I really have no love for Windows 10, but I use it for Steam and a few games. For a long long time people did not buy Apple computers because there were no games for them. Now I find there are more games than I can possibly want but there is no Apple computer I want to buy to play games on:
- MacBook Air: I have this one – it gets warm and noisy with games
- MacMini: underpowered for games, and so little value, especially if you want more RAM
- Mac Pro: its perfect, just very much too expensive to replace a Windows 10 machine
- iMac: I already have a display and KVM connected to a Linux computer, and I dont believe in throwing away the display because a hard drive breaks.
So I sound like my friends did 10-15 years ago: Macs are too expensive to play games!
But then there is Hackintosh: an ordinary PC running OS X.
There is even a Buyer’s guide, and something like this would suit me well.
I decided to try to turn my current Windows 10 PC into a Hackintosh and followed the instructions.
It was a gamble all the time:
- My ASUS P8H67-M mainboard: some people seem to have had success with it, but it is not exactly a first choice.
- My Radeon HD 6950 graphics card is not a good Hackintosh card at all. If I remove it I can fall back to the Intel HD 2000 that is integrated in the i5 CPU (or on the mainboard – I dont know). That is also not a good Hackintosh GPU.
Anyway, I disconnected my Windows hard drives and connected a 60GB SSD to install OS X. And for a while it was good. Some BIOS (UEFI) tweaking, and I
- got the installer running
- installed OS X
- started my new OS X (from the install USB-key, since bootloader was yet to be installed)
- played around in OS X, bragging about my feat
Audio was not working, and Video performance sucked, but ethernet worked and it was very useable.
I went on trying to install the bootloader and some drivers (using MultiBeast, following the instruction). This is where all my luck ended. MultiBeast reported that it failed.
I never managed to start OS X again. Not the installed system. Not the install USB-key. I tried:
- Removing all hard drives
- Reset BIOS/UEFI settings, and try many combinations
- Recreate the USB-key
- Remove my Radeon 6950 and fallback to Intel HD 2000
- Remove files from the USB-key that contains “kernel cache” and things like that
- Different boot options from Clover – both the standard menu and non standard options that I found in forums
- Create a UEFI-USB-key instead of a Legacy-USB-key
No success at all. I basically got this error.
In order to get things working in the first place I changed a few BIOS/UEFI settings:
- SATA mode: IDE => AHCI
- Serial: Disable
(I found no other relevant settings on my mainboard).
After changing IDE => AHCI Windows did not boot. That was an expected and common problem, and I fixed it following some simple steps (forcing safe boot). It was after that OS X never started again. I wonder if something happened to my mainboard/UEFI there, that Windows did, that I can not control/undo?
Update 2016-05-18
I found this post to follow. Much better now. I write this post from my Hackintosh.
In order to eliminate all possible old problems i deleted the 10Mb of the USB-key and hard drive using linux and
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 count=10240
Obviously replace sdX with your drive.
About my “working” configuration:
legacy: USB-key is legacy. Clover is installed in Legacy-Root-mode.
MultiBeast: During installation, Step 5 (MultiBeast) fails, and I had to resort to Step 6.
safe mode: my startup arguments are:
dart=0 kext-dev-mode=1 PCIRootUID=0 UseKernelCache=NO -x
I have twice rendered my system unbootable but fixed it with multiple restarts. I think it is the CustoMac Essentials that install some kexts that are are not ok.
Audio is supposed to be ACL892 but it does not work. Probably because CustoMac Essentials fail.
Dual Boot with Windows does not work. This was expected. Clover fails to start Windows (although, there is some limited success, but Windows does not make it all the way).
Clover Configurator: what was not so obvious was the config.plist. It finds 3 different ones on my system. The one that seems to be in use is /EFI/CLOVER/config.plist – so that is the one to edit. But you need to save your changed configuration to a new file, and the copy using the command line and sudo.
Ideas
Well, I have some ideas how to get to a better situation.
- Install everything NOT in Legacy mode but use UEFI-stuff all the way. Perhaps that just fixes stuff. Or not. I anyway need to get into my UEFI/BIOS to change to booting Windows.
- Changing graphics adapter: it could be the reason I have to be in safe mode. And the safe mode could be the reason audio does not work. And so on
Update
I tried removing my Radeon 6950 falling back to HD2000. That did not work. I could neither boot from my hard drive nor the install USB-Key. Putting the Radeon back in the computer did not work at first. But after several reboots (also with the USB key) OS X now starts up again (in safe mode).
I tried everything from the beginning with HD 2000: erase drives, disconnect windows drives, upgrade BIOS, reset BIOS, create new USB key (both Legacy and UEFI): never did I manage to boot the installer using HD 2000. So the ill-supported Radeon 6950 (which possibly restricts me from going beyond Safe Mode) works better than the integrated HD 2000.
I do understand the advantage with a “supported” mainboard that has all the recommended UEFI/BIOS settings.
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