After reading the article over on OSNEWS Building a Hackintosh Apple Can't Sue You For I wanted to build myself a Legal Hackintosh system.
I’m not rich so I had to buy the stuff I needed one piece at a time. Some of the components in my New Hackintosh are used parts that I recycled from my spares drawer.
here are the new parts I used for my hackintosh.
COOLER MASTER Elite 360 RC-360-KKN1-GP Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mini Tower Computer Case $39 dollars at frys
Intel D945GCLF Mini-ITX motherboard $64 dollars at frys
HP DVD1140 22x Internal Double-Layer PATA DVD±RW/CD-RW Drive $37 at frys
The rest of the parts that I used to build my hackintosh were used.
Mac OS Leopard (Retail box copy Version 10.5.6) purchased from ebay for $60 dollars with free shipping
2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 memory stick (pulled from another project system)
Maxtor Fireball 3 ATA/133 40 GB PATA hard drive
Micro ATX 150 Watt Power Supply that was pulled from a Gateway desktop system that had a bad motherboard (bulging capacitors)
The Cooler Master Elite 360 case didn’t come with a power supply, but because CM built this case to stealth the power supply inside the case, I was able to scrounge through my spare parts bin and find a low wattage Micro ATX PSU that I couldn’t use in a ordinary case. I was able to bolt it to the side of the CM Elite 360 case as seen in this photo.
The Intel D945GCLF board mounted into the case very easily. I would have liked to had a smaller case but most of the ones I looked at required a laptop optical drive. I didn’t have any suitable spares, so that is what made me decide on just buying the HP DVD Recorder drive and using the CM Case. My goal was to be as cheap as possible but still build a hackintosh system that could boot using the Boot-132 boot CD and install from a vanilla (unaltered) Mac OSX Leopard retail install DVD
OK On to more pictures of my hackintosh.
Exterior shots. (please note the Apple Sticker that has been applied to the top of the case, so I’m complying with the EULA in that I’m installing OSX on a Apple Branded system)
Interior shots
Screen shot from OSX Leopard with my system info
Notes about installing OSX Leopard on the Intel D945GCLF Mini-ITX
You will need these software packages
Intel D945GCLF2_ISO boot-132 package
The Realtek R1000 Kext driver from PsyStar as the driver installer in the Intel D945GCLF2 boot package link above doesn’t work with the ethernet card on the Intel D945GCLF motherboard. Use the install kext option in OSX86 Tools to install the R1000 kext
Notes for installing Leopard.
Boot the boot-132 boot cd, when prompted hit enter, on the next screen remove the boot-132 cd and insert your retail OSX Leopard installation DVD, then hit enter after the disk is finished reading the leopard install DVD.
be sure to partition your hard drive as a GUID type partition
after you have finished installing osx reinsert the boot-132 cd and use it to boot the primary hard drive.
Run OSX86 Tools and use the FDISK and install EFI options to properly prepare your hard drive for the EFI boot loader, and then install the Chameleon boot loader.
After this you should be able to boot your hackintosh without having to use the boot-132 CD
If you experience problems with Leopard looping back to the welcome video after the transfer files wizard there are a few different solutions suggested on insanelymac, but this one worked for me straight away.
Press F8 during boot, and type -s
then enter the following commands:
/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
touch /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
passwd root
I’ve been able to install all updates from Apple without any problems or issues.
Please Support Apple by buying a legitimate copy of OSX Leopard, the whole point of building your own hackintosh is that you are expressing your disappointment and disgust for the current way that Apple handles it’s company as a hardware company that just happens to sell a few pieces of software. The cost for a legal copy of Mac OSX Leopard is very reasonable. $129 isn’t that expensive.
The Reason I built my own Hackintosh is that the Mac Mini is a poor excuse for a entry level machine. My Hackintosh system was built for around $200 dollars (including the cost for my used copy of Leopard) and not counting the used hard drive and power supply that I scavenged from my parts bin.
This Intel Atom Mini-ITX System is a good entry level system, Apple needs to get their head out of their ass and make a mid level desktop system, something with upgradable video, memory, and the ability to install more than one optical drive or hard drive. Psystar and several other companies are trying to fill this niche because Apple doesn’t seem to care or even want to address the DIY market of users who would gladly buy Apple equipment if Apple sold a product that met their needs.
11 comments:
Hi there...
my name is helder meneses and i have a d945gclf and tried to install 10.5.4 on it. I followed your tutorial but after i choose language it says that "the software cannot install in this hardware". Can you help me??
I'll try my best to help.
you may need to adjust your bios settings.
on my system I have the ide hard drive set as the master and the dvd burner set as the slave.
In the bios settings I turned off the serial port and the parallel port.
for the drive configuration I left it set to auto and set the other options to native.
for my video I set it to BOTH with the apeture set to 256 megs.
Can you advise on the components you used with your D945GCLF board? did you use a SATA hard drive, a Sata DVD drive or a mixture of Sata and Pata drives?
Also are you using a retail Mac OSX Leopard install disk or a restore disk for another mac system?
Mac restore disks are specialized and only able to install on the system they were sold with. There was a point in time a few years ago before Intel Macs hit the scene where apple's restore disks tended to be universal and installable on all systems but that stopped around the time that 10.3 "panther or 10.4 "Tiger" was released.
Hi there, I tried to install and followed the steps you mentioned. I have same hardware and motherboard you mentioned only diff is my system is connected to my lcd tv and hard drive is sata. After the installation and tweak things, system boots up without boot-cd123, but after the blue screen of apple, it hangs and after 5-10mins no hard drive activity. please help or guide me anything I missed.
you may want to try booting with verbose logging to see where your bootup is hanging up at.
I switched my system over to a sata drive and didn't have any problems with leopard.
depending on which version of chameleon you installed you may be able to select verbose on the graphical menu or if you used one of the other boot loaders you should be able to specify -v at the command line, -f is another command that may be useful and it bypasses the extension kext cache files and forces the system to boot using the actual kext files instead.
you may also want to visit http://www.insanelymac.com and read through the forums to see if anyone else is having similar issues to yours. I spend a lot of time on that forum reading up trying to learn as much as possible. I still feel like a newbie though compared to some of the guys who post there.
Hi there, Thanks for reply, I have a doubt, do I need to do the OSx86 Tools part before installing chameleon and driver package. And also please provide details steps about the osx86 tools, I downloaded the .ktext and install after that do I need to do "add efi to strings or not " if yes how to proceed. I am bit confused. Thanks
after I published this, they came out with a newer version of the chameleon boot loader that automates the process, all you should need to do is install that. I never had to edit the efi settings on the D945GCLF board, the drivers that are in the D945GCLF2 package I linked to work great for leopard. Snow leopard is a different story, it is usable but I haven't been able to come up with a good method for using it besides editing the com.boot.plist file to hard code the resolution.
Hi, could you please provide me the steps to hard core the screen resolution. I will try once again re-installing or can I just do a repair, will it work if I boot from bootcd-123. Thanks for your help.
Hi, could you please correct me if I am wrong:
Install steps:
1. Boot from bootcd-123.
2. re-load the install DVD (10.5.6) and boot
3. Partition hard drive with GUID
4. Installation done.
5. Re-boot with bootcd-123 again.
6. Install chameleon ver1.0.11
7. Install Drivers package
8. Open Terminal window
8.1. sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
8.2. p
8.3. f 1
8.4. write
8.5. Y
8.9. exit
9. Open osx86 tools, install realtekr1000.ktext file.
10. Reboot.
This is the procedure I followed please suggest me If anything wrong or in any orders. Thanks
sounds about right.
there is a newer version of the chameleon boot loader available at http://chameleon.osx86.hu if you want to use it instead. I used it the last time I reloaded leopard and didn't have to make any changes to the drive using fdisk with it, I did the standard install.
Hi, you mean if i use new version of chamelion then I can skip the step 8 and 9.
Great post. I followed this posting to try my own set up. My install experience wasn't that smooth, but it would have been much much worse without this guide. I still have to work out some of the kinks, but I am able to boot into my install with the boot132 cd also get internet.
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