Octav's Blog Software, hardware, gadgets, hobbies

Installing Snow Leopard

Hey,

Some of us do not want to spend lots of money on Macs they are pretty expensive about twice the price for a PC, but what do you do if you really want the Apple SO Mac OS X on your machine, well not that hard, you can buy the retail version of the Mac OS X(much cheaper than Windows btw) and follow this tutorial here, this should work for most of you.

However I didn't use that to install Snow Leopard on my machine so in the next posts I will describe what I did to have it installed, the steps should help any of you with the same configuration to make your Hackintosh in the same way I did.

So let's start:

First I checked my configuration, see exactly what hardware I bought, this is it:

• Intel i3-530
• Gigabyte P55-US3L (the revision with P55 chipset not H55) , I updated to latest BIOS version FH,using the windows utility that came with the motherboard, worked like a charm
• Sapphire Ati Radeon 5750 1GB for the video card
• 2 SATA HDD(1 has a win 7 x64 installed)
• DVD-RW
• 8GB USB Stick
• 2 displays(1280x1024,1920x1080)
• 4G RAM

What software I needed:

• ImgBurn - http://www.imgburn.com
• uTorrent - http://www.utorrent.com
• GPU-Z - http://www.google.com
• iAtkos s3 v2 - http://www.google.com
• MultiBeast - http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/02/multibeast-ultimate-post-installation.html(do not download in Windows, you will download inside Mac OS once is installed)

So far ensure you have same hardware or close to it, any P55 would work pretty much the same, any other i3,i5,i7 should do it as well, and for the video any 57xx should work also, if you have an NVIDIA card this tutorial is not for you however everything should work fine beside the drivers installation for your video card, you will need to find other guides to install your Nvidia.

• Now after downloading the iAtkos distro burn it using ImgBurn at slower speed I did it at 4x and was ok.
• Next open GPU-Z utility and write down the details of your video card like DeviceId and VendorId, you  will need it later, but the main purpose of GPU-Z is to save your video card BIOS, so do it and save it somewhere on the disk and remember the path, use the hdd where you want to install Mac OS but not same partition since that is going to be formatted.
• Next you need to prepare the disk where you want to install Mac OS i suggest you use a separate HDD, like I did, I formatted a partition with NTFS  abt 50 gigs would do it name  it SnowLeopard
• Next shutdown your computer and remove all the usb devices you have beside mouse and keyboard(btw a ps2 keyboard works fine as well, a mouse on ps2 instead of USB might cause problems, however I didn't test with this distro), if you are really newbie you should remove the windows hdd also to be sure you won't format it by mistake later
• Next restart your computer and enter BIOS, put your as your first boot device the CDROM, set your SATA mode to AHCI and set HPET to 64, save and restart.

Your computer now should boot from the DVD where you you burned the iAtkos iso, press F8 and you should see a boot screen with a list of  volumes, first one and the one selected should be iAtkos, leave it like this and type:

-v cpus-1 busratio=22 (for other cpus see the list from here http://uphuck.ggrn.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=13929 and set busratio accordingly for my i3-530 is 22 ) and press enter your system should start booting from DVD, you need lot of patience on my machine this step takes up to 10 minutes, and it freezes from time to time, nothing to worry about just wait, if you see a kernel panic you have a problem, but for me with my hardware configuration worked fine.
Next you should see a window appearing asking for language, I chooses English , never tested with the other options but it should be fine, click next button.
Now you should see a menu bar open Utilities, go to Disk Utility, here you can see on the left your volumes, click on the one you prepared for you Mac OS install should be listed as SnowLeopard, on the right click Erase, choose  from the format combo Mac OS Extended (Journaled), you can keep the name SnowLeopard, click Erase, everything should go smooth, after is done (wait the progress bar that appeared), close Disk Utility, now press next, agree with the stuff they say there, read anything you find interesting.
Next step you should see your SnowLeopard partition click on it and the Customize button in the bottom left should be enabled, click on it, leave the defaults, and select next:

• Qoopz 10.3.0
• AHCI SATA
• Intel SATA/IDE
• JMicron SATA/IDE
• USB
• Uncheck Apple HDA
• Check also Realtek - only first checkbox from the list

DO NOT CHECK OR UNCHECK ANYTHING ELSE

Now install and wait for next 20-30 minutes the DVD installation is very slow, after is done it will restart, press DEL enter your bios and set as first boot device your HDD again, the one you used to install Mac OS, save, restart and press F8 again type -v cpus=1 busratio=22, your computer should boot and load Snow Leo just fine but you will have a default resolution and no sound, in the booting step you might see some errors like AppleUSBEAHCI.kext not found, which is fine you will take care of these later, no kernel panic happened to me until this step, and I did the above like 100 times until I got it perfect,everything was fine so far.

Once you set your timezone, your user, the registration with Apple is not mandatory btw, you should see Snow Leopard desktop, now is time to update your installation to 10.6.4, check all updates and install everything, reboot, everything should be fine.

Next open software updates again and install everything but the Graphics update( DO NOT INSTALL THAT), install the rest and reboot, next you will install MultiBeast, download it from the link above, your internet should work just fine in this step,

Install MultiBeast from the link provided above, check these options:

Install and restart, after restarting you should have sound, do not forget -v option when you start and in case your computer still doesn't boot correctly use also busratio=22 or whatever your cpu's busratio is, in case you get a kernel panic telling smth about VodooHDA you will have to start with -x and remove the VodooHDA.kext from /System/Library/Extensions using a terminal, the command is.

sudo -s
enter password here for the root user
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/VodooHDA.kext

then restart.

(In case you cannot boot with -x which is safe mode you will have to boot with -s which is single user and after you mount with mount -uw / execute rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/VodooHDA.kext).

If you successfully restarted and booted in Mac OS you should have sound.

Now is late dude, see you in the next post I'm going to sleep next post I will tell you what to do to get Ati 57xx working with multi displays and QE/CI.