It is quite hard to turn your average PC into something that runs Mac OS X and normally requires you have the right motherboard and other parts to make it even get to the install stage. What if you could make a USB stick that boots a safe version of OS X (no graphic or sound drivers) and generally works without wiping your present drives – great right? I shall document what I have done so far and what the outcome was in regards this amazing program – iPortable.

What is it?

The first thing you need to do is get your hands on it – if you search for iPortable, you should find a torrent – now you need a few things to get this to even work. The first thing you need is at least an 8 GIG memory stick, I have also used in the past a USB External Hard drive but that will be slower (and its not that quick as it is). The other requirement is some sort of working Mac, be it a real one, a Hackintosh or a Virtual machine. As it happens I had my Athlon machine running 10.5.8 with the slight annoyance that you must have the USB already plugged in for the machine to even see it.

Making the Bootable Stick

The guide (included) explains how you mount the file on the mac, format the memory stick and then use included CloneTools to write the image onto the memory stick. I had to use the boot fixer before my computer would allow this device to boot. Once this process is over, you now have a memory stick that as long as your computer can handle booting from USB sticks (Mine showed up as blank in the list which fooled me for a while) – you can boot into Mac OS X 10.6.2.

A Working Mac – just slowly

It takes a LONG time for the USB to boot and eventually get into OS X, just be patient at this part. Of course you do not want to be booking and running from USB for a main OS, this is now the process to get a harddrive ready for the same image. I used the same process as making the USB but instead picked the 250GIG harddrive I had as slave, this meant that when I started the computer I either had Windows 7 or if I pressed F8 and choose the secondary drive – OS X 10.6

Getting the parts working

As with any Hackintosh, getting the right files to make the things work is a fine art, I had a Creative Labs sound card fitted and a ATI 3650 Graphics card. The sound worked fine, I searched the forums and found the correct driver, ran it and rebooted and we had sound. Graphics was a different story though, I picked I think the wrong one and while the machine was working, I was stuck with a blue screen (the mouse moved though).

Worse then any of the above though, evn though the Hard drive was 250GIG, as far as the OS was concerned, it only had 64meg free. It was at this stage I had to so some googling to get the answer I needed. When I was booting from the memory stick, it picked the first Mac OS it had found and in this case was on the HD. I had to tell it at the boot prompt rd=disk2s1 and now we were from the memory stick. The reason for this – to run the hard drive repair tools on a drive that is not in use.

In Diskwarrior (Supplied) so far it has found 1929 Overlapping files and is still going. I am hoping by the end of this process I have the full free disk space otherwise its pointless.

Is it worth the effort?

I do this as something to do, If I wanted a mac that badly I would just go and buy one. It is good to see people faces when I boot a work computer with Mac OS X even if it is slow from USB. It is safe as you can try it out and it gives you a bootable OS for another Hackintosh should you need to sort it out.

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I bought this little Netbook some time back now, it was an impulse buy and the goal was to have a small netbook to take around various sites to SSH into Server and for this it worked great. It came with 512MB ram (cheapest one with a proper HD) and I have installed Ubuntu, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 through it’s life. I thought I would give it a go at OSX – why not right?

Upgrading the RAM

Now the first thing I had to do of course was upgrade that RAM and I must point out you have to rip this thing apart just to get at the RAM, that’s a pretty bad design by any stretch and the board contained 512MB soldered on, so with only one slot, you can only get up to a max of 1.5GIG – pretty Lame. Had I know this info at the time, I would have stumped the extra cache and bought the 1GIG model. Anyhow, I installed 1GIG DDR2 Ram and this bumped it up to 1.5Gigs which helped the speed a great deal.

Installing OSX

I first tried iDeneb 1.5.1 which is a 10.5.7 distro, I had a problem with the keyboard in that 7’s would repeat and this made it impossible to type in a password or anything for that matter. I moved onto a Guide posted HERE which explains how to do this via iPC 10.5.6 distro and everything went well following that UNTIL I updated via the iDeneb 10.5.7 update and this meant I had to type “cpus=1” every single time, I could have easy fixed this but the next part killed it dead – I chucked in various Kext’s and was met with a white screen and a dead system in fact – moral here is do not go wild and chuck in any old kext or you will kill the system.

iDeneb 10.5.7 (1.5.1)

I was back to this again and worked out that I had to select the PS2 fix which made no sense but it helped and now the keyboard worked as well as the trackpad. I had a working 10.5.7 system at this point minus the wireless and it is known the wireless in the Acer One not to work fully, some have had a little success but mostly it is prone to failure. I tried the various fixes as listed and at one point had the wireless showing up but not connecting and upon reboot was met with a kernel panic.

Dell Wireless Card

With the Dell Desktop, I got a Dell 1505 Wireless N Card which came fitted into a PCI holder – now I had no need for this on my desktop (I connect via gigabit wired) but it would work a treat on the netbook. I ripped it apart once again (getting good at this now) and replaced the wireless and rebooted. Low and behold not only did the wireless light come on (which is new to me) but OS X Booted up. I checked and there was wireless symbol, it showed me all the wireless and I connected. We now had a fully functional Mac NetBook – something Apple has failed to provide as of yet.

Update to 10.5.8

I simply went to software update and updated – problem was, although the machine worked, the graphics were now 800×600 and no Quartz. After searching and finding various fixes, I found the 10.5.7 one and now had 1024×600 with Quartz, there was some slight graphical glitches but mostly it worked.

Working or not?

The end result is a Netbook Powered by an Atom 1.6Ghz with 1.5 GIG ram and Wireless N Networking running OS X 10.5.8 fully updated. It seem’s quite nippy and apart from the small screen size, can do everything a normal apple laptop could. Reason mainly for OSX was speed and just to see if it can be done.  

I am still getting people asking me in various places and mainly in chat on the Tech Buzz about everything to do with making a Hackintosh with whatever hardware they have around with such as will there wireless work (yet do not know the make or model), sound or even how to get the files in the first place.

The first thing to mention is that your going to need to “Torrent” The files, this can take a while to find and a lot longer to download, it is after all a complete DVD we are downloading. Next your going to need a DVD Writer to write the resulting ISO file to a blank DVD, you would be amazed at how many failed to see they would need such a thing with questions such as “Can I not use a CD instead” – well doh.

I always suggest that you have a system which you can wipe as once the installer gets going, it is going to wipe that hard drive, it is easy to place a spare HD in that laptop and save having to wipe the OS on there for example. If it gets to the installer, this is a good start, if the machine is not going to work, it will not even get this far and you would have lost nothing at this stage. If it foes get to the installer screen, you have to make sure you know what hardware you have, boot into windows and make a note of soundcard, video card etc.

Lastly – my advice is just suck it and see – what is there to loose? Try it and if it fails, start again – yes it takes ages but we are after all getting OS X Machine for Free. A Point to remember is that unless Apple used the hardware in one of there machines at some point, then it won’t work as nobody actually writes any drivers as such but just modifies what is already around.

You can use two web sites to look things up yourself, after all this is what I do, I did not invent OSX86 or try it on every Laptop/Desktop – I just got it working across a very wide range of machines with a of trial and error.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

(This is the Wiki – has a lot of info)

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php

(This is the forum – ask there).

To recap – I have One real Mac (an iMac 24″, 2.8Ghz and so forth) and 2 machines which were loaded up as a Hackintosh. I shall go over them both (hackintosh) and see what use they were in real life, updating them and so forth.

The Toshiba Laptop was dual boot if we recall and to be honest never used it at all in any form. As the Mac was the default on boot up, any reboots the OS might make have to be watched if I wanted to go to Windows for example and remember half the stuff never worked on the Apple anyhow. I have chosen to wipe this machine for the last time and start again with something I know is going to work – this been Windows XP. XP Might be a shocking choice to some, what about Linux or stay with OS X – well gang, Windows just works and I can do what I need to do – no worrying about drivers and so forth.

Not sure about the Dell GX620 machine to be honest – this is still OS X 10.5.3, do I keep this Apple or swap this to Linux for example? Both work out of the box on this machine – stay tuned as they say.

To recap: I had managed to Get OS X on here before and there was a lot of stuff that never worked (such as Wireless, PCMCIA, Sound Inputs and so forth) and I reverted it back to Windows as I knew everything worked when in that mode. Recently I had a think about this and went for Plan B. I had already used the Toshiba DVD to restore the machine to XP (I choose this over Vista for now) and updated to death – at this point I have not put anything else on there. I grabbed Partition magic 8.05 and split the drive into 2 Halves – leaving Xp with its 80 GIG to play with and an Unformatted 72 GIG Primary Partition.

I had to disable in the Bios Dual core and this allowed the Kalyway 10.5.2 to Boot otherwise it crashed and burned. Once I had selected everything I needed, it rebooted and I had a Blue Screen but I could hear the Start up music. I had to connect a 2nd Monitor at this stage to continue setting it up. I put on the 10.5.3 Update plus the 9.3 modbin Kernels and rebooted. I already had ready the Intel GMA950 Fix which not only sorts out the resolution (to allow more then 1024×768) but makes the screen on the laptop come on without needing a second screen.

Finally – went through putting on iLife, Office 2008 and various other programs and made it into a workable Mac Laptop. I went into the BIOS and switched back on Dual CPU and the Machine Booted fine. What we ended off with was as follows:

* Windows XP Pro with SP3 with everything on the Laptop Working such as Card Reader, Wireless and Sound.
* Leopard 10.5.3 Fully working at 1280×800 (native res of screen) with all Update son there.
* Wireless Does not work in Leopard but I am not bothered about this.
* Sound works but no Line in (MIC) – Can use a WebCam Mic for this.
* PCMCIA does not work (I think)

This now Allows me to have the best of Both worlds, when I need the entire Hardware such as Wireless etc – then I can crank up XP and use that – I can boot the Apple mode when I need to do anything else.

Toshiba Satellite Pro A120
I was happy with this working but I was also not happy that wireless, no Audio Input, PCMCIA not working or the memory slot failing to pick anything up was a problem to me. I tried with all sorts of driver to get various things working and ended of with a non-working wired port now – so at this point I stopped and put the base XP Image back on. This machine was more of a Challenge them a goal to get it OS X but maybe later when the driver get better – i might revisit this.

Work machine (Lenevo)
I tried it n this machine just to see if the DVD actually worked, I got OS X on there no problems out almost straight away I had no Video Drivers and no Sound – not sure about the network. The Gfx card was an ATI X300 and never found anything to make that work – display just went off after a reboot. The in built worked until I put on the fix for better resolution and I got “Out of Sync” – I re-ghosted it back to Windows at this point as it was just a test anyhow.

Athlon 64 3700
My most recent machine was an Athlon – I had no faith in this running and the first go worked but could not shutdown, reboot or Sleep. I found a guide online and once following this – the machine worked as it should, sleep, reboot and everything else. Busy going through putting on various Apps – its not a bad speed machine and everything so far works.

I had struggled long and hard with the the Toshiba A120 Laptop, the specs read as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz
Chipset Intel 945GM Express
15.4″ TFT Screen running @ 1280×800
Graphic Controller Intel 945GM Express
1 GIG DDR-2 Ram
Intel Pro 1000 Wired Network Card
Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG
Realtek HD Audio
160GIG SATA-2 Drive

Upon initially trying both the Kalyway (Stop error on Screen) and Leo4All V3 (Kernel Panic on APIC) – I set about searching for answers to see if this was even possible to put OS X on there and every single post I found said the same thing – seems it was never to be. I am not one for giving up though and I had a brain wave, what if the BIOS needed updating? My BIOS was at version 1.50 and the latest was 3.40 – quite a bit out then. My next problem is the BIOS Updater was a Windows Program and I had not got windows installed, only Ubuntu. I put in the recovery DVD and left it going overnight. Next morning I Updated the BIOS, stuck in a Leo4All DVD and selected what I needed to Install, I had already wrote down from Windows what Hardware I had in there. I left the machine Installing and I went off to Work – would it work when I got back? Would it be stuck on the Installer or would I be Sitting looking at OS X??

The Laptop was on but nothing on Screen – it had tried to Powersave of course but fails on a Hackintos. I hard Booted the machine and soon it came up to a OS X Desktop – brilliant. Now we go on to check what works and what does not.

Graphics:
The Screen was running at 1280×800 with QE (Quartz Extreme) and CI (Core Image).

Sound:
I had sound working – though plugging in a Headset – the sound still came out of the Speakers.

Networking:
The Wired Connection worked just fine at full 1 Gigabit speed.
The Wireless did not work at all (not even showing up) and it seems the drivers are not ready yet – so no Wireless unless I plug in a USB One I have spare, I am not all that Bothered as of now though.

Sleep does not work as it should so I switched it off on the power saving options, would have been nice for it to work but I can live without this feature for now. All in all I am very happy – I have my very Own Mac Book (of sorts) and can now use OS X anywhere as I choose.

Windows and Linux were built to take into account the various PC Hardware out there, so shove in a CD/DVD and it boots, installs and works – drivers you can add later and so forth. Now on a real Mac – no matter how expensive you all think they are – you stick in the DVD and it just installs – of course it does and anyone can do it.

Now a lot of people I have spoken to and people posting on my Blog comments / Youtube are stuck and they expect some magic way to make any old PC that they own (be it desktop or Laptop) to stick in a Kalyway / Leo4All etc DVD in there and for it to Install and work first time. The shocking truth is that it probably won’t as proven by me on a whole range of machine’s at work.

The Sticking points are as follows (the one’s have come across):

1. Kernel Panic upon loading DVD – you can try -x -v cpus=1 and it MIGHT work but on the whole – if it sticks at this point – go search the web.

2. It Installs and rebooting is met with Errors or Blue Screen or whatever – Once again you have to do you research.

3. Sound / graphics / Network etc does not work – A bit of research might get the driver required (Kext’s).

The Bottom Line.
By all means download a Kalyway / Leo4All DVD and write it at 2x Speed, have a spare HD fitted in case it all goes wrong or at the very least a Ghost Image so you can get you system back to working if it fails. If the Installer does not boot and you get a Kernel Panic – you have lost nothing (as you have no formatted the HD yet). My advice is rather simple”

OSX86 WIKI

This might have your machine listed or the hardware used – do you research before you start and KNOW what hardware you have such as what Motherboard, Graphics Card, Sound and Networking. The other place to check is:

Insanely Mac

Search, Google and ask about – even with a system that worked the first time around, further tries might be met with a failure – try and try again. If you are serious about Using OS X – I suggest you buy a real one and make life easier.