Snow Leopard on a PC

[Chuckles]

Posted this in a couple of other places, but some people might find it interesting.

To give you a rough idea, in geekbench marks, this will beat any Mac Pro under about £3k.

OK, here is a guide on how I made my hackintosh. It dual boots to windows 7 which is on another hard drive and you can also spin up the W7 partition from VMWare fusion.

This works for me with the hardware list I'll attach, but it should work for other i7 boards. The only thing you might struggle with is network and sound. It's up to you, but it's probably easier buying a £10 network card rather than ****ing round with kexts.

Hardware list

GIGABYTE EX58-UD3R INTEL X58 (SO 1 £121.99
INTEL CORE I7 920 "D0 STEPPING" 1 £184.00
PATRIOT VIPER 6GB (3X2GB) DDR3 P 1 £83.99
ANTEC 300 THREE HUNDRED CASE 1 £41.06
CORSAIR MEMORY 650W TX SERIES AT 1 £64.99
NOVATECH GEFORCE GTX 275 896MB 1 £137.28
SAMSUNG S223B - 22X DVD+/-/RW 1 £14.49
NOCTUA SE1366 NH-U12P 1 £51.69

I'm running my cpu at 4ghz but if you don't want to bother, you don't need to last item on that list as you'll be ok with the retail fan.

In addition, you are going to need 3 hard drives. 1 for the OSX install, 1 for the Windows install and 1 as a temporary drive for getting a copy of 10.5.7 to work with (assuming you don't have an existing mac.) This can just be an old 40GB drive as you'll rip it out after.

Install

1) Firstly unplug all your drives (not just disable in BIOS) other than the one you want to install Windows on. This is important because if not in port 0, windows will try and write a boot partition to another drive. In the BIOS, set the properties of the Sata drives to AHCI from IDE if they are not already. Should look like this



2) Install Windows 7

3) Download iAtkos from here www.wudzi.co.uk/temp/iATKOS v7.nzb and burn to a DVD

4) Plug in your temporary hard drive

5) Boot from the iAtkos DVD and install to the temp hard drive. This is a piece of piss, just click next next next.

6) Plug in the hard drive you want to install Snow Leopard to and boot to iAtkos

7) Insert your retail Snow Leopard DVD (or mount an image to the desktop - This will run much quicker).

8) Download this file http://redirectingat.com/?id=292X457..._Installer.zip and extract/run. It will ask you which hard drive you want to work with. Make sure this is the one you are going to be installing Snow Leopard to.

9) Select type of install /Extra

10) Select bootloader PC-EFI

11) Select Mark partition as active

12) Select Run Retail DVD installer. Make sure you select customise during the install process and switch off all the optional installs. This is important.

13) After that's complete, select Run Kext installer. Do a "N" for normal build

14) Run DSDT patcher.

15) Power down PC, remove the temporary drive iAtkos was installed to.

16) Power on, in the BIOS, make sure your new hard drive (Snow Leopard) is first in the boot order. If that has worked, you should get a new boot loader that lets you select either Snow Leopard or your Windows drive. If you don't select, it will go into Snow Leopard after a few seconds.

That's the basics. You will want to check whether your sound and network are OK. I've done a load of pissing round with this, so if not, post here and I'll try and help. There are a few extra things you can do.

Firstly, I'd recommend disabling spotlight on your windows drive as you really don't want it indexing every on that. Just switch it off in the system preferences.

Also, but default, OSX86 will boot in verbose mode, meaning you see all the debug text. If you want just the nice Apple logo, do the following

Open terminal and type
open /Extra
sudo vi com.apple.boot.plist

In the kernel flags, remove the -v. In that file, you can also force the kernel to boot into 64 bit by changing arch=i386 to arch=x86_64 but I wouldn't recommend as a beginner or you'll be ****ing round with kexts again. Bear in mind all Macs other than Xserve default to a 32bit kernel anyway. Due to the way OSX works, all 64 bit apps run correctly and can address over 4GB of RAM even with a 32bit kernel so there is really no advantage.

If you rerun that script, you can pick a few different themes for the bootloader and do things like modify the processor so it is correctly identified in about this mac if not already.

You should also be safe to update to 10.6.2 at this point.

Finally, of you install VMWare fusion 3, you should be able to tell it to create a machine from a boot camp drive. If you do that, you'll be able to boot directly from your Windows 7 drive. Use something like Spaces and you can press Command+2 to toggle between OSX and Windows 7 instantly. If you need the graphics accelloration (to play games or whatever), just reboot and select the windows drive.



That guide has a lot of steps and makes it sound complicated, but when you get your head round, it really is a piece of piss. Feel free to ask questions anyway :visage: