Hackintosh! Leopard (Apple OSX 10.5.5) on PC

[SirAlec]

Well there was much debate recently in our forum, Mac are better than PC, Mac are bad than PC, Mac are expensive, et all.

So this (long) weekend, i decided to try turning one stray Dell Xps 1330 in our place into a Hackintosh.
Legality of doing this is still disputed and questionable world over. But enthusiasts will do it anyway. Still I must say Leopard is a great OS and what a fine job Apple has done. If you like it i encourage you to buy it, as it works best on what it was build for; Mac.


About this 1330: This expensive lappy was acquired from a fellow member (Gopi) from Bangalore, oops Bengaulru at a really good price. It was bought as a field lappy for boys, but they felt it looked very expensive and fragile, so nobody dare used it, so it has been lying there for 4 months.

What you need:
1. EFI patched OSX leopard iso (there are many), downloaded from obvious places on the great WWW. (Forget it! will not tell you from where)
2. a blank DVD-R (not RW)
3. A Bakra! i mean a PC or Lappy, don't blame me if you loose any data or you convert your PC/lappy into an ideal candidate as a parts doner in our Classified Section.
4. Flask full of tea (i hate coffee)
5. and yeah! did i mentioned...a sizeable amount of brain dedicated to fiddling PC, OS and disk partiton. (Didn't I tell you, you may loose data)

Before Installation
1. Check the HCL! no not that idiotic company, its the Hardware compatability List at the following.
a. HCL 10.5.6/Portables - OSx86
b. HCL 10.5.6 - OSx86

2. I tried the dual boot. (winxp and Leopard). Hence backup all you data.

3. Take note of all the devices you have. there are many ways to go about it. easist one is : Win+Pause break > Hardware Device manager.

Now the fun starts
1. Preparing the partition for OSX. (atleast 10gb free). I presume you have a running windows xp. i kept 25 gb (320gb) for XP during installation of XP and kept rest as unallocated. (Now plzz! Don't ask how to install XP)
Right click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management
Out of unallocated space create a primary (not logical, this is important) partition of minimum 10gb and format it as Fat32. Label it something (i labelled it OSX)
Partition the rest as logical. Format it as fat 32 if you want to write on it from Leopard. NTFS is mounted in Leopard as readonly.



2. Installation : Change the bios setting so that the first boot drive is your DVD rom. Pop the CD and start the installation.
First attempt failed miserably. In my Dell 1330 i had to disable flash cache and set SATA setting as ATA instead of AHCI during installation. After installation it was changed back to AHCI. This is also important if you want boot into your XP or Vista later.

a) After it boots from the CD follow the onscreen intructions. Agree the EULA. But before OSX could be loaded we have to format the partition we created in XP as native OSX HPS (Macintosh journaled).
For this click on DIsk Utility from Utilities Menu. Click on the Partition you created in WInXP (2nd primary, OSX 30gb in my case) and erase it as Macintosh journaled.



b) Close the disk utility (top-left red button) and Click Continue. Select the just created partition as the destination and continue.



c) On the Install Summary screen, DO NOT CLICK INSTALL. Click on Customize. This is important.



d) Customize: Now the options you choose depends on the configuration of your lappy or PC, but for my Dell 1330 following worked. Still audio, wifi and lan are defunct. But will work on that later.

• iATKOS v5i Main System (i used this release)
• Bootloader
  • PC EFI V9 (if you want to boot into OSX and ofcourse your beloved XP)
• X86 Patches
  • Decrypters
    • AppleDecrypt
  • SMBIOS drivers
    • SMBIOS Enablers
      • SMBIOS-EFI
      • SMBIOS-EFI Air
  • Kernel
    • 9.5.0 Kernel voodoo
  • ACPI
    • x86 ACPI
  • Disabler.kext
  • Remove Thermal kexts
• Drivers
  • System
    • SATA/IDE
      • Intel AHCI SATA (remember we are in ATA mode now during install. change it to AHCI later, before OSX fist boot)
  • Speedstep
    • Intel Speedstep b
  • System
    • Laptop Battery
    • ext2fs
    • NTFS-3G (To automount Windows NTFS drive, but ofcourse as read only)

e. Click Done and then Install. The installer will check the DVD for consistency (you can skip this if you are sure about your DVD is fine) and then install and wait. Installation took about 25 minutes on my lappy.



d. On the Install Succeeded screen, before the timer reaches zero, open up Disk Utility again from Utility menu. Click on the OSX partition and click on "Repair Disk Permissions". Then close Disk Utility and let the laptop reboot.
After this i had to go to bios and change back the SATA setting from ATA to AHCI.



e. Fill up the first run dialogs like time zone, create account etc. Make sure you set a password for your account. I insist doing this because not for security reasons but also to prevent some commands from becoming unresponsive later during fiddling. If all goes well, you’ll now land up on the wonderful world of Macintosh.





My Dell is labelled as Macbook Air


d. The lappy boots up into Mac OS by default and to boot into XP, you have to press any key on the boot prompt and then select XP.




PS:
This DIY is purely to enhance the educational urge of a petrolhead who also happens to be a wannabe geek.

If your wallet feels still heavy after the purchase of that big a** hybrid turbocharger or ear-blowing ICE or shinny Free flow for that matter, do buy a Mac for real experience.

Thanks to all the geek folks who are wannabe petrolhead at the Apple.

ALso thanks to all the geek some of whom are real petrolhead at the Osx86project.

And yeah Thanks Gopi for a wonderful laptop.

[diabloo]

Terrific ! Lets share your MAC experience vis a vis Windows.

[SirAlec]

actually i already have a Mac book pro. and i have lot of clients who have xeon based Mac FCPs.

[pulsar56]

Nice. Would like to try on my M1530!

But one question: What about the keyboard and other mac specific command keys?

[Gandhi]

That looks awesome.

I have done the same sorta thing the other way round. I run OSX and Ubuntu on my Mac as dual boot. Works like a charm.

[extreme_torque]

thanks for sharing this.. I am getting a new Sony Vaio FW next week and will try this for sure.

[dre@ms]

awesome steps m8. This initiates me to install Mac OS in my lappy too. I already have XP, Vista and Win 7 installed. Will have to see how to install Mac. BTW, wil Mac run smoothly in my lappy with 1GB RAM?

[aaggoswami]

Well, my computer vendor has done this earlier. He claimed that his internet download speed incresed by around 5-7 Kbps. Even the ISP called the next day that how come he is able to do so. There were around 6 pages of documents he had prepared.
Now I am sure this works. Will implement this as soon as I am through with my admission process.
Its a tough job and well worth the effort. Thanks for sharing.

[ph03n!x]

Originally Posted by aaggoswami

Well, my computer vendor has done this earlier. He claimed that his internet download speed incresed by around 5-7 Kbps. Even the ISP called the next day that how come he is able to do so. There were around 6 pages of documents he had prepared.
Now I am sure this works. Will implement this as soon as I am through with my admission process.
Its a tough job and well worth the effort. Thanks for sharing.

Increase in speed due to Mac? That sounds interesting... can you give us anything on that please?

@SirAlec- thats is one good DIY I had tried this way back, but didnt really pursue it. Anything on what aaggoswami said in your observation?

[Gurpartap Singh]

I use Mac OS X daily(btw, legit/macbook pro ), and Windows on desktop. Never saw any difference in speed. Probably his vendor had some program taking some share of speed.

Would anyone here "buy" Leopard retail version just for the sake of ethics, if you plan to use Mac OS regularly? (Even if you don't use that retail disc.)

[Akki_5]

awesome thread! thanks for all the info! but i still prefer using Win on m desktop and leave OS X to my Aluminum Macbook!

[Gurpartap Singh]

As a question to mods, is piracy encouraged on Team-BHP forums?

[SirAlec]

Originally Posted by Gurpartap Singh

As a question to mods, is piracy encouraged on Team-BHP forums?

WHo told you this is act of piracy. What if i have a copy of retail version of Leopard.

We did patched iphone long ago didn't we.

[funda2max]

This is great! Excellent stuff!! I tried installing OS X on VM (ESX) and it was easy though.

[bigman]

Sir Alec.

I have got a similar Dell laptop (I think it is a 1530) and fancy trying this. Does everything on the laptop work ok (in particular wifi, ethernet port, USB ports and the DVD writer).

Thanks.