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.

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 ?