Few More Issues

Ok. We are almost done. Our trackpad is working, we have  Chameleon boot loader and we don’t need to type anything like “GraphicsEnabler=Yes” while booting.

Sound

Problem number one is the sound. Actually I should say: the lack of the sound. Go ahead and open “System Preferences”. Sound effects are grey out which means they are not available.

To fix that we need only one kept – Azalia Audio. Open “AIOdownloads” pack and run the program. Restart your laptop. The sound is back.

Power management

We need four kexts to have perfect power and battery management. Go ahead to “AIOdownloads” and unzip two files:

• AppleACPI_Thermal_EC
• VoodooPowerMini & VoodooBattery

After unzipping the archives you should have four kexts. Select all of them and copy/move them to SnowLeopard/System/Library/Extensions directory. Authenticate with the password. Before restarting your machine we need to run small and extremely useful utility called “Kext Utility”. One more time open “AIOdownloads” pack. Unzip “KextUtility” and place the app in your Applications folder. Run the program.

Once it’s all done you may restart your computer.

Bluetooth

Oh yes, we will have a working bluetooth connection. The only thing we need to remember is the switch on the right side of your laptop. It has to be permanently On. If yours is Off at this point just switch it On and one more time open “AIOdownloads” folder. There is a zip file called “ToshibaBluetooth”. Unzip it and copy/move the kept into SnowLeopard/System/Library/Extensions folder. Authenticate. Run “Kext Utility” and restart. That’s it, the bluetooth is back. Just remember to have the switch always On.

We are done (for now). You may learn how to change some graphic elements like boot screen here.

Fixing installation

So…. We finally have it: Mac OS X on Toshiba Satellite.

We are in the middle of our way. There are few things we need to take care of.

First of all setting up the system, but that’s easy.

More important is making sure that our computer will boot into OS X without Empire EFI.

Let’s continue from the point we left (intro video). That’s easy part, just follow the instructions on your screen. Notice that the trackpad is still not working. Use your USB mouse or tablet.

If you do not have wireless network choose different way to connect to internet. These settings are not permanent. There is always a way to change them later on.

You may skip those some steps.

Except this one:

And finally:

Yet, proper screenshots:

Now it’s time for serious stuff.

Place Empire EFI in your drive and open it. There are three folders inside. We are interested in the one named “Post-Installation”.

Inside there is an installer called “myHack Installer”. Go ahead and run it.

Stop once you get here:

You HAVE TO choose “Customize” and select/deselect following kexts:

Double check you have them all the same way as shown above. Choose “Install” and authenticate with your password.

Wait for the installer to finish.

Restart your computer.

Note that this time your computer should start without Empire EFI disc as we just installed Chameleon boot loader. This what you should see this time:

And don’t forget to type (for the last time) before the progress bar runs out:

GraphicsEnabler=Yes

If at this point you’re getting grey screen, one more time use Empire EFI disc with “GraphicsEnabler=Yes” option.

Now let’s fix our graphics, so we don’t need to type anything during booting. To achieve that we need to create custom string for our graphic card and insert it in to apple boot playlist.

It may sound complicated but I’m going to prove it’s easy. All we need is one application: OSX86Tools. Copy it to your Applications folder and run it.

Click on “Add EFI Strings/Boot Flag”. The new “Boot Editor” window opens. Choose the top left icon “GFX Strings”.

Pick up our graphic card from the list.

Confirm with password.

In the “GFX String Creator” window click on “Import String to Boot Editor”.

You should see this:

Then hit “Apply changes to com.apple.Boot.plist” and confirm with password.

Restart your laptop.

During the next boot you don’t have to type anything. We’ve just fixed that issue. Was it so difficult?

Let’s proceed to the next step.

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

Read more (from Wikipedia):

about kernel

about kext

about bootloader

about OSx86

about everything else

Before you start

There are few obvious things you need to remember about, before you’ll start to experiment with your computer.

• First of all it’s a back up.

Simple task, but remember that during the installation you will format the computer’s drive.

Formatting=erasing, so back up your important files, documents, music, movies, pictures… etc. Whatever you wanna keep. But wait… You are doing it regularly, don’t you?

Anyway, even if you do check again to be sure you have everything. If you are running hackintosh right now maybe you have some custom presets in Photoshop folder? Codecs for QuickTime? Your favorite archive utility? That’s just a few suggestions, so double check.

If you are on Windows right now, maybe there are some programs you want to keep just in case? You can install them on another PC or give to someone else.

• Second thing is to prepare an external drive (pen drive would be perfect) with files you will need after installation.

It’s always good to be prepared.

I now you don’t want to wait anymore and have your hackintosh ready as soon as possible, but not everything will be working perfectly after installation. Use the time you’re connected to internet. I will update you with the files you need soon.

• Third is an empty CD or DVD disc for burning iso file with our bootloader.

You can not move further without it.

If you are on hackintosh scene for a while, then you know why and there is nothing to explain about it.

If you are totally new, then you need to know that inserting the Snow Leopard installation disc into your drive will not work.

Why? Simply because Apple OS X is not designed to be install on any other computer but only made by Apple.

You can try if you want, but trust me it won’t work.

We will come back to this topic.

• Fourth and the last is an retail disc with Snow Leopard.

Now, let’s move into this topic a little bit.

There are two ways you can get it. First one it’s the one that probably most of you (unfortunately) will go for. You can simply download iso file of the installation disc from torrents, rapidshare, hotfile and many other sharing sites. I can understand that you want to try the software before buying it, but there is absolutely no reason why you don’t buy your own copy from Apple once you’ve tried it and decided to stick with it.

Hopefully you will go for that second option. Come on guys, it costs 29 $, there absolutely no excuse for not buying it. Simple as that.

And just to clarify I have my own original retail disc with Snow Leopard. I paid for it 40 $ as I’m not living in US, but in one of these more expensive countries, where everything costs more. I don’t regret spending that money and I will do same again if I have to. It’s a bargain ! If you don’t want to buy it then you have another option: just stay with Windows. But just to let you know Windows 7 Home Premium starts with 120 $ for single PC (full Ultimate version is 320 $), so ???

What’s gonna be ?

Technical faq

Toshiba Satellite A100-784

• Processor 1.73 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T2250
• Memory 4GB 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM *
• Graphics Intel 945GM Express Chipset (128 Mb shared memory)
• Display 15,4″ widescreen 1280 x 800
• Hard disk 400GB Toshiba SATA 5400 rpm *
• Matshita Super Multi drive (Double Layer)
• BroadCom Card BCM94321MC  a/b/g/n *
• Built-in Toshiba Bluetooth 802.11
• Ethernet LAN Intel PRO 100/VE
• Synaptics Touchpad
• 5-in-1 Bridge Media slot for SD cards

* Notice that I upgraded few things here. Original laptop came with 1 GB RAM memory (it’s enough to run Snow Leopard, but it’s always better to have some more) and 100 GB hard drive capacity. I also changed wireless card and replaced original Intel Pro Wireless 3945 a/b/g with BroadCom Card (to connect with my lovely Airport Extreme station 😎 ). BroadCom Card is the card used in original Apple’s Macbook Pro. I got it from ebay for 20 $, it’s used but works great!