Simple tips before you start

[Kesley]

If you're thinking of dual booting vista with leopard then you should be prepared for trouble. I have just finally managed to get this working and I thought I'd post a few tips that helped me.

 

Firstly I used iATKOS v.7 (comes with chameleon bootloader 2) and followed a pretty good tutorial (search for Hack attack: dual boot leopard and windows vista). The only slightly outdated bit is the part where you use Darwin boot from Disk utilities when installing, as iATKOS 7 uses chameleon 2. Select chameleon at this point instead of Darwin and just enter the hard drive number (usually 0) and then the partition number (usually 2) upon which you want to install MAC OS X when it asks you for that info.

 

One thing I would advise is that when you come to partition your hard drive for the install and it tells you that you can only free up 32mb or something (!), don't bother searching around because the problem is probably that vista has dropped an MTF zone at the end of your disk that simple defrags wont shift. Just download perfect disk 10 (trial) and get it to defrag your system files. This should free up some room for your partition (for me it went from 209mb available to 40gb!)

 

I had trouble with getting my MAC OS X partition to load from windows boot loader after following this guide. A simpler way (rather than entering the commands listed in the tutorial) is to just download easy BCD for your windows partition and select a MAC OS X boot from there. It's really easy and worked instantly for me.

 

I would absolutely recommend you get a vista repair disk before you start. I foolishly thought it wouldn't be a problem but after OS X was installed windows wouldn't boot. This was a very simple problem to fix with the repair CD which you can easily download and burn if you search for vista repair disk or something. As an side I recommend a piece of software called imgburn for burning your iATKOS install disk and any other .iso (image) files to be honest. It works perfectly whilst vista just wouldn't burn the disk so that my computer could boot from it for the install.

 

Once you finally get OS X loaded most likely something wont work properly (eg mouse, keyboard, video card) (You may need to have a spare USB keyboard and mouse at the ready to get things going!) You'll no doubt search and be told of loads of kext files to install with complicated commands to enter but before you start I would recommend getting kext helper. It's a simple piece of software that you simply drag kext files into and it does all the work to get them in the right place and working, no command entering required. As a start, if you have an NVIDIA graphics card I would advise you to look up NVinject which sorted my display resolution issues out. Also look for voodooPS2 controller software as this got my mouse and keyboard working. There are 2 good databases with loads of PC drivers for hackintosh computers:

 

search for:

OSX86 Drivers database or

PC WIZ computer and then look in the file repository

 

See if you can find what you need on them.

 

Finally, always search the insanely mac forums for help as no doubt many will have the same problems as you! Hope this advice helps,

 

Kesley