hackintosh in a coma

I was very happy about my hackintosh, everything going smooth and easy… until it all broke down and I was left with no computer for almost a month.

And what was even stranger was that also Filippo’s hackintosh, built at the same time as mine, went down only a few days after mine. If computers were organic, I would have thought about some sort of mortal sickness.

Ok let me say that there’s a happy ending to this story: the motherboards were not dead but only in a coma. It was necessary to reinstall the bios and use an external graphic card to redirect the display because for some reasons the integrated HD3000 gpus were not working.

details of a hackintosh entering a coma

So I built these two hackintosh, one for me (A) one for a friend (B).

As you can see, fairly standard builds following the hackmini example by tonymac.

I updated the bios to F7 (h16nusb3.f7 from Gigabyte website), installed Lion 10.7.3 through Unibeast Lion 10.7.3.

Hackintosh A was the first one to die (alas, to enter a coma); it worked great for an entire week then one day I switched it on, could hear the fans whirring away, the hard drive starting up, but no output on the screen, so I couldn’t even get to the BIOS screen and do something. I had the cpu replaced from amazon.it because I thought that was the only thing that could have failed, but when I tried the new one nothing changed.

Then I went to Filippo’s house (owner of hackintosh B), replaced my motherboard with his, and blam, the hack is alive! So I’m happy because I know that it’s the motherboard that doesn’t work.

And then the next day Filippo calls, the same thing happened to his computer! Stuck on a black screen, the system doesn’t even load the BIOS.

Two motherboards, same model, different CPUs but really this should not matter, different cases. No idea about how this could happen. A defective batch of these two motherboards even if they are very common (and recommended to build hackintosh)? My case (a rather expensive Silverstone SG05) burning something on the board?

I sent my motherboard to the online shop’s customer service (in the meantime, a month goes by) and rather unexpectedly they said that nothing was broken, that my m/b was running ok, only thing they did was to upgrade the BIOS.

Wait a second, how did you do that if there’s no display output whatsoever? “Oh well we used an external graphic card”. So that’s it? I was still a bit skeptical but then I decided to buy an external graphic card; I knew from internet discussions that this should speed up video and photo editing so that was an upgrade that I was willing to do. I went to a local shop this time and bought a whatever-ATI-5450 with 2Gb of ram for 45 euros (surely faster than the GPU that Apple puts inside the 2-grand macbook pro I reasoned). And guess what, the customer service guys were right; I could update the BIOS on Filippo’s motherboard and that was it.

Yes I had to play a little bit more to have the graphical card working ok on my hackintosh but now it seems like everything’s running smoothly. I am still afraid to close the case (it’s still a post-industrial sight my desktop, with all components running and clicking away in the open), but maybe now it’s so hot here in Milano that I’ll leave the machine like this.

I just hope Giulia doesn’t notice it because you know women want to have clean stuff around, especially if this half-assed mechanical monster happens to live in the baby room (another month and a half to go before my yet un-named babygirl comes into the world).

sidenotes

When I installed in the PCI-E slot the graphic card I couldn’t get any display once OS X was loaded, so I had to use this switch at boot:

GraphicsEnabler=No

Then I installed ATI5000Injector.kext using Kext Wizard. I did other bits too that I’ve read somewhere but am not sure about them. Anyway, just in case I need them again: first, find the PCIRootUID of graphic card, by typing in from a terminal window:

ioreg -l | grep -15 "AppleACPIPCI" | grep "_UID"

What this command does is giving you this UID number which you have to put into /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist by adding the following lines:

<key>PCIRootUID</key>
<string>1</string>

Finally I also added these other two lines (to have the card identified as a 5400 series instead of a 5000):

<key>AtiConfig</key>
<string>Eulemur</string>

a magical QE/CI world

Trying to find information to make the graphic card work I stumbled once more on some acronyms that these nerds in the forums use a lot. Let me write those down so I will remember them:

• QE = Quartz Extreme (http://www.apple.com…/quartzextreme/)
• CI = Core Image (http://www.apple.com…ures/coreimage/)
• Q2DE = Quartz 2D extreme

Other acronyms that are probably worth remembering can be found at http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2789.

These are things that make the graphical magic happens in OS X; sometimes a card will work but with no magic (i.e., no rippling water effects, no transparencies, etc.); and how do you know if the magic is not there?:

If the Finder menu-bar is transparent, if a water ripple effect appears when you add a desktop widget and if you can zoom in/out on the desktop by holding ctrl while moving the mouse wheel then you have QE/CI.

update to lion 10.7.4

Since everything was working I wanted some more troubles so I updated my system to 10.7.4 using the Combo package.

Then, not unexpectedly, OS X crashed on restarting and had to boot from the unibeast USB disk, selecting to boot from the drive with the newly installed system using these switches:

-v GeneratPStates=No DropSSDT=Yes

I then ran Multibeast 4.5.2 using the updated DSDT for my motherboard and selected these options:

It all worked out in the end except for the graphic card which was not recognized as a 5400; I edited again the /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist and added the AtiConfig/Eulemur strings (see above) so I reckon the correct way to install this card is just to use the ATI5000Injector.kext and these two lines in the chameleon.Boot.plist.

final results

So this is the updated list of components and total price for my hackintosh:

And this is the new benchmark comparison against other macs (small improvement in 10.7.4 using dedicated DSDT for the F8 Gigabyte m/b BIOS):

Xbench ran with no thread test otherwise it would lock up, and geekbench is the 32-bit tryout mode.