Guide to installing OSX Snow Leopard version 10.6 (original Retail Disk) on a Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 with PATA drives

This is a general guide to installing OSX Snow Leopard Version 10.6 (original retail Disk) on a Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 that has PATA (Parallel ATA AKA IDE) drives instead of SATA drives.

This guide should also work for Systems using this motherboard with SATA drives with a few minor changes.

I'll try to do a guide a little later on for installing OSX Snow Leopard on this same motherboard using SATA drives.

Please note: my guide is written for my particular system config, if your system doesn't have similar components you may or may not have success with installing Snow Leopard.  Also this guide is written for those who are familiar with computers and technology, I'm not going to go into a step by step breakdown of how to burn a ISO for the boot CD,etc. You're on your own there.

My system's current configuration is as follows:

Thermaltake 430 Watt 24 Pin ATX Power Supply

Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 with Bios revision F14

2 Gigabytes of Patriot DDR2-800 Memory

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13 GHz CPU, stock setting, not overclocked.

Onboard Network card (Marvel Yukon 88E8056)

Onboard Sound card

ASUS EN8800GT 512 megabyte NVIDIA PCI Express Video card

Sony Dual Layer DVD +/- RW Burner (IDE / PATA configured as Slave)

Western Digital WD2000JB-00DUA0 200 Gigabyte (IDE / PATA configured as Master)

Generic Texas Instruments Chipset PCI Firewire card

List of Software, boot disks,etc. that I used to install OSX Snow Leopard on my GA-965P-S3 based computer.

1. Empire EFI Version 1.085 Boot CD found here

2. MyHack bootloader (found on Empire EFI Version 1.085 Boot CD )

3. Snow Leopard compatible Kext for Marvel Yukon 88E8056, VoodooHDA Kext for Sound and the DSDT file from here

4. A Retail Copy of Snow Leopard, (copies that come with mac systems are specific for that system and normally will not work when trying to install them on a hackintosh.

Some folks advise that Google is your friend for the copy of Snow Leopard, but my advice is to spend the money and buy a Legal retail copy of Snow Leopard, It's only 29 American dollars and is well worth the money.

For your Empire EFI Boot CD, you may want to burn a copy of the regular disk ISO and a disk for the legacy disk iso, I ran into a problem with the current version 1.085 where I would get a memory error for the regular disk, I was able to successfully use the legacy disk to boot my system and then start the Snow Leopard installation

Boot your system using the Empire EFI Boot CD, after it has booted eject it and insert your Snow Leopard install DVD and then wait until the drive stops flashing and then press F5, this should refresh the menu options so that you now see Mac OSX Install DVD instead of Empire EFI.

Press Enter to Boot your Mac OSX Install DVD and start the OSX Snow Leopard Operating System Installation.

make sure you partition your hard drive as a MacOS Journaled drive with GUID format, select the desired fonts,etc. and then install Snow Leopard.

If you get an error about the system not being able to bless the drive don't panic, this is common, you'll be using the empire efi boot cd to boot your system until you get the myhack bootloader software installed.

When the install finishes reboot your system, remove the Snow Leopard install DVD and reinsert your empire efi boot cd and allow the system to boot from it.

At the chooser screen select the hard drive (named to whatever you named it to during the install and then hit enter to boot. If you want to watch a verbose boot to watch for errors press the down key after selecting this disk and choose the verbose option and then press enter to boot.

after the system has booted you'll want to go into the post-installation folder on the empire efi disk, and run the myhack installer.

do a customized install and select the following items in addition to the items that are already checked.

1. graphics enabler

2. ahciportinjector

3. AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext and IOATAFAMILY.kext

4.IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext

5. JmicronATA.kext

If you want to be able to download updates directly from Apple, I suggest that you don't install the sleepenabler.kext file I did this and then updated to 10.6.2 and then I had to boot the OSX installer disk to be able to get into a working terminal so I could remove this KEXT file, it was causing an immediate kernel panic because it didn't match the version of the kernel. so I advise to stay away from this one, it's only needed if you want your hackintosh to be able to go to sleep, not a big deal in my book.

Ok back to the instructions.

After you get done making your selections, click install, after the install finishes eject the Empire EFI disk.

Copy the DSDT.aml file I provided a link to earlier in this guide to the /Extra folder in your hard drive in the finder

Reboot your Computer and verify that you are able to successfully boot into OSX Snow Leopard.

You should now have the ability to change your display resolution, as the graphics enabler and the DSDT file should now give you full functionality for your Nvidia video card.

The next thing you will need to do it get your network and sound card working

Unzip the Stuff for GA-965P-S3 SL Hackintosh install zip file I provided the link to earlier and then open the folder. You're going to need the Kext Helper program in this folder to install the network kext you need for the Marvel Yukon 99E8056 network card, as it's not recognized by the default network drivers for Snow Leopard. run the Kext Helper program and then open the marvel Yukon folder that's in this folder and drag the Kext file contained there into the Kext Helper Program.  Next drag the voodooHDA.kext file into the Kext Helper and then click the easy install button, this takes care of rebuilding the system cache files,etc. so your network and audio will now work.

Reboot your hackintosh and if everything went well you should now have a fully working Hackintosh system running Snow Leopard OSX 10.6

If you see any problems or mistakes in my guide please leave me a comment and let me know.

If you run into any problems I highly recommend going over to the insanelymac.com web forum to ask for assistance.

The main thing to remember when asking for help.

1. Patience, it may take a couple of days before someone answers your question, don't get pushy and don't keep posting the same question over and over.

2. scan the forum and make sure that someone else hasn't posted a similar problem, if they have you may already have the answer to your question.

3. understand that running a hackintosh isn't for the average person, you have to be willing to work on problems by yourself if you can't get anyone to assist you. Being pushy or disrespectful of others on the forum will cause your questions to be ignored.

4. Remember you're on your own if you do decide to build your own hackintosh. If you want a smooth out of the box experience, you should probably save up the money and buy yourself a real Macintosh system from Apple. I'm too cheap to do this, and I'm the kind of person that I think it's fun when you have to work a little to get something to run the way you want it to.

Having warned you about these things, I hope those of you who do decide to continue with building your hackintosh have fun and learn a lot from the process.

Thanks

Doctor Evil