You’ve probably read my other article here on the Retina blog about building a Hackintosh, and recently I made the fatal mistake of killing my machine by attempting an upgrade of the working Kalyway 10.5.2 installation with Kalyway 10.5.3. It pushed the machine into a horrible state and all attempts at recovery have been lost. 

I made a backup of the existing filesystem (25 minutes for about 70GB) and began an install of iAktos v4. I’m not going to tell you where to find the ISO of the DVD, but I’m sure you know where to look. 

I’d like to add some notes to my previous post, which are mostly lessons learned from this installation.

1) Be smart. Keep the OS, your Applications, and Users partition apart. 

When you install your apps,  they’ll go someplace other than the boot disk, and when your hackintosh installation explodes you’ll be able to recover your files and apps easily (well, mostly… you’ll need backups of Preferences, the Library directories, and the Applications support folders to make them go.) 

2) Understand that making one of these work is a slow, incremental process that takes a fair amount of patience. 

3) Know the rules about the way Mac OS X handles extensions. kexts aren’t loaded until the extensions cache (/System/Library/Extensions.kext) and intermediate cache (/System/Library/Extensions.*) gets removed and rebuilt. removal has to happen prior to reboot. Rebuilding can happen on startup or shutdown, depending if you have a proper restart or not.

Now, Where was I? Right! What happened during the iAktos install?

I couldn’t get keyboard or mouse to work until I’d disabled USB Legacy Storage Support. We’ll need to re-enable this on reboot, post-installation, so that my USB hard disks work.

I ran Disk Utility, erased the partition (which was MBR) and reformatted as GPT. This is the “GUID partition table” option in the advanced section of Disk Utility’s Partition tab. 

I installed SS3 compatible Kernels for my Gigabyte GA-965 and allowed the installation to finish. 

On reboot, I had no network. I fixed it by using the instructions here. It’s a simple edit, removal of kext cache, and reboot.

Next, I had working sound via the Realtek 883 Sound card, but I reinstalled the driver anyway (oops). LINE IN is dead. Oh well. 

So now we’ve got: USB disks, SATA disks, Sound, Network, Dual-head, but limited video (no QE or CI yet.) The fix for QE/CI is in my post here. Basically, you use 10.5.2 drivers on your 10.5.4 install.

I still need to resolve my IDE problems (AppleVIA?) but aside from that, we’re up! Hey, we didn’t need that CD-ROM, right?