Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Virtual Hackintosh


like so many people who desire to own a MacBook, but can't afford one at the moment, i decided to attempt a Hackintosh virtual machine with Mac OS via VirtualBox on my HP Pavilion G6 (AMD) laptop.  so i did some research to find out what it takes to do the install.  i figured it would be a lot less complicated and cheaper, because i would be running it as a virtual machine.  this means not having to deal with buying parts, and putting together another physical machine.  i found many web sites that dealt with the subject, and followed along hoping it was as simple as they made it sound.

the first thing i needed was an EFI boot loader.   having an AMD cpu i downloaded the EmpireEFI4AMD (E4A).

the second thing i needed was to rip my retail copy of Mac OS 10.6 install disc as an ISO file.

already having VirtualBox (v4.1.16...) installed on my laptop, the third thing was to create a virtual machine with all the necessary settings.

the way this works is simply to first boot using the E4A ISO file.  after the boot-up a splash screen appears with the image of the Dark Sith Lord himself.  instructions are then giving to remove the E4A ISO, replace it with the Mac OS Install ISO, and hit the F5 key.

what’s suppose to happen next is the Mac OS install option appears, but here is where it gets frustrating. after switching the ISO files, and hitting the F5 key it looks like something is happening, but after a while - i waited for almost 30 minutes once - i begin to think that maybe nothing is happening.

i don’t know how many times i’ve repeated this INSANE process, but with no progress made.  each time i thought i was doing it wrong, but whenever i refer to the various pages on the web to figure this out, the instructions were very clear. i found many solution by others to address this failure to run the install - believe me, i tried so many of them - but i just got more frustrated.

i almost gave up until i tried an ancient method courtesy of the Sony Playstation: CD swapping. for those of you who’ve ever owned the first generation Playstation console, many of you learned about how you can play foreign game on domestic Playstation system simply by applying the CD swapping technique. for those readers who may not understand this, you use a domestic CD-Rom game to initially boot the Playstation.  at the moment just before the game actually starts, you swap the domestic CD game for the foreign one.  if done right you were able to successfully play foreign games without hardware-hacking your Playstation.

to apply this technique to what i was trying to accomplish i switched the ISO files (from the E4A to the Mac OS install) at various points of the E4A boot-up.  i found that if i switched the ISO’s just before the splash screen of Vader appears, i was able to see the Mac OS install run automatically.  from there i was able to follow the rest of the instructions to load the updates and so on.  however i've ran into some other problems.  but that's for another time.

if you try this yourself, you may find it takes some practice to get it right. hopefully with the following images i've supplied you'll get lucky on the first try, or tenth.





i don’t know if this is an issue with VirtualBox running on an AMD cpu, or if this situation is completely unique only to me, but there it is.  if anyone out there is having the same issue, give this a shot. perhaps it’ll work for you too.


enjoy Hackintosh’ing,
@riel





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thansk buddy