Here was the more information I promised a post or two ago. These are the resources I used for not only building my Hackintosh but also getting some pointers in the right direction for some problems that were driving me crazy on it.
General Resources
- TonyMacx86 – The defacto resource I used to sourcing out parts for my Hackintosh along with all of the tools needed to get it up and running once you have all the components assembled. The forum is filled with people who have seem to have done this 1000 times over.
- OSX86.net – I have no idea if these guys are associated with the link I list below but they provide a good number of custom downloads for people with specialized issues, experimental solutions, and general solid drivers, configs and applications to make your transition to Hackintosh go as smooth as possible.
- OSX86 Project – Another great resource on hardware and components along with a live forum of people that are asking AND answering questions. Very rare these days!
Links to things that helped me out of some problems.
Problem 1: Hackintosh will not authorize to the Mac App Store, iTunes Store or iCloud. It would throw up an error about the “device or computer could not be recognized.”
My Solution: Had to do a couple of things. First and foremost I had to make sure my onboard ethernet was seen as en0 and my WiFi Adapter was seen as en1. This required me to follow all of the steps shown here (thanks to Mak1 for this post). I had to do all three of the suggested fixes before it was working for me. The part involving EFI Studio was the key.
Problem 2: After upgrading to 10.7, unbeknownst to me my ATI card was only being recognized as an “ATI 5000 Series” rather than a full on Radeon 5770. Because of this, the framebuffer specific for my card (Vervet) was not being loaded and instead a generic ATI Framebuffer. The main symptoms of this happening include: Cider-translated based full screen games (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in my case), any Source engine based game from Steam, and DVD Player would all crash on launch. Also in the dashboard, adding new widgets wouldn’t have the ripple effect anymore. This is attributed to CoreImage/Quartz Extreme not technically loading to the specific frame buffer.
My Solution: My fix was much more simple than I thought it would be. I ripped out all the extra kernel arguments from my org.Chameleon.boot.plist in the /Extra folder that Chimera generates. Here is my working file.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>darkwake=0</string>
<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>AtiConfig</key>
<string>Vervet</string>
<key>AtiPorts</key>
<string>4</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>2</string>
<key>Legacy Logo</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>UseKernelCache</key>
<string>Yes</string>
</dict>
</plist>
There are other forum resources I followed that pointed me in the direction of using an ATY_injector, using a different framebuffer (they are all monkey names), and a few others scattered on the sites I mentioned above but none of them did the trick. They are more for cards that don’t have an “official” Apple equivalent. The 5770 is a common card on the Apple platform so the built in support was a no brainer. My problem was the kernel arguments I had in there since 10.6.X when I first built the machine were no longer neccessary and needed to be removed.
Hopefully this will help some people out?
