Snow Leopard Hackintosh How to

So those of you who follow me on Twitter know I have been working on a hackintosh for a few days now, with limited success... until now!

I have a fully working hackintosh now, and really it wasn't that hard, it is just assimilating information from too many places. I am going to remedy this now.

First things first my hardware:

Motherboard: Gigabyte, EP-UD4P
VideoCard: Galaxy GTS-250 (512MB)

To start follow the directions at lifehacker. I mean follow them to the "T". First time I tried, I used a USB harddrive instead of USB Memory stick, I recommend the stick (much faster to install). If your BIOS looks different, that is okay, key on the following:

• Change settings away from IDE to AHCI
• Change the boot order to boot your thumb drive first
• Change your power settings as in the lifehacker article

If you follow the instructions above, then you should be able to boot into (a somewhat crippled) hackintosh.

Now, your network won't work (onboard at least, a PCI NIC may work), your display will not be very good (no dual monitors and no way to adjust resolutions). You may even get some kernel panics (black code shows up on the side of your screen and the system is completely crashed and needs a reboot).

First things first, lets get the video card working.

1. The thread I found the good kext (mac equivalent of a driver) for the GTS-250 is here and the actual driver dmg is here.
   
2. Also get kext_utility here.
3. Copy the driver and kext_utility over to your new hackintosh (I used a USB stick to do this).
4. On your hackintosh, install the kext_utility (open the dmg, drag to Applications)
5. Open the driver dmg, get the appropriate driver (512MB for me).
6. Drag the driver onto kext_utility.
7. Enter your password
8. Let it install

Now we are going to make sure that when we boot up we will refresh the drivers (kexts).

1. Under either your USB Hackintosh drive or your Local drive (depending on whether you still need the USB stick to boot or not, see the lifehacker article for details) under /Extra.
2. Edit the apple.com.boot.plist file.
3. Under kernel flags (it will be empty), add "-v -f -x32" (not including quotes). For more on boot flags see this blog post. Briefly the flags say , boot verbose (you'll see lots of text), force refresh of driver cache, and run in 32 bit mode.
4. Reboot your system

Now you should get better video settings (dual monitors, more resolution options). Lets see about getting the onboard network card working now.

1. Get the kext here.
2. Copy over to your hackintosh (again using a USB stick or the like).
3. Drag onto kext_utility, enter password and install.
4. Reboot your system

After reboot check your network preferences, should be working.

Now sometime during doing this stuff you may get kernel panics (see above). I got them and they were all related to mdwarm or mdworker, which Googling quickly told me was a problem with spotlight (which indexes the disks and obviously was having a problem warming its indices). I don't care about spotlight, and I found out how to turn it off here (note this link is a good resoure, though he installed differently than the lifehacker article). So specifically to turn off spotlight if you are getting kernel panics:

1. Boot to single user mode (this took me a stupidly long time to figure out, but in the chameleon boot loader, click any key on the boot screen, then highlight your hackintosh, and press the down-arrow key, it'll give you options, one of which is single user, select that one and hit enter).
2. You'll get a unix #root prompt, mount the hard disk (right above the prompt OSX kindly gives that command verbatim)
3. Now we can turn off spotlight indexing, type: mdutil –a –I off
4. Reboot, indexing is now off and I stopped getting panics

So now you should be setup (I was) so start installing all your favorite mac software.

Once you are setup, you probaby want to remove some of your boot flags (see above) from the com.apple.boot.plist file. I left -v in, b/c I like to see what is going on during boot, but you can remove all, except -x32, I suggest you keep that (the kernel is smart it runs any 64bit program in 64 bit mode even with -x32 set).

One last note: the one other good boot flag to know is -x (not -x32 that is different), which boots into "safe mode", if you get kernel panics and what I said above doesn't work, try getting into safe-mode and then fixing permissions (disk utility>verify permissions).

There you have it, I am now watching ESPN360 football with 64 bit cocoa eclipse running while itunes churns away making me a genius list! I'll report back with anymore instability here.

Update:

So tonight I fought with Samba, and I won! Problem actually wasn't Samba at all, but the fact that one more hackintosh patch was needed. When I would try to get Samba to run (or some other programs too), I would get the following (in the logs or command line):

_CFGetHostUUIDString: unable to determine UUID for host. Error: 35

I found the fix here basically grab the file at the top of the page, then drop it in the directory he says. Then, and this is important, open disk utility, and fix permissions (if you don't when you come back up your network will not work). Reboot and boom samba ran just fine.