Building a Hackintosh, pt. 7

I’ve done it!

I now have a completely working Hackintosh. Well, apart from Bluetooth… but I really couldn’t give a rats arse about Bluetooth. I’m never going to use it, so I really can’t be bothered to fix it…

I asked some of the guys at work and one of them said he’d seen the dodgy sound/graphics issue before. Basically what he said was the IRQ resources allocated in the drivers may be overlapping and therefore the two drivers are conflicting, so I’ve probably got the wrong audio driver. He was going to take a look in his kext collection and let me know what he could find, but I managed to fix it through random thoughts based on what he’d told me.

Unfortunately, I did my usual and managed to kill the OS again trying to fix it… so I did another fresh install. Previously, I’d installed VoodooHDA before doing the update to 10.6.6, so i tried doing it after the update this time to see if it made a difference. Unfortunately not…

But having a think about it, I spotted on my USB key that I had a few kexts lying around from when I was trying to get the resolution working in the first place, and the AppleIntel950GMA.kext file was older than the one I had installed now… so at some point between 10.6 and 10.6.6, they’ve made some updates to the AppleIntel950GMA.kext file… So I backed up the more recent one, replaced it with the older one and rebooted. Absolutely no differences graphically, everything still working perfectly… so I reinstalled VoodooHDA again, rebooted… and I nearly cried with happiness when I had sound and a working graphics driver! So it looks like the newer AppleIntel950GMA.kext conflicts with VoodooHDA. Or at least on my system it does!

Building a Hackintosh, pt. 6

Fun and games today! I’ve got most of it working now!

I tried one or two more times this morning to delete SleepEnabler.kext and get it all working again, but couldn’t get it to boot without panicking again… so I bit the bullet and started from scratch again. This time I had the knowledge that I needed to remove SleepEnabler.kext before installing any updates, so once the OS & NBI was installed, I jumped straight into /Extra/GeneralExtensions and deleted SleepEnabler.kext… Installed 10.6.6, and can you guess what happened?

Nope, you’re wrong. I got another kernel panic from SleepEnabler

Did a lot more searching on Google and while trying to fix it, I somehow managed to break it to the point where it was panicking because it didn’t support my CPU any more What the hell did I do there? But eventually, I found something specific to NBI. Apparently, something todo with the way NBI is installed, you can’t just simply delete a .kext file from /Extra/GeneralExtensions, as it’s going to run it from the Extensions.mkext file which is a cache… So they include a handy application that I didn’t know about called UpdateExtra.app. This will rebuild the Extensions.mkext file once you’ve removed a .kext and will therefore no longer load SleepEnabler.kext once I’ve installed any updates! So I rebuilt the OS, again, deleted SleepEnabler.kext, ran UpdateExtra.app and then installed 10.6.6. So you’re guessing I still got a kernel panic from SleepEnabler, right? Well you’re half right.

SleepEnabler is no more! But this time, VoodooHDA is causing it to panic Booted up the install media, opened terminal and removed VoodooHDA.kext from /System/Library/Extensions and now I can boot into 10.6.6 Just with no audio

After much more Googling trying to find the answer to my audio issue, I found out that VoodooHDA and AppleHDA really do no like each other and will cause kernel panics if they’re both in /System/Library/Extensions… Turns out when you install VoodooHDA, it removes AppleHDA.kext to a backup folder for you, but 10.6.6 has a much more updated version of AppleHDA, so it was putting this into the Extensions directory and therefore causing problems… So I removed AppleHDA.kext from here, and re-added VoodooHDA.kext… Rebooted, and I didn’t get a kernel panic, but still no audio?

I ran voodoohda-uninstall in the terminal to remove VoodooHDA to make sure I hadn’t broken anything when I first moved it, rebooted, and then reinstalled it, installation was successful… but then things get a bit strange.

My display is no longer 1024×600, but set to a stretched 800×600… Certain graphical features like the title bar translucency are no longer available either… I did have a graphics card glitch after I installed 10.6.6, but after rebooting, it was fine again…. so I rebooted, but this time it made no difference I couldn’t see it making a difference, but seeing as it was the only thing I’d changed, I uninstalled VoodooHDA again, rebooted and magically, my 1024×600 res is back and all the graphical features were back…

I thought it strange and probably just a one-off problem, so I reinstalled VoodooHDA again, rebooted, same thing again! Uninstalled it, resolution is back once more! It’s the weirdest problem I’ve seen in a long time!

I’ve tried a few other audio drivers like AzaliaAudio, but that doesn’t seem to work either… Not sure what to do with this… The good news is, everything else is working.

Building a Hackintosh, pt. 5

What do you want first? The good news? Or the bad news?

After doing a bit of Googling some more, I’ve found some of the drivers.

For the audio, a driver called VoodooHDA 2.7.2 worked for me. I installed this, rebooted and I now have audio!
For the wifi, the Realtek RTL8102E driver available direct from the Realtek website worked, but it doesn’t quite work the same way as an airport card would. It installs itself as an ethernet card, but then installs a utility application that gives you access to the wireless features. I configured a profile for my home wifi and it connects straight away, and you don’t even need the application running for it to continue working, just to kick off the connection!
For the graphics, I found that the Apple Intel 950GMA driver was correct, I just needed a bit of extra software to set it to 1024×600. The software I used is called SwitchResX. Once installed, you have to setup a custom resolution for 1024×600, but it’s very similar to 800×600, so really easy to setup!

This is where the bad news comes in! It was only 30 minutes before I broke it! Being a complete novice at this sort of thing, I jumped straight in, downloaded the 10.6.6 combo update and installed it… Rebooted and now I’m getting kernel errors again!

This time they’re referring to something called Sleepenabler? I’ve googled it and apparently it’s a common problem with upgrades… Apparently Sleepenabler allows a non-EFI machine to utilise Mac OS X’s sleep functionality, but it’s very version specific, so where I’ve got a version for 10.6, it doesn’t like 10.6.6… I’ve been reading and I’ve just got to delete SleepEnabler.kext, but I can’t see to get it to work. I’ve booted into the install media and run the Terminal to delete it, but even when it’s not there, it’s still causing problems?!

I’m giving up for tonight as I’ve tried so many times to get rid of SleepEnabler.kext to no avail

Building a Hackintosh, pt. 4

I’m finally getting somewhere with this Hackintosh build! After much swearing, and much Googling, I’ve come across a handy little tool called NetbookBootMaker & NetbookInstaller. Now the downside of this software for a lot of users is the fact that it is only available for Mac OS X, so it relies on you having access to another computer with Mac OS X already installed and working… but that’s no problem for me, as I’ve got an iMac already

Basically what you do is get a USB drive that has at least 4.7GB (DVD) capacity, insert the retail Snow Leopard DVD into the computer and use Disk Utility to “restore” the DVD to the USB drive. This will format the USB drive and basically make a direct copy of the DVD onto your USB drive. Once it’s restored, you run NetbookBootMaker and select the USB drive. It’ll then add a few drivers and install it’s own program called NetbookInstaller into the Mac OS X Installer program.

What that essentially does is makes a copy of the Snow Leopard installer that is natively bootable by a BIOS, and includes the necessary bits and pieces to get Mac OS X working on your netbook!

I tried it out using a 750GB external USB HDD, seeing as it was the only USB drive available at the time… and it worked!

Once the installer has finished, it will ask you to reboot, but before you boot into Mac OS X, you need to boot back into the installer otherwise it won’t work! Once you’ve booted back into the installer, on the “Utilities” menu there is a program called NetbookInstaller. Open this and it will say you’re using an unsupported device. Just click “Continue”.

Tick the first 3 options only. This will install a boot loader called Chameleon which allows Mac OS X to boot without an EFI, and it’ll install a generic set of extensions which as basically the driver files for most of your hardware. In Windows, you’ll know these as .sys and .dll files. In Mac OS X, they’re called .kext files.

Once all that’s installed (should only take a few minutes), you can boot into the netbook! It works! The only thing left to sort now is some of the drivers. I’ve got no wifi, no audio, no 3G and the graphics won’t let me set the resolution to 1024×600

For more information on NetbookBootMaker & NetbookInstaller, take a look at the Google Code project page for it here: http://code.google.com/p/netbook-installer/