googlebean Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 It being the end of my weekend of my first Hackintosh attempt (I call mine FrankenMac) - I thought I'd give my perspective on the process of building your own Mac. I was inspired to do this project based on Rob Griffiths article in Macworld. In fact, I bought nearly part for part what he bought to build his. ASUS P5K-E Kingston 4 GB RAM Seagate 500 GB HD (I did buy a Raptor to serve as my boot drive as well - best money I spent) MSI NX8800GT 512 MB Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz Proc The quick summary of my 8 hour build goes like this: Sidenote - I used to own a small business in the late 90's building PCs for customers. I feel like I have a handle on the building piece - not so much the hacking piece. Having made the note above, the building part took MUCH longer than I remembered. I've probably built 100+ PCs in my time, but this one took forever. Granted, a lot has changed since my last build - I officially switched to Mac in 2001 and haven't built a PC since. Anyway, I started with the software side around 7:45 PM on Friday. The process was: Install followed by a failed boot Install 2 followed by another failed boot Install 3 followed by a successful boot - followed by a graphics driver kext change - followed by a failed boot Install 4 followed by a failed boot At 2:30 AM I finally installed Kalyway with MBR and NO other options. That allowed me to get in. I then did the packaged install of the video kext. That helped a great deal. After a reboot, I had my 30" Cinema Display in all it's glory. Network, Sleep, Restart, Shutdown - all of it worked. The only thing not working was the audio. Off to sleep. Came back on Saturday morning with a good feeling I'd be able to get the audio working. I cloned my working setup to the other internal drive and proceeded to install what I thought was the correct kext for audio. No go. Failed boot. I thought, well I have this cloned disk over here, that should boot as well. No luck. So I proceeded to do what I should have done first thing. Install the OS to an external USB drive. I did that and booted it up. I was able then to remove the offending kext from the internal drive install and reboot. When I did, I installed the correct kext and was off and running. Since then, I've brought over all my files from former main machine and started setting this up. As of tomorrow morning, I have no hesitation making this Hackintosh my main machine. I'll have my MacBook Air as my backup in case of catastrophe. This thing just smokes. It "feels" faster than the MacPro I was running as my main machine one year ago. In fact, right now I'm just running on 2 GB RAM since I thought there would be issues with 4GB. For those of you who have 4 GB running, if you have any feedback on that - let me know. I just wanted to pass this story along for those who are struggling to get the machine up and running. When you do, it'll be great. If I were more in tune with hacking, I'd offer more advice. Best of luck to all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
macbrush Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 I am running almost the same setup as yours. P5K PRO, and Q9300, but I have turned off a bunch of stuffs from mobo bios, like IDE support, SATA set to ACHI, internal audio, and firewire. And I am running 8GB fine, I often see the OS used up all 8GB for caching, which make relaunch of apps lightning fast. The only problem you may encounter with more than 3GB of RAM is non-PAE compatible device drivers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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