XFX 750i Mobo 10.7 Lion: Success

[j211shadowman]

As a newbie to the Hackintosh scene (though I have a pretty decent background in Linux and Unix) I decided to give it a shot.

Lacking a working DVD burner (and Im a cheapskate who hates burning disks) or a Thumb drive larger than 4GB I had to come up with several roundabout methods to get my 2 Hackintoshes up and running, though some of the methods I used seem a little convoluted they may help others get around some problems.

 

 

My basic specs:

XFX 750i motherboard

6GB of RAM

1GB BFG GTX 285 GPU

 

300 GB SATA HD (Win7)

1 TB SATA HD (storage)

100 GB PATA (OS X 10.7)

DVD ROM PATA

 

NForce Lan controller

Realtek ALC888S audio

 

One of the first things I did was became familiar with DSDTs and why they suck for this board, but to no avail at first......did come in handy later though....I made a basic one patched for this board and this method using some of the DSDT tools for windows like DSDT extractor and DSDT Patcher. Just extract it, compile it and you will see the errors you need to fix in the output, CPU alias, a null Buffer, and you need a Mute fix for about 7 warnings, all fixable in DSDT patcher for windows with checkboxes

 

You will run into a hung buffer like...."using xxxxx buffer headers yada yada" if you don't fix your DSDT properly so keep that in mind, if you get that problem with the XFX 750i your either not using a DSDT and getting it direct from the Bios or your DSDT needs the null buffer error patched out of it. Don't cry, its easier than it sounds.

 

First tool used extensively: VMware.

Following several different tutorials I first setup a working install of 10.7 in VMware

The reason OS X in VMware was a key factor in my success was due to the fact it allows direct low level connection to an actual physical disk. Not exactly necessary, but VERY useful if you have an install that will never boot without the ability to easily access files on the drive, and it allows you to work with the files directly in a working OS X environment.

 

Once OS X was up and running in VMware (the easiest part) I was able to then partition and access physical disks from the virtual OS X.

 

After reading the NForce threads extensively and quite a bit of trial and error I came up with a working installer solution

 

Used an old PATA 80GB HD as my installer disk

 

Working in VMware with my physical disks connected I partitioned and setup the disk exactly as the tutorials outline to create a bootable USB installer disk, I just happened to be using an actual PATA HD instead.....a boot sector is a boot sector....unless its a CD of course....

 

The XFX 750i board DOES NOT SUPPORT AHCI FULLY. I decided to ignore that fact and pressed on.

I found 2 major deal breakers that will drive anyone with this motherboard out of their mind:

1: "waiting on root device" courtesy of the NForce ATA controller, you need AppleNForceATA.kext modified for 32/64 bit in your installers S/L/E, it solves this problem but there is still one more.....

2: Chameleon as your boot loader Will stick you with waiting for DSMOS........forever. FakeSMC WILL NOT FIX THIS so don't bother, tried a whole string of FakeSMC, disablers you name it.

What works? PC-EFI 10.7. Get it, use it, marry it.

OK now we have a working installer from the old IDE (PATA) drive (oh if you have this board and attempt this yourself....only use the black 80 wire IDE cables, and the HD set as MASTER trust me on this)

Next I installed 10.7 to my other 100GB PATA HD (Now I just want to mention I got so fed up trying to get it going in the beginning I gave up on using SATA for the installed OS so I used PATA for the sake of not hitting a snag, since the SATA controller does not fully supporting AHCI....So I haven't tried setting it up on SATA...your mileage may vary if you wanna give it a shot)

 

Once installation had finished, we boot back into windows, and open our Virtual Hackintosh in VMware where I have the Physical disk assigned to the same IDE channels as on my actual board (just to prevent any incorrect partition IDs, though it probably didn't matter....good to do just in case though) Open up the newly installed OS X drive, and install the osx86 extras package to it (the included mach_kernel seems to work better for this board than any of the others I tried) Install PC-EFI 10.7, drop AppleNForceATA.kext in S/L/E, manually navigate in the terminal to /Volumes/"whatever"/System/Library/Extensions, chmod and chown the kext to the right permissions, Put the DSDT created earlier in the root of the drive......shutdown the virtual Mac and reboot the PC.....

 

startup and hammer F11 (boot menu on this MOBO) select the drive we were just working with in VMware.....pray....go baby go....come on.....

 

OMG IT WANTS ME TO FILL OUT MY INFO!!!!

trumpets sound, angels sing....you get the idea (if you have this board a lot of you have already given up, as I haven't seen a post about it newer than a year ago lol)

 

For the rest of the hardware there are readily available kexts for the NForce Lan, VoodooHDA works fine for the audio and I used An EFI String injector to get my GPU up and running (and yes hardware acceleration is working and it is reporting all the correct values for the card).

 

So major points

VMware can save you time and money burning and reburning disks, and allows you to get into the actual files on a non bootable installation to work with boot loaders and system kexts.

 

Get to know how to do some basic DSDT patching, it helps in the end to avoid a lot of kernel panics and hang ups.

 

Whoever created the AppleNForceATA.kext is a digital Jesus. (and the guy who upgraded it to 64 bit is cool too)

 

The Chameleon boot loader works great.....unless you own a 750i.....then it is the devil. So use PC-EFI to save yourself some trouble......and marry it.

 

EFI device string injection is your friend

 

Nothing is impossible.......