Running Mac OS X on standard PCs

Kai Schmerer ZDNet Germany

Published: 14 May 2008

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Go to section: Introduction Motherboard, CPU & chipset Network, sound and graphics cards Installing Leopard on a standard PC Tips and tricks Performance Conclusion

Tips and tricks

As already mentioned, you may encounter difficulties either during setup or installation. For example, if the system hangs shortly after the start of the setup DVD, or if an error message appears, the following switches for the Darwin bootloader can be helpful: - f, - x, -v, -legacy. Also, switching off one of a dual-core processor's cores in the BIOS can be helpful.

After installation, a flashing cursor can appear on-screen, followed by nothing much at all. In this case, the partition was probably not marked as active, which prevents startup. You can retrieve this situation manually by starting again from DVD, calling up the Terminal program and entering the following instructions:

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (If a hard disk is in the system)
p (Show partitions)
f 2 (Make partition 1 active (GUID), for MBR enter 1 here instead of 2)
w
y
exit

Post-installation problems: orange disk icons
In many cases, the Leopard hard drive is identified as a removable device — especially if the disk controller is an Intel ICH9 in AHCI mode. Accordingly, the disk's icon is orange instead of grey. That not only looks bad, but can also cause problems with access rights. This can be resolved by replacing two kernel extensions ('kexts'). The Kext Helper tool, which is often installed by the modified image, lets you easily install the AppleAHCIPort.kext and IOAHCIFamily.kext in /System/ Library/Extensions without being in Terminal with super-user rights (sudo -s).

'About this Mac'
Apple has no conventional desktop processors in its systems (the Mac mini, iMac and notebooks use Intel's mobile processors, while the Mac Pro is equipped with server CPUs), which means that Mac OS usually misrecognises standard PC processors. In the 'About this Mac' info box, it simply says 'Unknown Processor'. The memory complement is also often not properly recognised, while the CPU functions supported by Leopard no longer appear.

To correctly display processor and memory information, you need to edit the AboutThisMac.strings file. To do this, go to /System/Library/Core Services/loginwindow.app, right-click on the program and select Show Package Contents. Then open another Finder window and navigate to the /Contents /Resources/German.lproj folder. Here you should find the AboutThisMac.strings file, which you can copy to the desktop and open with TextEdit. Scroll down to the line "ABOUT_BOX_MULTIPLE_PROCESSOR_FIELD_FORMAT" and, after the equals sign, replace the two operands "% @" with the correct CPU string — for example, "Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU X9650". For a single-processor system, do the same for the "ABOUT_BOX_SINGLE_PROCESSOR_FIELD_FORMAT" line, and enter the correct memory information at "ABOUT_BOX_MEMORY_FIELD_FORMAT". Then save the file and replace the original with the modified version.

With a little judicious editing, you can get Mac OS X to display CPU and memory information correctly.

Assistance, drivers and instructions for installing Mac OS X on standard PCs are available on the internet. The most comprehensive forum is insanelymac.com; there are also useful tips and tricks at osx86scene.com and hackint0sh.org.

 

 

Go to section: Introduction Motherboard, CPU & chipset Network, sound and graphics cards Installing Leopard on a standard PC Tips and tricks Performance Conclusion

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