Getting your Hackintosh working: Some common pitfalls

Posted at November 12, 2008

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I’ve been meaning to write about the pitfalls that I experienced during the process of getting Mac OSX working well on my main AMD-based PC because, although the support available on the net (particularily at insanelymac.com) is fantastic, I experienced some problems that were either undocumented, or took a serious amount of research to find and fix: I may as well write down what I found.

Maintaining a dialogue with readers would be really interesting: feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to help. Even better, leave a comment for others to see the conversation: I’m very active on this blog and I’ll see it pretty quickly.

I took lots of photos along the way but unfortunately the whole lot got corrupted by my Ubuntu laptop, along with my AMAZING front-row Travis photos that I had planned to post as well ( doh :( ).

Anyway, here goes. I did manage to salvage a few photos, so all is not lost.

Disclaimer: Please note: I messed around with this purely for academic research (and consumer evaluation) purposes: I fully intend to buy a Mac in the near future. I just wanted some fun first… Also, please make sure you backup everything you can’t live without before attempting this: the probability of having to wipe your system multiple times is.. likely.

Contents:

  1. Introduction / Specs of PC used

  2. Problem: DHCP doesn’t work using the automatic configuration option

  3. Problem: Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard not setup properly

  4. Problem: The instability of certain apps breaks your heart (iTunes)

  5. Problem: 512mb graphics (Geforce 8600) not detected properly, causes instability

  6. Problem: VERY unstable NTFS drivers [NTFS-3G/Paragon NTFS]

  7. Problem: USB devices arent mounted properly when you plug them in (but work after restart)

  8. Problem: “Connect to” is broken

  9. Problem: CD drive won’t open / Problem: OSX crashes if left alone for a while [CD/HDD power down]

Installing and configuring a hackintosh PC: My experiences

The first thing I’d recommend is.. if it doesn’t work first time, try and try again. Rather infuriating advice I know if you’ve found this after hours of googling, but this is the only thing which worked for me. I completely gave up trying to install OSX on my laptop as it just wouldnt stay afloat, but managed it perfectly on my PC.

First of all, I’ll detail the specs of my PC and give a quick summary of the main points. I’ll elaborate on these underneath.

My Specs

Distribution used: Kalyway 10.5.2

Motherboard: GA-K8NF-9 (nForce 4 chipset) (fully supported)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64bit 3200 (supported in 32bit mode ONLY, using Marvin’s AMD patcher)
Graphics card:

Initially: Geforce 8600 512mb (FAILED to get this working fully: was a source of many crashes)
Fixed: Used my old Geforce 6600 256mb to get it off the ground and installed properly
Note: After using getting the 256mb Geforce drivers installed properly, I found that I could swap the card out for the initial 512mb one: It only recognised 256mb, but obviously it’s a much faster card so there was a big benefit gained.

Hard drives:

Primary: 40GB Seagate IDE Parallel ATA.
As well as: an assortment of other IDE and SATA drives: the interface doesn’t seem to make any difference at all (unlike on windows)

NOTE: I had huge problems using NTFS-3G to write to my NTFS formatted drives, and ended up destroying my music collection and corrupting the drive. BE CAREFUL. Note: if NTFS-3G appears to have corrupted your drive, check this.

Network: Built into motherboard, works great SO LONG AS you manually configure IP settings: DHCP is not supported properly.

Audio: Built into motherboard, works great.

Monitors: DUAL Samsung SyncMaster 226BW (one DVI, one VGA) working perfectly

Problem: DHCP doesn’t work using the automatic configuration option

Network settings that I used

Network settings that I used (System Preferences->Network)

I thought it was game-over for accessing the internet at this point, but after a little guesswork the network connection was working perfectly. The problem seems to be that OSX can’t utilise the DHCP protocol properly to obtain an IP address with the router:

Solution: The trick is to do the legwork yourself and pick an IP address which you know isn’t being used on your LAN. I found I had to enter IP address, Subnet Mask, Router IP and DNS server (should be the same as router IP) before it would work. See screenshot for details.


Problem: Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard not setup properly

The keyboard is assumed to be a weirdy Mac layout by default which is a bit annoying because some keys (’\') don’t even exist.

Solution: Install Microsoft Intellitype Mac drivers in order to get the “British - Microsoft” keyboard layout in Internation pane of System preferences. This should map all the keys properly to your PC keyboard. The added advantage is that the multimedia keys now work in iTunes etc.

Problem: The instability of certain apps breaks your heart (iTunes)

Solution: If you’re running an AMD based system, give Marvin’s AMD patcher a try. It patches the binary (what PC users know as .exe) files to remove CPUID checks and encryption, and certainly fixed iTunes and iPhoto for me.

Problem: 512mb graphics (Geforce 8600) not detected properly, causes instability

I never managed to fix this issue because, as far as I could tell, the fix was to flash the ROM on-board your graphics card in order to change the identifying number that it provided to OSX.

Partial-Solution: It’s not ideal, but I found that by installing OSX using an older 256MB card (Geforce 6600) (choosing the 256mb NVinject drivers when asked) I was able to swap the new card back in later on. Presumably only 256mb of the available 512mb is being used, but the clock speed of the newer card is much higher so there should be some performance increase..

Ok, I realise this is a lame fix, but it might be useful for someone to try: it might at least get their system off the ground

Note: You can probably skip actually using a sub-512mb card for the install and just check the 256 drivers option.

Problem: VERY unstable NTFS drivers [NTFS-3G/Paragon NTFS]

OSX is only able to read NTFS formatted drives unless you install third-party software. I tried NTFS-3G, which corrupted an entire drive (every file became unreadable: read). I also tried Paragon NTFS, and this did the same thing.

Solution: Therefore, my advice is, give it up, backup your data and format to the native OSX disk format.

I’ve had some confirmation of problems with NTFS-3G via an email from someone called Baris:

Baris:

hi
did you find a way for recovering lost files under ntfs-3g
does disk recovery wizard works?
thank you.

Me:

Hey Baris,

Not sure what you mean by Disk Recovery Wizard: I tried quite a few things with varying success, so I might have forgotten.

After ntfs-3g corrupted my HDD, I found that running Windows XP’s built in disk scanner recovered EVERYTHING, so I recommend trying that first!

Seems like quite a few people are having trouble with this software, let me know how you get on!

Ian

Baris:

Thank you very much Ian.
Disk Scanner worked. Everything recovered.
I cant believe it would be so easy :))
I will not use NTFS-3G anymore.

.. Do you use something else stable, to read and write ntfs on macosx instead of ntfs-3g?

Me:

I tried Paragon NTFS and that was even WORSE so stay clear.

The only solution that i can see is to backup your data then format your drive for FAT32 (if you need the drive to be readable in windows still as well) or format it using the Mac file system: I chose to use the Mac filesystem and I’ve not had any problems since!

Problem: USB devices arent mounted properly when you plug them in (but work after restart)

Solution: install USB fix 1.3.MPKG

Problem: “Connect to” is broken

[Insert screenshot]

I found that Finder’s “Connect To” function is broken for certain protocols. A bit of googling led me to the following fix:

Solution [taken from]:

1- Open the terminal application (Under Applications->Utilities)
2- Enter:

sudo rm /System/Library/Filesystems/afpfs.fs
sudo ln -s /System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare/afpfs.kext /System/Library/Filesystems/afpfs.fs

Problem: CD drive won’t open:

Problem: OSX crashes if left alone for a while [CD/HDD power down]:

I think these two problems are related to the Power Management settings. Certainly, OSX has problems powering drives back up once they’re powered down (which occurs if the machine is idle): I was finding that a CD drive would just lock up and become completly unresponsive until I rebooted the computer.

At the time, I was finding that if OSX was left on it’s own for a while, when I came back it would act very unresponsive: programs would all crash, and the only action I could take was to either move the mouse sadly around the screen, or to reset the system.

Solution: I read somewhere that I should try changing the power management settings to prevent the CD Drive going to sleep. This helped (although the “open drawer” button still doesnt work: I have to eject it from within OSX). This solution had the added effect of preventing the HDDs going to sleep as well, and miraculously this was the last piece of the jigsaw before I arrived at the rock-solid system I have now.

That’s it for now, but I’ll add some more soon, especially if I get sent any! I’m planning to upgrade to Core 2 Quad soon, so I’ll document that as well.

NEW Problem: Sound is intermittent, or no sound at all

When I upgraded to 10.5.6, I had the above problem. I got it working using appleac97audiokext

Solution:
Use SpotLight to search for Audio/Midi setup, the under the Audio Devices tab select the right ‘Properties For’ which shows “Audio Output”,.. change 6ch-16bit to 2ch-16bit. This should fix it!

Hackintosh

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