hackintosh, triple boot on HP Pavilion tx2525nr Notebook

[owengerig]

I had a job offer to code an iphone app and was in a rush to get xcode working. so i struggled tring to get a VM of snow leopard running for 3 days and failed miserably; all i could get was leopard running. I couldnt find a DL(dont have a dev account yet) for xcode 3.1 so i was stuck with needing 10.6.

so with with my leopard VM(vmware) i tried to burn the "snow leopard dvd.dmg" to a usb drive cuz im very broke and couldnt afford dual layer dvds.

i walked through the tutorials to mount the dmg then using disk utility to restore the usb drive from the install dmg.

*problem 1* it kept complaining when trying to restore saying: dmg file needed to be check for restore points prior to restoring it. (sry dont remember exact text of error)

*solution 1* per other tutorials i found they explained it with an added step of formatting the usb drive first (osx journaled), then when restoring dont check "erase." this successfully got me around the problem and i was able to create my snow leopard install usb stick

 

after that i tried and tried to install with [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url]. i later found [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] does not support amd and that was probably the main problem. either way i ended up using Nawcoms Boot CD this seemed to work

*problem 2* the installation kept failing saying it couldnt read from the source drive. i know in the tutorial on lifehacker its suppose to fail but i wouldnt see the installation after booting to the cd again (basically it wasnt failing cuz it was suppose to it was failing because it was failing)

 

by this time i was desperate. i had 3 more days to give my employer and answer and NEEDED A MAC. so i ended up borrowing one from a past job and from there it was off to the races to figure out objective-c

 

*solution 2* so after borrowing the mac i tried to make the usb drive again but this time on a physical box as opposed to the VM. after making the usb drive this way the installation was successful

 

i was stoked i had my hackintosh working!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or at least the install worked.

 

but this off course brought other problems. how to setup my drive. i had windows and linux already loaded and didnt want to lose them. however after many google searches, tutorials and bad advise i did something that screwed up grub and my linux partition. so at this point it was pointless to try and save the current os's. i repartitioned the whole drive leaving fat partitions for windows, linux, and sharedstorage.

(i later found these tutorials which would have been real nice prior to all ive done)

install on mbr (scroll to bottom very good walk through of swapping osinstall.mpkg)

and

also the tutorial on the site thebackpackr.com called hackintoshing-with-snow-leopard

 

install went fine and everything was working

now i went through the rest of the tutorial on lifehacker but that made things alot worse. this was early last week so my memory is a little bad. it was either [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] or 10.6.7 but regardless after a reboot for one of those i lost alot of devices. so after more research and finding nothing (i really didnt want to go to deep into which ktext i needed or how to go about reinstalling them) i decided to say screw it and instead of doing all of post installs they list just leave it alone, use modcd instead of [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] and only update to 10.6.6 (which was all i needed for xcode4). and this worked fine (except i still needed to install other os's and it sucks needing a boot cd)

 

*problem 3* i tried to install windows after mac was ok. however diskpart wouldnt let me set the second partition to active. and windows wouldnt install. so i redid my whole drive once again following the tutorial below

*solution 3*

link above hackintoshing-with-snow-leopard (all about triple(mac,windows,linux) booting)

 

and this is where im at now

im pretty sure everything will work following the triple boot tutorial

 

the only thing left to investigate is getting it to boot without a cd

but i plan on make a post with this question later once everything is working(linux and windows installed)

 

for anyone interested in the work story im proud to say i successfully built the framework of the ui in 2 days without any proir knowledge of Cocoa and so i have told my new employer that we are good to go.

 

great site, great tutorial, thanks guys i certainly couldnt have got my hackintosh working at all without this site

 

 

quick update:

i couldnt get triple boot to work. after installing linux the windows partition cant boot. i did the correct steps making sure to install the bootloader on the same partition as the linux install but like i said it didnt work. in the end i dont care. mac and windows is good enough.