Hackintosh 10.5.5 Retail Rig - Starting at $305

[mosslack]

Originally posted by: mosslack

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: thefatoldsun68
Wow, I'm up and running on my Pentium 4 using the Voodoo kernel... awesome! I am having video card issues, however. The only resolution is 1280x1024, and scrolling in Safari is messed up. Is there anything I can do about that? I have the correct card selected in the driver list or whatever that is called in the UInstaller.

How did you go about installing the Voodoo kernel?

mosslack mentioned a few pages back that his 8400GS was having problems in 10.5.7 - just for fun, try installing only up to 10.5.6, then install the Voodoo kernel & 8400GS driver, but don't update to 10.5.7 - see if that works. The 8400GS may be broken under 10.5.7...

For me this issue turned out to be related to the refresh rate, not the card itself. For some reason, 10.5.7 won't allow anything but a 60 Hz refresh rate with my Acer X223W monitor. It worked fine @ 75 Hz on 10.5.6. I don't know if this applies in his situation, but I thought I would mention it just in case. :light:

Edit: FYI, I have switched back to the eVGA 8400 GS on my UD3P and it is working fine in 10.5.7. The only issue I have, other than no other refresh rates to choose from besides 60 Hz, is that when I switch resolutions, the screen goes blue and I have to hit the reset button and restart the computer. Once it comes back up it is at the new resolution and things appear to be fine. FWIW, I never switched to the 8400 GS string in the Uinstaller either, I'm still using the one I installed with for the 7200 GS.

 

[thefatoldsun68]

I can't change resolutions, refresh rates or anything related to graphics. I actually had to reinstall the OS; I'm now running 10.5.6 with the Voodoo kernel. I am still having the same video issues. My boot resolution is set correctly for my monitor (which is the same as Mosslacks', an Acer X223)

Is there another nVidia driver that I can install? I'm actually booted with my 6800 GS 256mb right now. This is the card I'd prefer to use, because I can return the 8400 GS. Let me know if there's anything you guys think I could do. Thank you so much.

 

[mosslack]

Originally posted by: thefatoldsun68
I can't change resolutions, refresh rates or anything related to graphics. I actually had to reinstall the OS; I'm now running 10.5.6 with the Voodoo kernel. I am still having the same video issues. My boot resolution is set correctly for my monitor (which is the same as Mosslacks', an Acer X223)

Is there another nVidia driver that I can install? I'm actually booted with my 6800 GS 256mb right now. This is the card I'd prefer to use, because I can return the 8400 GS. Let me know if there's anything you guys think I could do. Thank you so much.

There are many nVidia OS X drivers available, just google for osx86 nvidia drivers or something like that. The problem is they will have to be reinstalled each time you upgrade the OS. HTH

 

[cgates]

Just wondering, is there anything I need to do before overclocking my E5200/ES2L? Is 3 GHz a good speed to reach for? Thanks

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: cgates
Just wondering, is there anything I need to do before overclocking my E5200/ES2L? Is 3 GHz a good speed to reach for? Thanks

Good CPU Cooler, Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste, and a front case fan and rear case fan for crossflow. That's about it. Then read this super awesome overclocking guide:

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2057083&enterthread=y

 

[Kaido]

Whew! Got the Media Center card article and S-Video article posted! Had to copy it over from my blog format, so here they are:

S-Video & Composite Output Guide:

http://leopardsoup.pbworks.com/svideo

Video Cards for Media Centers Guide:

http://leopardsoup.pbworks.com/media_cards

Thanks for putting up with the endless delays everybody, I'll be done soon! I'm giving up on a set day for posting the new thread because I keep skating past it, haha.

As far as S-Video output goes, all you need is the right card and the Apple DVI to Video adapter ($19). Macs support S-Video output on the ATI 1900XT and ATI HD 2600XT video cards. The Apple DVI to Video Adapter supports both S-Video and Composite.

The 1900XT is bootable (one of the few ATI cards with a Mac-supported VESA mode), but the driver overwrites your Boot Plist, so you'll need to make a DSDT for any existing EFI Strings (such as audio or the Time Machine fix, or whatever strings you use now), then copy back your other keys/values into the new Boot Plist.

The 2600XT is not bootable, so you'll need an Nvidia video card temporarily, or else use the Hard Drive method for installing Leopard and then install the 2600XT driver to the hard drive. I got an inexpensive Nvidia card ($25 7200GS) to act as a "helper card" for my initial installation, that way I was able to install the driver, reboot and swap cards, then boot up with full ATI support.

You may nee SwitchResX or DisplayConfigX to tweak your video settings, depending on your TV. Play with it and see if it works fine stock or if it needs additional tweaking. I would recommend the HD 2600XT card ($99 on Newegg) because it supports HDMI via a $5 adapter (the 1900XT doesn't), so you can upgrade to a digital TV or projector in the future very easily if you want to (that and it's in-stock online; the 1900XT isn't).

 

[Kaido]

Hard Drive install method posted:

http://leopardsoup.pbworks.com/hdd_method

 

[Zaap]

Once again, nice work!

Is natit the current best way of installing drivers for the 2600XT? Tonight I may attempt to get a 2600XT going on my beater machine if I can figure out the drivers. I've got the $99 fanless one.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Zaap
Once again, nice work!

Is natit the current best way of installing drivers for the 2600XT? Tonight I may attempt to get a 2600XT going on my beater machine if I can figure out the drivers. I've got the $99 fanless one.

Thanks! This 2600XT driver is the best:

http://www.mediafire.com/?hqmzj1zjlz2

It supports DVI, HDMI, and S-Video/Composite using the Apple video adapter. You will need an Nvidia card for the initial setup, or else use the Hard Drive method to install OS X & the driver beforehand (I've only used the Nvidia card method and can confirm that that works).

 

[thefatoldsun68]

Kaido, would you know why my 8400 GS isn't working with your UInstaller? Maybe it's because I'm using the Voodoo kernel, but I am not sure. I'm installing the EFI String with UInstaller, and it still isn't working correctly. I've also tried my 6800 GS, and it doesn't work either. Both cards are 256MB.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: thefatoldsun68
Kaido, would you know why my 8400 GS isn't working with your UInstaller? Maybe it's because I'm using the Voodoo kernel, but I am not sure. I'm installing the EFI String with UInstaller, and it still isn't working correctly. I've also tried my 6800 GS, and it doesn't work either. Both cards are 256MB.

Are they both PCI Express cards?

 

[thefatoldsun68]

Yeah, they sure are. I went ahead and formatted again. I have 10.5.6 installed, with the Voodoo kernel. That's all I've done so far. Booting from your Boot-132 CD. I am running the 8400 GS right now.

 

[thefatoldsun68]

Just got it! I did the 8400 GS 256MB like usual, and it worked. Awesome. I'm changing resolutions and everything.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: thefatoldsun68
Just got it! I did the 8400 GS 256MB like usual, and it worked. Awesome. I'm changing resolutions and everything.

Very odd! Glad it works for you now Awesome that you got your Pentium working, good job!

 

[thefatoldsun68]

Thanks! I'm going to stick it out on 10.5.6 for a bit and see how everything runs. I do a lot with Logic 8 on my MBP, but I wouldn't mind having a desktop, plus I'd love to have a quad-core processor in the future. For now, it'll just be a machine I'll use for fun and see how stable the Voodoo kernel is. At least I always have my MacBook Pro to fall back on.

Thanks again for everything guys, I couldn't have done it without this thread.

 

[Zaap]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Thanks! This 2600XT driver is the best:

Awesome! Thanks! Now I have a new project for tomorrow after work!

 

[Hernandito]

Does anyone know if there is a way to create a recovery disk method for the Hackintosh solution on this kit? I usually have a second partition where I store a clone image of the main OS. If I want to revive the system, I simply boot to the DVD (or a separate drive with OSX Setup) and restore from the clone image on that second partition.

I tried to restore but I end up getting a non bootable error when starting. I know there is a 200 MB FAT partition at the begining of the drive. I did not touch tthis partition. What I did, was to erase the main Leopard partition, and tried to restore it back to the same partition.

I have been researching all weekend on how to create an entire duplicate image of the DRIVE (not partition). I tried Clonezilla (a live CD), but it would not image my Hackintosh drive.

Any guidance would be very helpful.

Thanks,

Hernando

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Hernandito
Does anyone know if there is a way to create a recovery disk method for the Hackintosh solution on this kit? I usually have a second partition where I store a clone image of the main OS. If I want to revive the system, I simply boot to the DVD (or a separate drive with OSX Setup) and restore from the clone image on that second partition.

I tried to restore but I end up getting a non bootable error when starting. I know there is a 200 MB FAT partition at the begining of the drive. I did not touch tthis partition. What I did, was to erase the main Leopard partition, and tried to restore it back to the same partition.

I have been researching all weekend on how to create an entire duplicate image of the DRIVE (not partition). I tried Clonezilla (a live CD), but it would not image my Hackintosh drive.

Any guidance would be very helpful.

Thanks,

Hernando

Use SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, then when you restore it, install the Chameleon bootloader again - this is your missing link. That 200MB FAT partition at the beginning of the drive is what makes the partition bootable - without the bootloader partition, your Hackintosh will NOT boot. When you clone the main partition to a backup partition, remember that it doesn't clone the bootloader partition - just the OS partition - so all you have to do is re-install Chameleon after you re-clone the backup partition to your boot drive. You can either use Uinstaller (just check the PC_EFI v9 Chameleon button only) or you can download the standalone installer here:

http://pcwizcomputer.com/weaksauce12/?p=309

So to restore a backup successfully:

1. Clone your backup partition to your new boot partition
2. Boot up with a BootCD
3. Install the PC_EFI v9 Chameleon bootloader to the newly-cloned partition

 

[Hernandito]

Thank you!! Your standalone installer makes it very simple. If I want to use the new Chameleon 2, could I simply run that installer instead of the one you linked above? This would again save me one step.

I think my goal is going to be to put all this on a USB thumb drive to make the whole things self contained.

Thanks again!

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Hernandito
Thank you!! Your standalone installer makes it very simple. If I want to use the new Chameleon 2, could I simply run that installer instead of the one you linked above? This would again save me one step.

I think my goal is going to be to put all this on a USB thumb drive to make the whole things self contained.

Thanks again!

Yup, just install Chameleon 2.0 on top of what you've already installed, it wipes out the previous bootloader.

Loading it on a USB stick is a bit more tricky because not all drivers can be loaded from a USB stick. If you get a plug-and-play PCI Ethernet card and a plug-and-play USB sound card, you can do it, otherwise those two drivers are required to be installed in /System/Library/Extensions on the hard drive.

Also with Chameleon 2.0, there are a couple newer tricks you can use for software tweaks - first, the Boot Plist can now be loaded from USB (so the on on your hard drive is stock, then the one on your USB stick has the custom config), and you can now load an SMBIOS Plist onto the USB stick to tweak various cosmetic settings like the memory speed. Just do some reading on the Chameleon 2.0 threads on InsanelyMac & the Voodoo forums to get a better idea of the current status, it's still in beta so there are still changes being made.

Edit: The nice thing about doing it on the USB stick is that your Leopard install can be 100% Mac. This has two nice benefits - first, it's completely free of any Hackintosh stuff, so you could literally plug it into a real Mac and have it work, and second, cloning drives is easy because you don't have to re-install the Chameleon bootloader to the newly-cloned drive, because the bootloader (and all the Hackintosh files) are on the USB stick!

 

[Hernandito]

VERY interesting.

In order to have the HD be completely pure vanilla, I would have to have the USB audio and external network card.

Is this also true for the other 2 Gigabyte motherboards? Like the ES2L?

Starting with a clean slate, in order to achieve this, I think I would need to:

1) Insert boot 123 and boot to either the setup DVD or an external HD with the setup on it (I have done this).

2) Upgrade to 10.5.7

3) Install Chameleon 2 to a Fat32 formatted USB drive (or does the USB drive need to be HFS+??) Somehow, I have to edit the com.apple.Boot.plist on the USB drive to add my video card string. What would be the best method to do this.

4) Setup bios to boot from USB drive.

5) At the Chameleon bootup, I would pick to boot to the hd with plain vanilla setup.

I don't think I would care about cosmetic things like reporting memory speed.

A couple more questions. If I wanted to go with onboard audio and network on the UD3P, I would need to copy the kexts, that your kit includes to the SEL folder on the hd? Do I simply drag these files, or do I need to use the "kext helper" utility.

Total newbie question, but do I need to install OSX in the USB drive, or simply the Chameleon bootloader.

If bootloader is starting from USB drive, will I see USB drive as one of the boot options?

This is like building my own Efix. I am trying this tonight!!

Thanks,

Hernando

 

[Kaido]

Well, it's all about drivers - depends on the board. Onboard audio uses either a patching system or an enabler system, which means that you have to load the drivers from the Extensions folder to get them to work, same with the R1000 driver.

Format your USB stick to HSF+. For the Boot Plist, first backup the stock Boot Plist, then use Uinstaller to configure the Boot Plist, then copy the newly-modified Plist to your USB stick, and put the stock Plist back on the hard drive. Uinstaller is what puts the settings in the Plist, and you want that modified Plist on your USB stick, not on the hard drive. Remember to boot from USB in BIOS, you need to set it to boot from USB-HDD, and then change the boot priority to make the USB stick the first drive that boots - so it's two settings you have to change.

In the Chameleon settings in your Boot Plist, you can specify which drive is the default boot drive. I had trouble with this in RC1, I don't know if that bug has been fixed yet or not. If you'd like, I can post my USB stick files when I get home from work tonight. Remember that Chameleon 2.0 is still in beta, so there are a few niggly little things floating around and there's like zero documentation available

Yes, if you want to use onboard audio & networking, you would simply use Kext Helper to do so. If you're using the UD3P, you will have to re-install audio with every point update because it gets overwritten. If you're using hte DS3L, you will have to re-patch audio with every point update because it gets overwritten. If you're using the ES2L, you're safe for now. That's the beauty of the USB stick (for $8) - you never have to re-install any drivers (but then you don't get digital audio, only analog with stereo output).

The USB drive only needs to have Chameleon. USB sticks cannot boot optical discs, so if you want to install Leopard from a DVD, you will still need the Magic Boot Disc. However, if you clone your Leopard DVD to a hard drive partition, you can use the USB stick to boot that partition and install OS X to your main partition or drive. Also, if your USB stick is big enough, you can simply clone the Leopard DVD to a partition on the stick and install from there (although it would be pretty slow since USB sticks aren't very fast...but it'd be convenient!).

Yes, you will see the USB stick as one of the boot options. Again you can set a default boot drive so that your main partition with OS X will boot by default, but I had trouble getting this to work on my USB stick (maybe there's a newer version that works properly now?).

It is similar to EFI-X, except YOU are the tech support. Although EFI-X has a real EFI environment, instead of just an emulator, or so they claim. Plus all of the drivers for their supported motherboards are already on there, and they take care of updates. So for $200 or whatever the chip costs, it just takes out the headache for you, which is pretty nice. I had an EFI-X chip before and it was pretty slick! Very convenient.

 

[Hernandito]

Thanks again,

Please do post the files from your USB stick. I am on my way to buy a couple of thumbdrives.

Do you know of a decent USB plug and play device that supports digital audio, that is not too expensive?

 

[Muddy Mudskipper]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Edit: The nice thing about doing it on the USB stick is that your Leopard install can be 100% Mac. This has two nice benefits - first, it's completely free of any Hackintosh stuff, so you could literally plug it into a real Mac and have it work, and second, cloning drives is easy because you don't have to re-install the Chameleon bootloader to the newly-cloned drive, because the bootloader (and all the Hackintosh files) are on the USB stick!

I like the sound of that.

Further to Hernandito's questions, what would I need on my stick when I have the following hardware:

Gigabyte 8600GT 256MB (fanless) - the one listed as working by Kmax82
LAN card (Netgear GA311)
USB sound card
No IDE devices, No PS/2

Looking through your 2.0 guide, I see AppleDecrypt.kext, AppleSMBIOSEFI.kext, IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext, LegacyAppleAHCIPort.kext, OpenHaltRestart.kext

LegacyIOAHCIBlockStorage.kext - for the orange icons, that doesn't bother me, I'll just change the actual icons manually.

Are some of those now part of chameleon?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Hernandito
Thanks again,

Please do post the files from your USB stick. I am on my way to buy a couple of thumbdrives.

Do you know of a decent USB plug and play device that supports digital audio, that is not too expensive?

Due to licensing issues, there are no inexpensive USB sound cards that support digital audio. You have to buy $$$ pro-level equipment to get that, unfortunately. Keep in mind that all new Macs come with built-in optical digital audio input and output jacks, so there's no real need for this type of adapter in the Mac market segment, unfortunately.

I'll be home in about 5 hours and I'll post my USB stick files. The Chameleon installer installs some generic stuff, so I'll explain how to overwrite what they have with my tweaked files