Kiksy, Building Hackingtosh OSX86 using GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Notes: 3 / 2 years ago

Building Hackingtosh OSX86 using GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Been meaning to write this up since I built the machine in September.

Build of Hackintosh using GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 ATX mobo, running Leopard.

This guide:

http://lifehacker.com/5351485/how-to-build-a-hackintosh-with-snow-leopard-start-to-finish

and the updated one:

http://lifehacker.com/5360150/install-snow-leopard-on-your-hackintosh-pc-no-hacking-required

acted as my starting point. the GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P mobo had good compatibility, and from building Hackintoshes before , that seemed to be the key. Everything else has a bit of leeway, .

Wanted to build a Mac Pro hackintosh. Research into it showed that the Xeon CPU’s were pricey (And obviously needed to different mainboard), and for a livable performance drop and a significant price drop the Quad Core Q9550 Intel 2.8GHZ looked like the best deal.

Benchmark

By getting the 2.8Ghz I saved an extra 100 quid over the 3Ghz, and was still bench marking over twice the power of the at the time current iMac.

Graphics card choice was based on top end available for Macs. I read that driver updates for graphics cards come within the OSX updates, so I wanted a card that had 100% support, so went for the Ati Radron 4870 512mb which was the best available as an Mac Pro upgrade from the Apple store.

RAM was 8gb. Initially was thinking 4gb, but then its 64bit OS , so might as well make the most of it.

HDD was WD 1tb , same as from the guide.

DVD/CD was just an old IDE one that I had lying around.

Total shopping list:

MOBO

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=345709&sourceid=2021

£110

http://www.pcd-engineering.co.uk/webstore/product.php?productid=63102

CPU

http://www.overclock.co.uk/product/Intel-Core-2-Quad-Q9650-3.0GHz-12Mb-Cache-LGA775-1333-MHz,-Retail_8486.html

£250

much cheaper CPU

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/141515

£166

Graph

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169206

£100

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-021-PA

£70 X2?

HDD

£60 1tb

the guide stated that the onboard LAN didn’t work on the mobo, luckily (!) I had a spare NIC unopened in a box lying around, so I shoved that in .

Build.

Putting it all together was a short process, about 15mins. Bum clench time on first power on waiting for the beep…………….

…………….success!

OS Installation:

First thing was a test using a Live CD of Knoppix to make sure everything was running smoothly:

All good, that was a 32bit version of Knoppix , so only reported 3.2GB RAM, but everything else was going well, so it was onto OSX Snow Leopard.

Following the online guide using the retail version of Snow Leopard I bought….

…..was easy, and within a short while I had a 16gb USB with the patched install on it.

All the installations were going well, until it hung on the spinning black circle. Multiple retries , still the same.

So I tried a Leopard install from a pre patched DVD, still hanging on the same bit. Gave up for the night.

Next day tried agin, still the same. Frustrtaed with not having a working computer I went to install Windows 7. Hanged on install too. Tried the Beta of 7 . Hanging.

Fearing that I would have to manaully try and work out what was the faulty part, in desperating I unplugged all peripherals, including the LAN , and then, the HDD light lit up and the install continued. Turned out the NIC was faulty. Phew.

I then tried the Leopard DVD again, just to see.

rushing throguh I split the HDD 500gb/500gb and used these settings:

ATI

SATA2 AHCI

Intel SATA IDE (the mobo has more than one SATA controller)

JMICRON SATA

Generic SATA (just to be sure)

Apple HDA Audio

Realtek R1000

Voodoo 9.7

Leopard installed fine.

A user on OSX86 posted this helpful guide which worked for me for audio:

“Ok, I finally got the ALC889A sound to work with iDeneb v1.3 Leopard OSX86 10.5.5

My board is a Gigabyte EP35-DS3 rev.2.1

Here is what I did:

1) remove any trace of ALCinject and AppleHDA you might have from previous attempts. to do this, simply delete ALCinject.kext and AppleHDA.kext from System/Library/Extensions a password will prompt.

2) download the attached zip file. it contains a new AppleHDA.kext and a HDAEnabler.kext (ALCinject is NOT needed anymore).

3) install AppleHDA.kext and HDAEnabler.kext for this I used OSX86Tools from pcwiz

4) After that, in OSX86Tools i chose Clear Extensions Cache, then Set Extensions permissions

5) Reboot and tada! the System Profiler shows an Intel HDA present under Audio. it also seems to recognize the S/P-DIF Out, although I cant test it cause i only have headphones. The microphone worked immediately. One thing though, I had to plug the headphones on the front of the case. Try around several connectors until you get the right one.”

Desktop loaded. Good times.

All good.

I should of then gone and redone the Snow Leopard install, but my friends MBP wasnt at the house so I thought Id wait. Got bored and installed Win 7 on the other partition . Worked first go, although it wouldnt dual boot as the Win 7 bootloader overwrites Chameleon .

To fix this I downloaded EasyBCD :

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

If you install Win 7 first, then OSX you need to boot off the Win 7 DVD. Boot using console then type:

diskpart

list disk

select disk 0

list partition

select partition 0

active

exit

exit

If you do it how I did it installing OSX first then Win 7 will overwrite the OSX boot partition. To fix:

Right click My Computer, then Manager , then Disk Management

Assign a drive letter to the small Win 7 partition , should be about 200mb.

Then run EasyBCD as Admin

Add/Remove entries

Add an Entry

Mac

Type : Generic OSX86

and thats it, save it and reboot.

Then it would use the Win 7 bootloader , then onto Chameleon, not entirely satisfactory, but good enough.

Issues:

The online guide said that onboard LAN didnt work on the mobo. I found it worked out of the box with no drivers. The only weird issue is the router needs to be turned on before you boot into OSX, otherwise you need to manually reset the DHCP lease in control panel.

With CD/DVD drive you MUST use the software eject, or drag the drive onto the Eject button. Using the eject button on the DVD drive causes Finder to hang. I guess this is because its not being unmounted properly with the hardware eject.

VMware causes a kernel panic ,for some reason.

Thats it!

And here is a little video of the machine running the whole of CS4 Master Suite and playing some HD video:
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Building Hackingtosh OSX86 using GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

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