Nearing a working Hackintosh!

[iPixel]

Hello, for the interested among you, I'm sharing my experience at a first OSx86 setup attempt...

 

So as the title says, I got a more or less working Mac (iAtkos S3 v2, no update applied yet) after 48 hours of trying, reading, thinking, and reinstalling!

 

Config:

CPU: AMD Phenom x4 9650

MB: Asus M3N/HDMI (nForce 720 chipset)

GFX: nVidia GTS 250 1GB

RAM: 2x 2GB DDR-II

HDD0: Hitachi 1TB SATA

HDD1: Seagate 200GB PATA

(Already had a Win7 installation)

 

It seems that for me, the only way of getting a bootable system was to use a modified kernel (qooze 10.3.0 or something similar).

I had to enable AHCI in my BIOS (rendered my Windows unusable but I'll fix that).

 

Post-setup, I still had some trouble:

Graphic chipset not working properly -> Fixed with the GT2xx strings method (you can use the search function to find it)

Wireless LAN (Sweex LV312 PCI card, based on chipset Ralink RT2760/RT2720) not recognized -> Fixed by reinstalling (enabling all PCI ralink extensions), then starting up some ralink-related applications I found in my apps folder

An ugly crash (black screen) when I left my PC for some minutes. I'm almost sure the sleep function caused this, so I disabled sleep, as well as "automatically disabling hard disks when possible" in power management. Still have to test if it works now.

A little annoying issue that probably happens to most of us: Unknown processor in ATM, I got this fixed really quickly thanks to http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=98775!

 

Now I still have one important obstacle to overcome:

Fixing the bootloader. I have to boot using the DVD, because whenever I boot from the HDD, I see Darwin popping up (offering me to press F8 for options), but whatever I do, it restarts the PC just before showing the gray apple loading screen. -v only shows unreadable info (restarts too quickly).

If I'm not wrong, the installed bootloader extension is Chameleon RC5 (the latest) or maybe the modified Chameleon (the one selected by default). Tomorrow I'll try to install the PC EFI loader (as recommended by some users).

 

PS: I've been able to install Chrome and get it working like a charm. (I've noticed someone who had trouble with that)

 

Feel free to leave a comment/suggestion/question.

[iPixel]

Update:

I managed to install the PC_EFI bootloader using the iAtkos DVD. It just asked for the disk and partition number, and after restarting it worked!

I wish everything went so easily...

Now if I don't run into KPanics, this day will be my lucky day!