB didn’t detect the OSX install. I had to manually add that entry to GRUB’s menu.lst file (which is located in the /boot folder). I found the right entry by googling “OSX grub line” and took the first hit to the InsanelyMac forums. The answer was:

title MacOSX
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader –force +1

One thing to change is the (hd0,1) line after root. I chagned mine to (hd1,1) because my drive was the secondary drive according to bios and my OSX install was on the second partition. Apparently GRUB starts at 0.

Now, with the boot situation worked out I was finally able to see if my install worked. I boot into OSX and found the grey Apple loading screen. Seconds went by and the spiny thing was still spinning. A few more seconds and I had a new screen with a mouse cursor! Nice! I even got the rainbow loading cursor for a moment! Seconds later I hear the lamest “Welcome to your new OS install” music I’ve ever heard. It was even worse than XP’s (which just suckksssss).

Unfortunately thats all I get! After the music stops it just sits there with the hard drive lights flashing occasionally and I can move the mouse.

So I still have some work to do before I can join the Hackintosh elite! Maybe its a video driver issue? Not sure, but I bet it has to do with those crazy kext things!

posted by chantron on August 11, 2008 and tagged as Computers, osx86, partitions.