I have completed my Hackint0sh. Network, sound, booting by itself…everything!

I will be working on the step-by-step HOWTO sometime today.

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SUCCESS!!

Well, for the most part.

I am now writing this blog entry using my new Hackint0sh (I have network)!  I am not yet totally done.  I still have to make the SL drive bootable by itself (I’m still booting from the thumbdrive) and I still need to muck around with the drivers to enable audio.  AND make sure that Software Update works.

Once I have everything in order, I will be writing an article about the experience to hopefully help somebody out there who would want to have an OS X box, but not exactly have a lot of money to blow.

Update 1: That was easy! I have managed to make the HDD bootable by itself now. I’ll mess with the drivers later. It’s hard to think while gloating.

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ARRGGGGhhh…turns out that the motherboard i have (GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L) has TWO VERSIONS: v1.x and v2.x…only v1.x is compatible at the moment…guess which one I have?

Update 1: According to this site, my motherboard should be compatible sans on-board NIC…and the guide points to the same guide I used from Lifehacker, except that I used a bootloader 10.3 instead of 10.1.

Weird thing is, when I boot using the thumbdrive, I can press a key THEN the installed partition appears and I can continue booting from that point on. Obviously, when I restart without the thumb drive, I’m back to staring at “Verifying DMI Pool Data…” screen.

I am now reinstalling with bootloader 10.1…not sure if that would make a difference.

This sucks. I’m not remotely confident that I will have a working Hackint0sh any time soon.

Update 2: It turns out that I NEED the thumb drive to boot into the installed partition (just like I have noticed in Update 1)…so it was actually acting normal…which means I do have a partially-working Hackint0sh. I just need to do some extra steps to have a fully-functional Hackint0sh:

• I need to install Chameleon/Netkas bootloader in order to make my OS X partition bootable
• The built-in NIC of the motherboard does not work; I stole a PCI NIC from my older computer that I never use anymore.
• I need to tinker with the drivers to make audio work
• Sleep does not work apparently; I need to install something to make it work properly

I feel that I’m so close to this, yet so far…

Update 3: The NIC I stole from my old computer didn’t work.  I didn’t think it would anyway, so I ordered the NIC that is exactly on the Lifehacker guide.  Until then I have a barely useful Hackint0sh that has no network nor sound.

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I just received the computer parts from NewEgg and now in the process of creating the Snow Leopard custom installer as outlined here and here (mix and matching the instructions as necessary).

I will probably gut out the old parts and put in the new sometime tomorrow.

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I’m in the process of creating my own Hackint0sh–both as a cheap route to getting my own Mac Pro, and as a learning experience. Building a custom PC isn’t exactly a new thing for me; the only thing new is I will be installing OS X on the new custom box.

The components I got is around $350 without the case and power supply (i’ll be reusing the ones i already have). I figure, if the thing doesn’t pan out, I probably still have a decent Windows 7 PC…

I’ll try to chronicle the experience in this blog…as long as I never get lazy…which is always the case.

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