10.6.3 Hackintosh on P4

[lgwells1]

I am building a file server at home, this would be primarily used host my movies and share a printer. I am having difficulties installing my printer drivers on Ubuntu 12.04. So I am trying to turn my old clunker into a Hackintosh, just because it would make it so easy to get it to do the things I need it too.

 

Asus P4P800-M (Not 100% sure on model, I am at work so I cannot inspect)

Intel P4 2.66Ghz

1.25 DDR RAM

NVidia 64MB Video Card(Forgot Name)

160GB HDD (OS/Applications)

200GB HDD (Storage/Misc)

 

There are NO Sata ports on my MB, I have to use IDE for everything.

 

I have been over at TonyMacx86, followed the directions to setup the mother board. I have ###### on a cd, and ###### ready for when OSX is finally installed.

 

 

 

<i>STEP 1: BIOS SETTINGS

You will need to set your BIOS to ACHI mode and your Boot Priority to boot from CD-ROM first. This is the most important step, and one many people overlook. Make sure your bios settings match these. It's not difficult- the only thing I did on my Gigabyte board besides setting Boot Priority to CD/DVD first was set Optimized Defaults, change SATA to AHCI mode, and set HPET to 64-bit mode.</i>

 

 

 

I cannot find the ACHI mode on my motherboard, I have looked all over. It does not have this option.

 

I boot to ######. Insert my 10.6.3 Retail DVD, I press ENTER to boot from the retail disk. I get the white screen with Apple logo, but that is it. I tried a few command prompts at ###### screen to help enable the boot process on the retail disk. None worked.

 

-v = Nothing

 

Can anyone help me out, the search button was not so helpful this time.

[Cerastez]

The search here is not very good, so use google: P4P800 site:http://www.insanelymac.com

 

Try some other boot CDs. i boot legacy might do the trick for you, if not Nawcom's boot CD is very good.

[PookyMacMan]

Try the guide in my signature. It uses nawcom's osx86 ModCD (far superior to i Boot). I installed on 2 P4 builds and 1 Pentium D build successfully.

[lgwells1]

thanks gentlemen! I will try these out this weekend and post results. finals week

[PookyMacMan]

Oh, ouch. Finals are coming up for me too...

[lgwells1]

Well I finally freed up some time to work on the project. I downloaded the OSX86 MODCD and used it to boot from. I kept getting the "Still waiting for a root device". I then tried typing in rd=disk0 through rd=disk4 before booting from my SL DVD. Neither of those attempts resulted in any better results. Here are some screen shots, sorry for the poor quality.

 

 

[Gringo Vermelho]

Your board has ICH5 right? It has no AHCI support. AHCI is not a requirement for installing or running OS X, this is a myth perpetuated by people who never used older ATA controllers, and/or don't read enough.

 

Place your DVD drive jumpered and cabled as master on one channel and the hard drive jumpered/cabled as master on the other.

Disconnect all other drives. In the BIOS you should have some settings for the ICH5, something like enhanced/compatible mode. Try different settings.

 

Use AppleIntelPIIATA.kext or ATAPortInjector.kext.

 

I don't like to recommend distros but for older hardware it might be easier. Try to find JaS Client/Server 10.5.4 or iPC 10.5.6 final and go from there. Both should boot and allow you to install on ICH5. Leopard (as opposed to Snow Leopard) will be fine for your purpose.

 

Your video card sounds like it might be too old, there's probably no driver support for it. If your hackintosh is going to be a headless fileserver then that's not important anyway.

 

For a headless file/print server on hardware of that vintage I'd stick with Windows 2000, Hackintoshing it is too much work if it's just going to sit in a corner delivering data anyway. But that's just me.

[lgwells1]

I can slap XP Pro on it anytime I want, but that is no fun. This is a learning curve for a possible Hackintosh build down the road, one built for power. I will take another crack at it this weekend, and see what other problems I run into. Thanks GringoPS I own a few macs already, how much harder is it to just install OSX on an external drive. Then pop it into my hackintosh?

[Gringo Vermelho]

It's much, much easier to install OS X on a modern, compatible PC. Of course you'd learn a lot from installing retail on your old P4 but there are many fixes that are hardware specific and many things you'll need to do that you will never have to do again.

 

The two screenshots you posted don't show anything wrong (besides "still waiting for root device"), not anything that would prevent the installer from booting anyway. The "USB controller will be unloaded across sleep" error does not affect the installation process. The diagnostics messages from Chameleon in the first screenshot look fine except for the syntax error with the UUID. But that's not important during the installation process either.

 

You need a boot CD or hacked distro that has a patched AppleIntelPIIATA.kext or the ATAPortInjector.kext on it and configure your hardware like i said earlier. I know you want to run Snow Leopard but for obvious reasons it's better to start with a "period" distro, one that is of the same vintage of your hardware. Once you get that to work and learn what makes it tick you can try installing Snow Leopard. It's a lot easier to move forward when you have a working OS X installation on the same hardware already.

 

Yes you can install OS X on another machine and transplant the hard drive but use a flash drive with Chameleon to boot it while you're experimenting, otherwise you'll be doing A LOT of hard drive swapping until you get it to work. That old P4 can't just run OS X as it is, you'll need a patched kernel with SSE3 emulator, a correctly installed and configured Chameleon boot loader and a bunch of drivers.

Whichever way you approach it it's going to be a lot harder than installing OS X on a modern and more compatible Intel based PC.