OS X Lion on Gigabyte P55A-UD4P
Greetings all. OS X 10.7 or Lion is out and available on the Mac App Store (MAS). Like it, love it, or loathe it, it is an evolutionary step in the progression of OSX. While the direction Apple is going in, with the new UI can be debated for hours, there is no denying the fact that millions will switch, and this includes some of us with our Hackintoshes as well. Snow leopard was notoriously difficult to get up and running on our Hackies for a long while. Worry not though, here’s a quick and painless way to get Lion up and running on your beige box. The steps below outline the route I took for my Gigabyte P55A-UD4P (F14). YMMV.
What you will need:-
- Lion installation DMG or the App from Mac Apple Store (MAS)
- Chimera or Chameleon RC5
- A spare USB drive or a partition on your HDD to serve as the installation disc (>6GB)
- Existing installation of Snow Leopard (how else would you get the Lion DMG or App?) (>10.6.5)
Step 1: (SL) Extract the InstallESD.dmg from the Lion.app.
I assume you got your copy from the MAS, and not from the “usual sources”. If you did get ti from the usual sources, mount the DMG you “found” and, go to step 2. For all others, within your installation of Snow Leopard, do the following:
- Show Package Contents on Install Mac OS X Lion.app by right clicking on the Lion icon
- In Contents -> Shared Support find InstallESD.dmg
- Mount InstallESD.dmg
Step 2: (SL) Restore the DMG to an installation disk
This step will restore the DMG image on to the USB drive or a partition on your HDD. Be warned, it won’t make this drive or disc bootable, but will copy over all the data required.
- Find BaseSystem.dmg amongst the hidden files in the InstallESD.dmg. I usually use Pathfinder to view Hidden files.
- Mount the BaseSystem.dmg image. (Illustrated below)
- Open Disk Utility and on the left pane, right click the USB drive or the partition you want to designate as the installation drive.
- Click Restore, and as the source, drag the Mac OS X Base System, and in the destination, drag the USB drive or the partition from the left pane. (Illustrated below)
- The process takes ~ 2 minutes.
- Unmount the mounted image from 2. Unmount the Mac OS X Base System with the white drive icon.
- Open Mac OS X Base System that was just created in 5, and navigate to System -> Installation folder.
- Delete the file called Packages.
- From Mac OS X Install ESD copy the folder called Packages to the System -> Installation folder from 7.
- Copy these five files from Mac OS X Install ESD to Mac OS X Base System:- mach_kernel, .disk_label, boot.efi, kernelcache and MacOSX_Media_Background.png (Illustrated below)
Steps 2.1, 2.2
After Step 2.2
Step 2.4
Step 2.10
Step 3: (SL) Make the Installation Disk bootable.
Now that the BaseSystem.dmg has been restored to the USB drive or the partition you designated (hereafter referred to, as the installation drive), we need to prep it to boot.
- Install Chameleon RC5 or Chimera (choose your poison) to the newly created Mac OS X Base System partition.
- This will create a new folder called /Extra.
- In /Extra, paste in Extensions folder, com.apple.Boot.plist, DSDT.aml, Extensions.mkext and smbios.plist. You should have these if you are using Snow Leopard on your beige box. If not, you may utilize what I have in mine. Here’s a link.
- Pay special attention to smbios.plist. Make sure you have a serial number in there.
Step 4: (L) Lion Installation
Reboot your box, and press F12 or whichever key combination to bring up the motherboard HDD select screen. Choose to boot from the installation drive. If you’ve done it right, Lion installer should start. Continue on to install Lion by either erasing your Snow Leopard installation, and installing it on that partition, OR install it to a separate partition. If you really don’t care, you can also choose to install it over Snow Leopard. In any case, the installation should go flawlessly.
Step 5: (L) Post installation
On reboot, choose to boot from the installation drive again, but when the Drive selection comes up, choose your new Lion install partition, and boot into Lion.
- Once you’ve logged in, install Chameleon or Chimera on the Lion partition.
- Copy back the Extra folder contents from the Mac OS X Base System installation drive to your Lion Drive Extra folder.
- As an alternative to 2, if you ever did use Multibeast, you can run the installer for Multibeast, much as you would’ve on Snow Leopard.
- Reboot, and profit.
I chose to keep the Mac OS X Base System partition intact, and not delete it, in case I ever need to reinstall Lion from scratch. However, if you are hurting for space, feel free to delete the installation drive from Disk Utility.
The process is very straightforward, and to be honest, I don’t recall it ever being so easy to install the latest OSX version so close to the actual launch of the OS. Whether or not you’d want to, is a completely different question.
Snow Leopard 965P DS3/DS4 – Extra Extensions Folder
Hi all, by popular demand – here are the contents of my /Extra folder, including the working DSDT.aml and the extensions (kexts) therein. These work superb on my 965P-DS4 system, and should work for those with the DS3 motherboards as well. Let me know how it goes!
Snow Leopard on my 965P – File Server
As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to relegate my main machine (Gigabyte 965P – DS4) to a file server. I decided to go the no-hassles route and installed Windows 7. After painstakingly converting all my drives back to NTFS, I found to my chagrin, the great amount of lag when opening a network share via Samba (SMB) on my Macs. The Finder would scan the remote directory for what seemed like minutes before it showed me the contents of the folders.
That in addition to the messed up permissions on the server machine made it nearly impossible to sync files to and from the iMac/Mac Mini/MacBook Pro. Each time I’d initiate a transfer/sync session, the permissions on the Windows server would cause the sync client to erroneously recognize the entire data set as new, and cause a full copy between machines. Not too serious, but it does get old when the entire network is choked up due to 100GB of data crossing over each night.
And this is when I decided to head back to Mac for my server needs. It is an old adage that if you don’t flex your muscles enough, you lose them. Apparently, the same goes for Hackintosh skills! For the life of me, I couldn’t remember which set of KEXTs I used in my /E/E folder, so I decided to go back to the easier Leopard route. I installed iPC, only to notice the slower network speeds of 32MBps (Gigabit Ethernet). I could get up to 60-70MBps on Snow Leopard – so indeed, I decided to reconvert all my drives to HFS and then start the process of installing Snow Leopard.
I had to refer back to my blog and to the relevant websites to pick up pointers. Luckily I had my DSDT handy and after a couple of trial and errors, I finally had Snow Kitty back up on my Hack. I used Chameleon RC4, and with no need for manual UUID injection, things just worked the way they should. I added a number of flags to my com.apple.boot.plist – mainly to cause a timeout at the boot selection screen, as well as to hide some extra drives that showed up. I also have a new set of KEXTs I am using. These are:-
fakesmc.kext (new one)
LegacyAppleYukon2.kext
LegacyHDA.kext
NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
OpenHaltRestart.kext
It has been a few weeks since then. I am running a 32Bit Kernel and Extensions, and I couldn’t be happier. Chronosync keeps all my Macs up-to-date and runs scheduled backups of all my home movies and iPhoto data.
Chameleon 2 RC3 & EFI String Graphics Issues
So I am back from an extended road-trip with former colleagues from the Netherlands. It was an enjoyable trip that took us 1300 miles from home to Catskill, New York, and Washington DC, and back again, with stops here and there. I am headed back to work after a long break, and I must admit I did miss using my brain cells the past week.
In the interim, the world has been busy releasing new apps/functionality and updates. The biggest of course being Chameleon 2 RC3. It is out, and for the selected few, it works great. It no longer errs on large drives and has full Snow Leopard support. One advantage of using it over Netkas’ 10.1 EFI is that it weeds out non-boot drives from the startup menu. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the best of luck with this version of Chameleon. It seems to oddly enough not work with my Graphics Card. As I wrote in an earlier post, I use EFI strings in my com.apple.Boot.plist for my Graphics card. The same however, does not work with Chameleon RC3. QE/CI seems to chug along just fine, but the resolution is stuck at VESA 1024×768. I refuse to use boot flags to force a resolution, and I am unable to get to the root of the issue. In the meantime, I have started using a DSDT.aml fix for my Graphics card. As a result, I now have full audio (in/out), QE/CI for my GFX card, and Gigabit LAN using my DSDT.aml. Life is indeed good.
Huzzah – Logitech is out with drivers for Snow Leopard (both 32 and 64 bit) and they work really well. Finally I can use my MX Revolution and VX Nano mice with Snow Leopard without additional hacks.
With new beta releases of DropBox, MenuMeters, Growl and the like, the migration to Snow Leopard can finally be proclaimed – a done deal.
