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Let’s Do It !!!
Before you start double check you have:
- Mac OS X retail install disc
- CD/DVD with burned Empire EFI (BootCD)
- USB mouse or tablet
- AIOdownloads folder (probably on external flash drive)
Have all of them?
Let’s start then.
Power up your computer and choose CD/DVD drive to boot from.
BTW setting the boot order can be done in two ways:
- press F2, go to Boot Order, make sure CD/DVD drive is on top
- press F12, choose CD/DVD drive
The difference between those two options is that by choosing the second one you make only one time change, while the first option will change the booting order permanently (until next change).
It’s totally up to you.
I find the second option more convenient, so I’m going to stick to it.
Before you hit enter insert your CD with Empire EFI.
You will see something like this:
In this case my internal hard drive contained Windows 7 installation.
The drive was partitioned before that’s why you can see one “System Reserved” and two “Windows NTFS” partitions.
Follow the instruction on the screen. Remove Empire EFI and place OS X installation disc in the drive. Wait a bit and hit F5.
Before choosing “Mac OS X Install DVD” type:
GraphicsEnabler=Yes
PS. Don’t search for any box or space to type it in. Just lay your hands on keyboard and start typing. As soon as you touch any key, the text appears in the left bottom corner of your screen.
Hit “Enter”. The next few minutes will look like that:
And finally:
At this point you may notice that your trackpad is not working. It’s good to have a USB mouse or tablet and connect it to your laptop.
Choose your language.
Before hitting “Continue” we need to prepare our internal hard drive for installation.
In menu bar choose “Utilities” and “Disc Utility…”.
And here it is: my hard drive with Windows installation as seen by Disc Utility:
Just for this guide (to make it simple) I’m going to partition my hard drive into one partition.
While Windows use NTFS file system, OS X needs HFS+ file system with GUID partition table scheme.
Here is how to format your drive properly:
At the bottom right of the table you should see “Options…”. Choose it and make sure you have “GUID Partition Table” option enabled:
I’m going to name my partition “SnowLeopard”.
Once you’re ready click “Apply” and of course ignore warning:
Disk Utility will now partition your hard drive. Once it’s done quit application.
Familiar screen appears again:
This time go ahead and click “Continue”.
Read (or skip) the agreement. Just “Agree”.
After formatting the hard drive is ready for OS X. Before hitting “Install” you may customize your installation, so go ahead and click “Customize”.
I’m going to skip language translations. That saves 1.2 GB of space.
But I want to have Rosetta and QuickTime 7. I’m also going to install additional fonts and printer support for most popular models.
Finally install!
The installation will take some time. In my case it was approx. 30 minutes.
My strong advice is to keep an eye on your computer during installation as it happened to me once that the installation just froze in the middle. Then I’ve noticed that the fan stopped working. Laptop was becoming dangerously hot, so I had to shut it down and start all over again. Next time everything went OK, so just monitor the progress from time to time.
Anyway once the installation is complete you should see this:
Don’t panic. Everything is fine, at least according to the plan.
Click “Restart”. One more time change the boot order (F2 or F12), remove OS X installation disc and place Empire EFI one more time into CD/DVD drive. Boot from CD.
This time you should see this:
Before choosing “Snow Leopard” you need to type once again:
GraphicsEnabler=Yes
One more time matrix:
And finally – YES!!!! The intro video (probably with no sound, we will fix it later).
In case you wish to see it again, here is a YouTube link.
At this point you earned my congratulations. Seeing the intro means that the installation was successful.
There are few more things that need to be done, but the first major step is complete.
Welcome to the dark side!
You may go ahead to Fixing Installation.
Basic knowledge
It’s always good to know how the things are working. It’s even better to know why the things are working the way they are.
You may know or not that the idea of running Apple OS on non Apple hardware it’s quite old (old in the computer time terms).It’s an OSx86 Project and it started in 2005.
If you are completely new to hackintosh I would strongly recommend visiting OSx86 Project site.
The subject is huge and the possibilities are endless. I’m not going to write a book about that here. If you feel like browsing some hackintosh dedicated forums you can check useful links. More you know, it’s always better.
Anyway I’m going to give here some small, very limited and selected explanation.
Basically they are two ways of getting the things done, so in the simple words you can have the Apple OS on your PC following these two methods:
- using the pre-hacked already patched distro
- using the original installation disc from Apple
In both cases the effect will be similar=you will have Apple OS on non Apple computer. I can not say which way is easier because it all depends on your knowledge and experience.
Let’s have a closer look at the first method.
First of all, what is distro you may ask ? Distro = software distribution. It’s already configured software. In our case it would be already configured operating system. There is quite a few distros floating around like: iAtkos, iDeneb, Kalyway or iPC. Probably you’ve heard these names somewhere. The whole idea behind the distros is that they are all based on original OS but modified and bundled with different patches to make them more compatible with most people PCs. I started my adventure with hackintosh with iPC distro (based on Leopard 10.5.6). The installation was successful and I was running Leopard OS X 10.5.6 on my Toshiba before. So why decided to use original retail disc? Let’s move to second method.
There is one limitation while using distros. You can not use Apple official OS and security updates. Majority of them will completely break your installation as they are overwriting patched distro files. In the result your computer will be not bootable. The only solution is reinstalling. Using original Apple installation disc to get OS X working on your PC allows you to update your system in the future with the official Apple updates. They are some hackintosh users reporting system crash after official updates, but it’s difficult to define if the update process was done correctly or not. This is not going to happen with our Toshiba laptop. After successful installtion of Snow Leopard 10.6 we are going to update to 10.6.6 using Apple combo update.
Few more terms you need to know:
Kernel – the basic part of your operation system, the heart of your computer, responsible for communication between different components of your hardware and your applications.
the central component of most computer operating systems; it is a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level *
Kext – kernel extension, as the name itself says kext adds extra features and support to kernel, extending kernel’s functionality. Great article here.
Bootloader – small program that loads the OS after turning on your computer.
EFI – Extensible Firmware Interface
a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware *
Empire EFI we are using to install Snow Leopard on our Toshiba emulates the EFI environment. In simple words it allows to use original retail Apple installation disc because OS see our computer as original Apple computer. That gives us an ability to use unmodified Apple kernel. That’s the reason why we can update it later on with the official updates.
* after Wikipedia
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