Posts Tagged ‘boot-132’

For you my faithful readers, here’s part 3 of my Nerdy Renaissance series.

So we left the media center Hackintosh quasi-functional. It worked, but to say it was held together with duct-tape would be an insult to duct-tape. The biggest problem was the ridiculous hoops I had to jump through to get my Intel DG-33FB motherboard to boot. The solution? Buy a new board. I picked up an ECS 945-GCT for $35 at Fry’s and tossed it in. One reinstall later and it’s working smoothly. The fellows (and fellowesses) at InsanelyMac’s forum were invaluable.

I also picked up an Antec Fusion V2 media center case since the previous case left a certain something to be desired. When I’ve got more time I’m going to work on getting the iMon driver going for the integrated status screen.

If you have the ECS 945-GCT, your search for help begins and ends here.

It is not possible to create a $100 Hackintosh (a retail copy of OS X Leopard is $129 all by itself without any hardware). But if you’ve already got a copy of Leopard or can scrimp one cheap on eBay, here’s the absolute cheapest hardware you can scrimp a functional Hackintosh onto.

• Intel open box BOXD945GCLF Atom + Mini-ITX motherboard combo: $44 (goes in and out of stock)
• 1 GB of generic DDR2 5300 memory: $12
• Mini-ITX power supply: $20 on eBay
• Western Digital WD800AAJS 80 GB hard drive: $33
• SATA DVD drive: borrow from neighbor’s computer for OS X installation and then return
• Build Mini-ITX case out of LEGOs/lunchbox/other novelty item: free
• Keyboard and mouse you already have: free
• Monitor you already have: free

Total cost for dirt cheap Hackintosh hardware: $109* Close enough to $100 for government work!

* Notice I intentionally didn’t include tax or shipping here. Expect an extra $20-30 depending on where you live.
** If you’d like to include a DVD drive with your final build, plan on an extra $17 (cheapest I could find).
*** I’ve included 1 GB of RAM, but OS X really needs 2. Plan on spending an extra $7 here if you need any real performance

So here’s the end of the Media Center Hackintosh saga: I failed. Sort of. But it’s working well enough for what I need it to do.

So after my last attempts to get this board working with OS X failed, I got in touch with a couple folks who had posted in the InsanelyMac forum that they are using the Intel DG33FB board with Boot-132. Everything was working well for them using several fairly generic Boot-132 disk images. But nothing worked with my particular board.

As a last ditch effort I installed OS X using another motherboard, applied the appropriate drivers/patches and attached that to the DG33FB. Still wouldn’t boot. On a lark, I updated the BIOS to the latest version (should have done that as step #1 of this project). And then it worked; well, sort of.

As near as I can tell, my particular DG33FB BIOS won’t boot OS X. But if I leave the BIOS update CD in the drive (and don’t type anything when prompted), the Isolinux distribution that Intel put together will time out waiting for input and then hand off the boot process to the first hard drive. Which has OS X installed. Which lets the system boot!

It’s an ugly work-around since I have to keep the Isolinux BIOS flash CD in the drive on boot, but it’s enough to get the system up and going. And once the system is booted, everything works great. The gigabit ethernet works with the drivers posted here. Audio was patched using the Taruga AppleHDA audio patcher with the ALC888a(?) codec.

It’s now hooked up to the TV running the eyeTV Hybrid product, essentially turning this pile of parts into a basic TiVo clone.

The first step was to determine whether the hardware I had assembled had any hope of working. A quick search found several success stories for my Intel DG-33FB motherboard on the InsanelyMac forum. Several folks helpfully provided links to drivers for the DG-33FB, but nobody had a pre-made Boot-132 image ready. This thread at InsanelyMac is attempting to collect pre-built Boot-132 images from the community and is a great place to start.

I tried using the Boot-132 disk I already had from getting my GA-EP35-DS3L motherboard going, but that immediately failed. Realized that Boot-132 (at least on my board, perhaps always?) requires a SATA DVD drive and swapped out my IDE drive. I made sure to switch the SATA controllers to AHCI mode instead of IDE emulation, but still nothing. Tried several other Boot-132 images (the “Generic” one as well as the “Kabyl Bumby” one). Still no dice.

After digging through the docs for making a customized Boot-132 image for my motherboard, I happened across the SlimbuildGUI tool by PCwiz which promised to make the whole effort painless.

I gathered the drivers I knew would be necessary and built a customized Boot-132 disc. No luck there, the boot screen just won’t recognize the retail OS X Leopard DVD. After selecting the default boot device I’m immediately kicked back to the first screen. Not reading about anyone else having the exact same problem.

Next thought: the DB33FB is an Intel standard “reference board;” other OEMs use the same northbridge and southbridges in their boards. Perhaps someone else has come up with a boot-132 image for a comparable board using the same chipsets. Some quick searching identified that the Shuttle SG33G5, Intel DG33BU, and Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2L boards all use the same chipset. Then I hit the mother lode: a list of motherboards using the same chipset combination.

Next steps: scour the webs for anyone successfully using one of the equivalent boards.

Useful links I’ve gathered:

• Discussion of enabling IDE on DG33FB
• Discussion of enabling ethernet on DG33FB

Time for Hackintosh attempt #2: the media center Hackintosh. This time instead of following an existing hardware recipe, I’m striking off on my own and will be attempting to use the Intel DG-33FB motherboard. My goal is to get this going via the Boot-132 method and when this is done have a bootable Boot-132 image that other folks can take advantage of, a “drivers pack” that can be installed via PCwiz’s excellent toolkit, and a howto document for others that want to go this route.

Here’s my hardware setup:

• Motherboard: Intel DG-33FB
• Processor: Intel Celeron E1200 (dual core 1.6 GHz)
• Video Card: EVGA 7200 GS (Turbo Cache)
• Hard drive: Western Digital 250 GB SATA
• RAM: Crucial Ballistix

The Intel DG-33FB motherboard is a fairly “vanilla” board using Intel’s G33 Express north bridge, ICH9DH south bridge, a solid array of ports (including FireWire), and uses the almost modern LGA-775 socket. From what I’ve read online, other users are having success running with “customized” OSX86 installations, but I’d like to avoid blatant copyright infringement and use the Boot-132 method instead.

The Celeron E1200 is a $50 dual-core Core 2 Duo minus the L2 cache. It’s hard to recommend this now that the Pentium E5200 is $10 more expensive, but it’s what I’ve got on hand so it’s what I’m going to use.

The EVGA 7200 GS is the cheapest PCI-E video card I could find that supports hardware accelerated Quartz Extreme. It’s gutless for games, but it should do just fine driving a 1080p high-def TV.

The rest of the bits are bog-standard.

So I went back and rebuilt the Hackintosh from scratch. Again. Seriously, it’s fun! This time I used Weaksauce12′s excellent GA-EP35-DS3L Boot-132 kit which makes the whole process as easy as pie. Basically his guide boils down to:

1. Set up your BIOS to match the guide
2. Burn a Boot CD from the ISO he’s provided
3. Install OS X Leopard from your retail DVD
4. Install the Chameleon bootloader (included in the kit)
5. Install the drivers he has provided for the GA-EP35-DS3L
6. Follow his eight click OSX86Tools video and network setup
7. Install Apple’s usual software updates as necessary
8. There is no step 8

So as far as complexity goes, we’re basically comparable to reinstalling Windows or Linux from scratch. Total time from start to finish is about 3 hours.

At the end of the day, the advantage for me was a Hackintosh with perfectly functioning sleep support and a process that is easily reproducible.

And Weaksauce12 is promising that he’s got an update coming to make it even easier!

I’m a fan of Mac OS X. It’s a “real” UNIX ™ with all of the underlying technical goodness that brings, with a candy-coated GUI and support for the critical commercial software I need (i.e. Photoshop). But at the moment I have something of a love-hate relationship with Mac OS X’s parent: Apple. With one hand Apple provideth: shiney toys, open-source projects, compelling software, and industry-driving innovation. With the other fist it pioneers DRM, vendor lock-in, and artificially crippled product lines to enforce profit points.

So when it was time for a system to edit video from my new HD cam, I was torn. On the one hand, I really wanted a tower system I could use for Apple’s iMovie HD (my MacBook cries on HD video). But on the other hand, Apple doesn’t make the Mac I want. I need expansion so the iMac is out (plus I’ve already got a great LCD, thanks). The Mac Pro has expansion out the ears, but is so ridiculously over spec’d that it brings a ridiculous price tag (the Mac Pro uses only premium parts).

Enter the Hackintosh. For the last couple years, Macs have been built using the same commodity parts as any other PC. This allows for some interesting tricks like running Windows natively on a Mac. It also allows for enterprising nerds to work the other direction: installing Mac OS X on regular PCs. Mac OS X’s End User License Agreement specifically prohibits this, but the legality of this restriction is untested. I bought a retail copy of Mac OS X: whether I install this on my Mac, PC or toaster is nobody’s business but mine. Obligatory car analogy: once I buy a Chevy, I can do anything I want with it including replacing every last part with Toyota parts.

So over the past couple months I did some part shuffling and built myself a dual-core, reasonably spec’d PC that runs Mac OS X on commodity PC hardware. After some significant research and effort it runs as well as my “real” Macs and provides speed and expandability at a moderate price tag. The process has gotten much easier recently, but it is still a “nerds only” project; I would not recommend this to anyone who isn’t comfortable dealing with kernel panics, driver conflicts, and reinstalling your OS (literally) dozens of times.

The shopping list:

• Gigabyte EP35-DS3L motherboard ($65 on sale at NewEgg)
• Intel Celeron E1200 ($49 at NewEgg)
• nVidia GeForce 8800 GT video card (under $100, already had)
• 2 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 memory ($25ish, already had)
• Western Digital 250 GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drive ($60ish, already had)
• Lite-On SATA DVD burner ($25 at NewEgg)
• Antec Earthwatts 380 watt power supply ($60 at NewEgg, already had)
• Antec case ($45ish, already had)

I picked the EP35-DS3L because OS X supports it very well and it provides a ton of tweaking options. The Celeron E1200 is a cache-neutered Core 2 duo that I originally picked up as a cheap “place-holder” until the quad core monsters drop in price. After using it for several weeks I’ve completely fallen in love with how well it overclocks; for $50 it’s a steal. The GeForce 8800 GT is pretty much the fastest video card supported by OS X and allows me to dual-boot into Windows to play games. At less than $100 it’s a ridiculous deal (it went for $300 less than a year ago!) I’ve always been impressed with Lite-On burners so this was an easy choice. It’s cheap and rock solid. Total cash outlay if I were to build this from scratch would be about $400ish.

Installation was a chore. I researched and tried a number of different methods. For any newbies wanting to start this project, I’d recommend going directly to the Boot-132 method. If you’ve got money to burn, take a look at the eFIX dongle that takes the sting out of the process. The new INSTAHackintosh project looks very promising, but I haven’t played with it yet.

After getting things up and going, some subsequent tweaking was necessary to find the perfect driver combination for my hardware. Fortunately, legendary Macinhacker “PCWiz” has put together a software package to make this easy. For help and advice, the Insanely Mac Forum is an invaluable resource.

In the end the system is stable and all components work perfectly. In the final reckoning it’s been a great project. I saved money, learned a ton, and built a dream machine that matched my needs perfectly.