There’s a story behind my new system. Recently my wife noticed how noisy my computer was. The fans were pretty noisy. I told her that I need the fans because the system gets too hot. That got me to thinking if I could cut the noise by getting a cooler processor and motherboard. Also, I had heard about sound insulation for PCs that significantly cut noise outside the case. We decided it was time to invest in a new system.
I also wanted a system that I could run the new OSX for the Macintosh. My old computer couldn’t handle this operating system because the processor wasn’t Core 2 or higher.
The Hardware
Most of the equipment that makes up my new hackintosh was purchased from NewEgg.com. Below is a shopping list complete with links to the websites where I purchased the equipment.
- Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard with BIOS rev F6
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 3.0GHz 12MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor
- EVGA 512-P3-N871-AR GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
- 8GB (4 2GB SDRAMs) OCZ Gold 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Desktop Memory Model OCZ2G8004GK
- Western Digital Caviar WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drives (I used two of these from the old system – one for OSX and one for Windows 7)
- Western Digital Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB 5400 to 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (this one I bought new for my new data drive)
- Sony Optiarc 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model AD-7221S (this one is new)
- Plextor PX-716A DVD R/W drive (this one is from my old system)
- ZALMAN ZM600-HP 600W Power Supply
- ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
- Acousticase 360 (I ordered it with the sound insulation material pre-cut and I installed it myself)
- 2 Acoustifans (these were supposed to be the quietest fans)
OS Configuration
- OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.2 installed on boot drive 1
- Windows 7 (64bit) installed on boot drive 2 (another WD2500KS 250 GB SATA drive)
The Goals
My goals with a new system were:
- Build the system myself to save money
- Get a cooler running processor and motherboard
- Get a case that could be sound insulated
- Get a motherboard and processor that can run Windows 7 64bit, and OSX (yes I wanted to have a Hackintosh).
- Get a system case that can accomodate at least 3 internal hard drives (one for OSX, one for Windows 7, and one for my data), and can accomodate at least 2 DVD RW drives (with 2 it’s much easier to copy disks, which I do a lot for my model railroad kit business and my video making).
I think my new system accomplishes all of these goals and more. It provides me with a quieter, cooler, and more reliable system. I also have more storage capacity for my data with a separate drive dedicated to the data. I have better isolation of OS from data, and I can triple boot now. In addition, with OSX, I can learn more about Macintosh software development – something I haven’t done for over 20 years.
Assembly
I have prior experience assembling systems, so it was not much problem.
Despite that experience, there are always problems. For example, the precut foam they send with the Acousticase 360 for the side removable panel is not cut properly to fit around the two slide locks on top and bottom. So I had to carefully cut extra notches in the material to fit.
I printed out the illustrated foam installation instructions on the Quiet PC website and used them instead of the one-page installation sheet you get with the foam in the box.
I found that the website instructions had better pictures and were easier to follow than the ones included in the box.
The only other problem was the FDD cable included with the motherboard had a wiring problem that would cause my 3.5? drive (one from my previous system) to fail on startup. Fortunately, I had a spare cable from an older motherboard and it worked perfectly.
Everything else went together pretty well. I plugged my eVGA 9800 GTX+ video card into the PCI Express 16 slot. I did not hook up any SATA drives to the jMicron SATA ports (the two purple ports) on the motherboard. I’ll tell you why later. Instead I used the yellow Intel Matrix Storage SATA ports (6 of them) on the motherboard. I read on InsanelyMac, that OSX likes to have it’s SATA 0 set to the SATA DVD drive, so I hooked up my new SATA DVD R/W drive to SATA 0. I hooked up my old non-SATA regular IDE Plextor DVD R/W drive to the IDE 0 channel as the master on that IDE channel. I wasn’t sure if OSX would support it, but I hooked it up for Windows’ benefit.
I labeled the drives with small white stickers so that I could easily identify which OS was on what drive later when I have to swap drives to install Windows OS’es (painful, but necessary I found out). I labeled the drives OSX, Windows 7, and Data, respectively so I could quickly identify them.
I hooked them up to the Intel SATA ports in that order, i.e. OSX to SATA 1, Windows 7 to SATA 2, and Data to SATA 3. I hooked up the remaining SATA 5 port to the external SATA drive port (included with the motherboard), even though only one of the two external ports would be working.
BIOS Preparation
I wanted to have a double boot system and I wanted to have all my data on the third new 500 GB hard drive, separated from the OS’es. The reason for separating the data from the OS was that in my experience, if you let Windows put all your data on the OS drive along with it’s big swap file, which is it’s default behavior, that drive gets a lot of thrashing whenever you use programs. That thrashing cuts down the life expectancy of the drive, so when it fails it’ll take out your OS and your data at the same time. My plan was to separate the OS from the data so that if the OS drive fails, my data drive will still live on longer because (the theory at least) there’s less thrashing on the data drive.
Because I wanted to run OSX on one of the drives, I needed to enable AHCI in the system bios for the SATA interface. This is to maximize performance and compatibility with OSX. On the EP45-UD3P motherboard, there are two SATA interfaces – one is an Intel Matrix Storage type and has 6 ports, and the other is a jMicron SATA that has 2 ports (the purple ports). I had read a post on the InsanelyMac forum from someone who had trouble getting OSX to work with the jMicron SATA ports, so I disabled them in the bios before installing any of the OS’es. Also, in the bios I enabled the Intel Matrix Storage 6 port SATA to run in AHCI native IDE mode.
When I first powered on my motherboard, I noticed that the bios was F5 revision. The latest at the time of my startup was F6. So I figured I’d better flash it up to F6 after my Vista OS installation. I planned to flash after Window 7 was installed because I had read about the handy bios flash program included with the motherboard that worked under Vista.
In the MB Intelligent Tweaker (MIT) section of the bios I made sure the CPU Clock Ratio was set to 9X which made the Frequency show up as 3.0 GHz.
The OCZ memory I got for the new system runs at the settings: CAS Latency Time = 5, tRCD = 5, tRP = 5, and tRAS = 18. This is different than the motherboard defaults so I set these up in the Advanced Timing Control sub-section of the same MB Intelligent Tweaker (MIT) section of the bios.
I had heard on the InsanelyMac forum that it was a good idea to disable the Parallel and Serial ports in the bios, so I did that as well.
In the Advanced BIOS Features section of the bios, I changed the Hard Disk Boot Priority to boot to the OSX drive (the WD2500KS 250 GB drive on SATA 1) first. This was because I knew I wanted that drive’s MBR (with the Chameleon v2.0x bootloader) to start first. This is important for Snow Leopard to boot from its hard disk.
While I was in the Advanced BIOS Features section, I set the First Boot Device to be the Floppy, the Second to be the CDROM, and the Third to be the Hard Disk. Finally in this section, I set the Init Display First setting to PEG, because my eVGA 9800 GTX+ video card is plugged into the PCI Express 16 slot.
As I mentioned earlier, in the Integrated Peripherals section of the bios, I set the SATA RAID/AHCI Mode entry at the top of the screen (this one is for the 6 yellow Intel ICH10R Southbridge SATA ports) to AHCI, and the SATA Port0-3 Native Mode entry below it to Enabled, so the ports will run in native IDE mode for better performance. In this same section, I enabled the USB Keyboard and Mouse Support options.
This motherboard has two LAN ports on it. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that the port on the back of the machine that is closest to the multi-channel audio jacks is the port called LAN1. I didn’t need LAN2 and I figured it would confuse OSX and maybe Windows, so I disabled Onboard H/W LAN2 in the bios.
I disabled the bios entry Onboard SATA/IDE Device, which is for the two purple jMicron SATA ports on the motherboard. I also disabled the Onboard Serial Port 1, and the Onboard Parallel Port.
I don’t know how important this option is, but in the Power Management Setup section of the bios, I enabled the HPET Support option and I set the HPET Mode option to 64-bit. I did this because I knew I was going to run Window 7 64bit. I didn’t test whether disabling or setting to 32-bit would have a bad effect on OSX.
After setting up the BIOS, it was time to restart the system and setup operating systems on the hard drives. I installed Windows 7 first onto the first SATA drive, and then formatted the drive I would use for Data. Next I install OSX on another of the SATA drives.
Install Windows 7
I connected the Windows 7 drive to SATA drive 1 and I removed the OSX drive from the box. I started the system with the Windows 7 Ultimate install disk and proceeded to install Windows 7.
After Windows 7 was installed, I started it up and installed the latest nVidia drivers for my 9800 GTX+ card from the nVidia web site.
One important thing to do at this time is to bring up the properties dialog on the Windows 7 drive and give the drive a name. I named mine Windows7. This is handy later when you install OSX – you can easily identify which drive to install to by choosing the one that has no name.
I shutdown the system and moved the Windows 7 drive to SATA drive 2 and put back in the OSX drive in SATA drive 1 so that the OSX drive will be the boot up drive.
Install OSX
Installing Snow Leopard on my hackintosh is a six step process:
1. Install 10.5.7 using iAtkos v7.
3. Install Snow Leopard from the thumb drive.
4. Fix the sound in Snow Leopard with drivers you downloaded to the thumb drive.
5. Transfer the bootloader from the thumb drive to the Snow Leopard drive so it will auto-boot.
6. Update to the latest Snow Leopard version using the standard Apple Software Update.
Items you need:
In the installation procedure I create a bootable Snow Leopard Installer on a USB thumb drive. You need to use a USB thumb drive that’s at least 8GB in size (I used the 16GB Corsair USB thumb drive).
I used the retail Snow Leopard Upgrade Install DVD to create the installer on the thumb drive. Even though this is a fresh installation, the $29 upgrade DVD does the job.
Considerations:
The install process I use is based on the fine discussion of installing Snow Leopard on similar equipment by Adam Pash on his blog. I’m indebted to him for his very complete accurate accounting of how he got Snow Leopard to work on his system.
In his blog, Adam uses a special package called “EP45UD3P Snow Leopard Install” to simplify the process of auto-booting the thumb drive and the Snow Leopard drive. I chose NOT to use this package because I couldn’t get it to work on my equipment. I found that the longer slower manual method Adam discusses at the link above worked better for me.
To install Snow Leopard you first need an earlier version of OSX Leopard on your system so you can prepare the thumb drive. So I decided to use iAtkos v7 to do this with. Download a copy of it (search Google for iAtkos v7 torrent). I burned the iAtkos v7 ISO image to a new DVD and stuck this in my DVD drive and started up the system.
REMEMBER: THIS VERSION OF OSX IS ONLY FOR EXPERIMENTATION AND IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A PERMANENT INSTALLATION. PLEASE PURCHASE AN ACTUAL RETAIL COPY OF OSX AND SUPPORT APPLE DEVELOPERS.
When the prompt to start from CDROM came up, I pressed the Enter key to proceed to boot from the iAtkos DVD. After a while, you get an introduction screen and agreement page. Move the mouse up to the top edge of the screen and you will get a menu bar. I started the Disk Utility application from the menu to partition the unlabeled 250 GB drive on my system – the one we just put in that’s for OSX. I partitioned it as a single GUID partition. I named the drive Leopard, after the preproduction codename for OSX 10.5.7. After the partitioning was done, which only takes a minute, I closed the Disk Utility application window and proceeded to the screen that has the Customize button on the bottom left. Click this button before continuing with installation – VERY IMPORTANT!
In the customize window, there is a tree of options, some of which are preselected for you and others are not. Here are the options I selected which work on my equipment:
iAtkos v7 Main System
Bootloader/Chameleon v1
x86 Patches/DSDT
x86 Patches/Decrypters/AppleDecrypt
x86 Patches/Disabler
x86 Patches/OHR
Drivers/VGA/nVidia/EFI string for nVidia/DVI-DVI
Drivers/System/SATA-IDE/AHCI
Drivers/System/Sound/Voodoo HDA driver
Drivers/System/NTFS-3G
Drivers/System/Network/Wired/Realtek/Realtek R1000
After selecting these options, I let the install begin. I chose not to verify the disk, as it can take a long time and delays installation at the beginning. If you are concerned about the quality of the disk image, then by all means let it check the disk.
After the install is completed, it will restart your system. When the BIOS startup screen is displayed during system startup, eject the iAtkos v7 DVD if you can, otherwise turn off the system before the OSX loader on the iAtkos DVD starts and then back on again to eject the DVD. When you do restart the system with no DVD in the drive, OSX 10.5.7 will start with the animation of different languages welcoming you to OSX against a background of a supernova and stars. Very nice.
After I helped OSX recognize my keyboard by following the on-screen instructions to press keys next to each Shift key, and after I entered all the registration information, I hit the Desktop. Everything seems to be working fine, graphics card, sound, network, etc. Now it’s on to preparing our Snow Leopard installation thumb drive.
Step 2: Prepare Snow Leopard Installer USB Thumb Drive
Partition and format the thumb drive:
Under OSX 10.5.7, stick the thumb drive into a USB port. It will appear on the desktop. Then, startup the Disk Utility application. The thumb drive will appear in the Disk Utility left sidebar window. (1) Click on the thumb drive in the sidebar, then (2) click on the Partition tab. (3) Choose ’1 Partition’ from the Volume Scheme menu, (4) give it a name (I called mine ‘Snowy’) and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format drop-list. (5) Press the Options button and make sure GUID Partition Table is selected as the partition scheme. Once you’ve made sure to set all the appropriate settings, (6) click Apply to partition and format the thumb drive.
Save an image of the Snow Leopard DVD:
With Disk Utility application open, insert the Snow Leopard DVD. When it shows up in the Disk Utility sidebar, (1) click on it, then (2) click New Image in the top Disk Utility toolbar. Choose to save it on the Desktop, then click the Save button. This will take about 20 minutes to save an image of the Snow Leopard install DVD on your Desktop.
Restore Snow Leopard DVD image to thumb drive:
In Disk Utility, (1) click on the USB thumb drive (mine is called ‘Snowy’) and (2) click on Restore. (3) In the Restore window, drag and drop the ‘Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg’ from the left Disk Utility sidebar to the Source field, then (4) drag and drop the thumb drive from the left sidebar to the Destination field. Finally, (5) click on Restore and enter your password when prompted. Disk Utility will take everything on the Snow Leopard Install DVD image and put it on the thumb drive. This can take around 20 minutes.
Download extra goodies:
It’s time to download some additional goodies that we will use to make the thumb drive and later the Snow Leopard hard drive auto-booting. Also we need to download some items to fix the audio in Snow Leopard once we have it installed. We will put these items in a folder called ‘Utilities’ on our thumb drive.
Create a new folder called ‘Utilities’ on the thumb drive now.
Open Safari and browse to the Chameleon homepage, find the Latest Releases section of the site’s right sidebar, and download the latest version of Chameleon. Uncompress the download and move the Chameleon folder to the Utilities folder on the thumb drive. Rename the Chameleon folder on your thumb drive ‘Chameleon’ so it will be easier to identify and refer to later. Chameleon will be used as the graphical boot menu for both the thumb drive and the Snow Leopard hard drive.
Next we need to download an EFI bootloader so the thumb drive will start the Snow Leopard installer when booted. This same bootloader will also be used to startup Snow Leopard on the hard drive once we have it installed. Use Safari to browse to netkas.org and download the latest bootloader from the bootloader link on the page. Copy the resulting ‘boot’ file to the Utilities folder on the thumb drive.
Next, download Extra.zip, unzip the file, and then drag and drop the Extra folder into the thumb drive. Also, drag and drop the downloaded Extra folder also into the Utilities folder of the thumb drive so we’ll have it ready to use later on the Snow Leopard hard drive. This Extra folder will be what the bootloader uses to make Snow Leopard work on non-Apple systems.
Finally, download a couple of items to solve the sound problem you will encounter in Snow Leopard when it is installed on your system. Download the Kext Utility disk image file, then download this audio kext and unzip it. When you download the Kext Utility disk image, it will automatically decompress and start up its installation. Just close the installer window and eject the disk for it that appeared on your Desktop. You aren’t quite ready for it yet. Copy both the Kext Utility disk image file and the audio kext into the Utilities folder in your thumb drive.
Prepare the thumb drive to auto-boot:
We are now going to make the thumb drive auto-booting. To do this we’re going to use the Apple Terminal utility to execute some commands at a command prompt, similar to using the Command Prompt in Windows for DOS commands.
In all the commands, remember to substitute your drive names in place of those I used, unless you named yours the same as mine. In my case, the thumb drive is called ‘Snowy’ and the OSX 10.5.7 drive is called ‘Leopard’.
With the thumb drive still in the USB port, open Terminal and type:
diskutil list
This command displays a list of all the disks mounted on your system. For each drive, there are identifiers that uniquely identify the drives on your system to OSX. We need to identifiers for the thumb drive. The first is the root identifier for the thumb drive (mine is listed as ‘disk2′). The second is the specific identifier for the portion of the thumb drive that contains the Snow Leopard installer. Mine is ‘disk2s2′. The identifiers may be different for your system. Write these two identifiers down because we will need them later in the steps below.
Now we’re going to change into the directory where Chameleon is located on the thumb drive.
Open Terminal and type:
cd /Volumes/Snowy/Utilities/Chameleon/i386/
Next, while still in Terminal, type:
sudo fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/r[thumb drive root identifier]
where [thumb drive root identifier] is the root identifier of the thumb drive you wrote down earlier. For me it is ‘disk2′. After you press Enter, you’ll be prompted for your password. Enter the password to complete the command.
Next, in Terminal, type:
sudo dd if=boot1h of=/dev/r[thumb drive snow leopard installer identifier]
where [thumb drive snow leopard installer identifier] is the identifier for the partition on the thumb drive where the Snow Leopard installer was restored. For me it is ‘disk2s2′.
Then again in Terminal, type:
sudo cp /Volumes/Snowy/Utilities/boot /Volumes/Snowy
Remember to substitute your thumb drive name in place of Snowy, unless you called yours Snowy. This copies the boot file to the root of your thumb drive so it will auto-boot.
That’s it! The thumb drive is ready to boot your system with so that you can install Snow Leopard.
Make sure there’s no disk in the DVD drive or the floppy drive. Also, make sure your thumb drive is plugged into a USB port, and then restart your system. When the BIOS startup screen appears, press the Delete key to enter BIOS setup. When you are in BIOS setup, go to the Advanced BIOS Features screen and press Enter on the ‘Hard Disk Boot Priority’ field.
Make sure that the thumb drive is listed at USB-HDD0 and that it appears in the list. Move it to the top of this list by using the PageUp key.
Once you have the thumb drive as the first hard drive to boot from, then press F10 to save the changes and restart the system. On restart, the system will boot up the Snow Leopard installer.
In the Snow Leopard installer, use Disk Utilities from the installer top menu bar to repartition the drive you previously installed iAtkos v7 OSX 10.5.7 on. In my case I called it ‘Leopard’. Partition it the same as you did for 10.5.7 – 1 partition as a GUID partition for the whole drive. I called the new partition ‘Snow Leopard’. After the drive is partitioned, continue with the rest of the Snow Leopard installation. You don’t need to use the ‘Customization’ button – just select the ‘Snow Leopard’ drive you just partitioned and let the installer go. After installation is complete (for me it took about 15 minutes), leave the thumb drive in the USB port and let the system restart.
In the Chameleon boot screen, you will see a hard drive picture with the name of your thumb drive on it and a prompt below telling you to press Enter for options. Press the Enter key before the thermometer goes to zero and then you will see a list of hard drives (those you have installed) which you can boot from. Select the drive you installed Snow Leopard on (for me that is the drive labeled ‘Snow Leopard’) by using the arrow keys and then press Enter to boot from that drive.
STEP 4: Fix Sound in Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard will startup. You won’t have any sound yet, but the network card and the graphics card works fine.
After you get to the Desktop, you need to use the Kext Utility and the audio kext file you downloaded earlier and saved into the thumb drive ‘Utilities’ folder to solve the sound problem.
First, with the Desktop of Snow Leopard in front of you, click the Finder menu on the top menu bar and select preferences. In the window that appears, check on the option to display the hard drives on the desktop. When you do all the hard drives, including those for data and Windows 7 will be shown. The most important however is the Snow Leopard drive. We need it displayed on the Desktop so we can drop folders from the thumb drive onto it.
Open the Utilities folder in the thumb drive and double-click on the Kext Utility disk image. The disk image will mount and the Kext Utility installer window will appear. In the installer window, just drag the Kext Utility icon onto the Utilities folder in the window to install it on your Snow Leopard drive. Now you can close the Kext Utility installer window and eject the disk for it on the Desktop.
Open the /Applications/Utilities folder where the Kext Utility icon is located. Open another new Finder window for the thumb drive Utilities folder. Drag the ALC889.Fix.kext file icon from the thumb drive and drop it on the icon for the Kext Utility in the finder window for /Applications/Utilties. The Kext Utility application window appears and you’ll be prompted to enter your password. The Kext Utility will then install the audio driver into Snow Leopard. This takes about a minute.
When the Kext Utility is finished, open up the Disk Utility application and then click on the Snow Leopard drive (mine is named “Snow Leopard”) in the left sidebar, then click the Repair Disk Permissions button. This will update and correct any file permissions that were wrong in your Snow Leopard installation.
After this is done (you’ll see a message in the Disk Utility window at the bottom of the scroll list output pane), restart the system. Remember to leave the thumb drive in the USB port. The next steps will eliminate the need for the thumb drive and make Snow Leopard auto-boot.
Step 5: Make Snow Leopard Auto-boot
These steps are almost identical with those above for preparing the thumb drive to auto-boot, except that we will use the disk identifiers that correspond to the Snow Leopard hard drive instead.
Open Terminal and type:
diskutil list
This command displays a list of all the disks mounted on your system. For each drive, there are identifiers that uniquely identify the drives on your system to OSX. We need to identifiers for the Snow Leopard drive. The first is the root identifier for the drive (mine is listed as ‘disk0′). The second is the specific identifier for the portion of the thumb drive that contains the Snow Leopard partition. Mine is ‘disk0s2′. The identifiers may be different for your system. Write these two identifiers down because we will need them later in the steps below.
Open Terminal and type:
cd /Volumes/Snowy/Utilities/Chameleon/i386/
sudo fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/r[Snow Leopard drive root identifier]
where [Snow Leopard drive root identifier] is the root identifier of the drive you wrote down earlier. For me it is ‘disk0′. After you press Enter, you may be prompted for your password. Enter the password to complete the command.
Next, in Terminal, type:
sudo dd if=boot1h of=/dev/r[Snow Leopard drive partition identifier]
where [Snow Leopard drive partition identifier] is the identifier for the partition on the drive where Snow Leopard is installed. For me it is ‘disk0s2′.
Next copy the EFI bootloader to the Snow Leopard drive so it will start when booted. To do this, in Terminal, type:
sudo cp /Volumes/Snowy/Utilities/boot /
Notice the space after ‘/Volumes/Snowy/Utilities/boot’ and the last ‘/’. That last slash is the command-line representation of the root folder of your Snow Leopard drive. In other words, this command will copy the boot file from your thumb drive to the root folder of your Snow Leopard hard drive.
Finally, drag and drop the Extra folder from the ‘Utilities’ folder of the thumb drive onto the Snow Leopard drive icon on the Desktop.
That’s it! Now you can eject the thumb drive. The next time you start your system and select the Snow Leopard hard drive from the Chameleon boot menu, Snow Leopard will startup.
Convienently, in addition to Snow Leopard, the drive for my Windows 7 installation is also shown in Chameleon and I can select that to startup under Windows 7.
Because of the way I installed Snow Leopard with the steps above, it is easy and painless to update to 10.6.2 (which is the latest version of Snow Leopard at the time I wrote this). Just choose Software Updates from the Apple menu in Finder and let it update and restart. Now I have the latest OSX and it all works perfectly on my system. What a wonderful feeling!