Initial Try

I tried with iDeneb 10.5.7 and was met with the same non-booting problem (Silver apple on the screen, no spinning globe) and I went back to xXx 10.5.6 once again, updated it to 10.5.7 and the same thing happened. At this point I was sure I was indeed flogging a dead horse (sorry to all the horse lovers out there) but I am not one to give up anytime soon.

F8 Switches

I did what I never do – I pressed F8, Typed ? and read what it was telling me – what is this I see, if you type voodoo, it loads the Voodoo kernel – get out of here. I type this and there it was , a fresh new 10.5.7 desktop looking at me in the face. Basically then the problem is – it is loading the Vanilla Kernel and this is not going to work on my Athlon, Voodoo will though.

Modding the Kernel

I went in and edit the Boot.plist (/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist) and added a Line in there I thought was the part to type Voodoo for me – but all that happened was no switches / F8 and I was now stuck. I booted into Vista (and got very annoyed at how much disk thrashing occurred – what was it doing??), loaded the Demo of MacDrive to allow me to re-edit that file and reboot, press F8, type Voodoo and be back into OS X.

A Better Loader

I grabbed Chameleon 2 from the web and installed this, the good thing about this is it stops at the loading screen and allows me to type “Voodoo” which is a pain but personally all that works at the moment. I got the sound working (AC97) by using a combination of a few different AC97 files – Seems I put one on, reboot, no sound, put another, sound but later back to no sound and trying only the 2nd does not work – so this AC97 thing is a bit Hit & Miss.

Thoughts

Can anyone take any AMD Machine and make it work? Thats is impossible to say but the AMD64 3700+ supports SSE3 – a whole world apart form the AMD 2800+ which was previous generation for example. The motherboard is a typical NFORCE Model (ASUS A8NE-FM), sound been AC97, Gfx Card been Typical Nvidia, Network is Nforce – so every single one of them is supported in one way or another.

The iDened 1.5.1 (10.5.7) probably did work, had I typed Voodoo at the F8 Prompt and it had newer drivers, just meant less work for me after the install basically. This is not the final resting place for the Hackintosh for this machine, 10.5.8 is out, no doubt i shall try this and again my machine will fail to load, the fun is not trying to get a machine to be a Mac but rather the challenge of making an old AMD into a Mac – it defiantly runs a LOT faster then either Vista for example.

I recently turned my time once again to turning a normal desktop PC into a fully fledged OS X desktop, out of all the machines around me, I choose to turn a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P (AMD 3700+ 64Bit) into a working Mac Desktop.

Specifications

• ASUS A8NE-FM Motherboard
• Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2Ghz)
• 4 x 512MB DDR Ram = 2GIG
• 120 + 80Gig IDE Drive
• GeForce 7600GS (256MB Ram)
• DVD Writer x 2
• RealTek AC97 Sound (on-board)

iDeneb 1.5.1 (10.5.7)

I wanted to aim for the latest, so I grabbed iDened 1.5 and patched it up to 1.5.1 via PPF which in turn would run the latest – been 10.5.7 at this time. When I got to the Disk Utility, I had wiped and partitioned the 80Gig Drive which as it turned out was the Slave or D Drive – this also meant that Vista was still on the machine and running nicely. I ticked all boxes and went for it (silly of me) rebooted, Pressed F8 to get the boot menu up and selected Slave HD to boot from – this failed.

I went through the process for the 2nd time, I selected what I thought would work, been a NFORCE Chipset etc but I was met with a spinning icon and upon checking, it was the “waiting for root device”. I had two more goes with many different options which fitted the hardware I had and I never got to the point of a desktop, I was almost going to give up here, I had a working Vista but I had an idea.

xXx 10.5.6

Another disto I had already downloaded was one called xXx 10.5.6 Final – would this work? Would it upgrade? I Installed this ticking the known hardware I had such as NVrush for the graphics card, nForce for the network and I thought I had picked the right sound with AC97. Once finished, I rebooted and up came the starting animation. I checked what had worked and basically we had the graphics with QE etc plus the proper resolution, the network card worked but no sound.

10.5.7 

I did not want to waste time installing software and drivers only to install the update and it fail, so I had the iDeneb 10.5.7 update already downloaded, I installed it, rebooted and had the same issue as the iDeneb above – zero boot.  choose not to worry too much about this update, it was not really important enough.

Working

I re-installed the OS again, did all the updates bar the 10.5.7 one and it worked. I finally found a sound driver (just labelled AC97) which after a reboot, the sound worked. I checked and had the sound plus also the MIC input etc – brilliant. I had also grabbed the missing ALEX Voice (I used to copy this from a real Mac) and installed iLife 09. Needless to say it all works as far as I can tell – if I need to boot Vista, I just switch it on, if I need OS X, I have to remember to press F8 to select the right device.

Thoughts & Conclusion

It was shown here that even after 5 attempts of picking the right hardware on the install, the iDeneb Failed on me whilst he xXx 10.5.6 version worked first time. My Suggestion if you wanted to attempt such things is make sure you know what the hardware is, right down to the model number and have a few different distributions on hand. Not all hardware will work, the top two been Dual Core cpu seem to fail it a lot and Intel Wireless.