First time Hackintosher here. Many thanks for this guide, trs96!
I’ve fixed all the bugs I care to fix, and have been successfully using the hackintosh for music production (via Logic Pro X 10.4.4) for about a month now. Everything I need is working fine, though I did have some scares during setup. Here are a few details, in case they can help anyone:
Motherboard:
HP Compaq Elite 8300 Small Form Factor (SFF)
BIOS:
The computer came with v02.90 installed. I’m running it in Legacy mode. Everything works fine.
Operating System:
Sierra (10.12.6)
RAM:
I added 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM from Ripjaws X Series (2 x 8GB cards), which combined with the 8GB of manufacturer RAM (2 x 4GB cards) gives me 24GB.
Storage:
I moved the default 500GB HD (with Windows 10 still on it) to SATA 1 and installed Mac OS on a 1TB SSD from Crucial, inserted in SATA 0. Easy install with the mounting bracket.
Graphics Card:
I went with the Nvidia GeForce GT 710. I’m able to run three monitors (VGA, DVI, and HDMI) simultaneously with no hiccups— though, granted, I’m not doing any intensive video processing. I had to install drivers and then update the drivers on the Windows side to get Windows to see it, but I was able to use the onboard graphics to do so without trouble. On the Mac side, I had to get through step 7 (running MultiBeast) and reboot, and afterward the graphics card worked fine.
Audio:
I installed the VoodooHDA and Apple HDA Disabler kexts, per Step 9. This enabled the front headphone jack, but I find the audio hiss coming through there to be way too distracting for me. Instead, I use an audio interface (3rd generation MBox from Avid) which connects via USB and outputs to stereo monitors and headphones. I don’t have a way to test HDMI audio, and I did not attempt DSDT patching.
Wi-Fi Card:
Archer T9e from TP-Link. On the Windows side, it worked immediately after installing manufacturer drivers and rebooting.
Mac OS, meanwhile, did not see the card, so I mistakenly tried installing a driver listed
here for a TP-Link helper tool (designed for use with the TP-Link N150 Wi-fi/USB adapter, TL-WN725N), which crashed my whole setup. After installing and rebooting, the screen booted to the slashed circle symbol (ø) instead of the Apple logo. I used the BIOS to specify the startup drive on a second reboot, which (for whatever reason) allowed the computer to boot to Mac OS, though with graphical issues (opaque dock, horizontal bars flickering across the screen, etc.). Uninstalling the driver fixed the graphical issues and the crash on startup.
What finally got wi-fi working was to open my config.plist file in Textedit and replace the <array> section under <key>KextsToPatch</key> with a string of code I found
here.
Note that I also installed Rehabman’s “FakePCIID” and “BroadcomWiFiInjector” kexts (
https://bitbucket.org/RehabMan/os-x-fake-pci-id/downloads/) both in Clover’s 10.12 folder and in /Library/Extensions, rebuilt permissions with sudo Terminal commands “chown -R root:wheel [path]” and “chmod -R 755 [path]”, as well as ran the “kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel” and “kextcache -system-caches” commands. These had no effect before I did the fix in the above paragraph, but may have been part of the fix anyway.
The card sits about 30 feet from the router (Nighthawk AC2100) with two walls in between and works fine.
USB:
Despite the fact that HP 8300s predate USB 3.0, the refurbished model DID come with four USB 3.0 ports in the back, even though Amazon (where I bought it) did not specify whether the computer had USB 3.0 or not.
Dual Boot:
I use the BIOS’s startup menu to choose between SATA 0 and 1 (Mac on my 1TB SSD vs. Windows on the default HD). I haven’t tried using Boot Camp or otherwise partitioning one drive to have two operating systems.
Messages:
Following the steps in P1LGRIM’s iMessage guide (as linked in Step 10) did the trick, first try.
However, after a fiasco requiring me to reinstall OS from a flash drive, Messages became intermittent, even after I triple-checked all my steps (generating a new valid serial number, running iMessageDebug, giving it permission through my iPhone 6s, etc.). It could receive messages, and could send SMS, but would sometimes fail to receive SMS and would always fail to send messages. Group SMS I sent would also split into individual texts for each person.
The fix ended up being recovering the config.plist file I had before the OS crashed and copying the exact serial number, SMUIID, MLB, and ROM (UseMacAddr0) from it to my current config.plist. Rebooted, and everything worked.
Safari:
Safari frequently force-refreshes the page when loading content on Facebook. My guess is that updating Safari would fix the problem, but when I went to update Safari from 10.1.2 to 12.1.1, I mistakenly hit “Update All” in the App Store, which also updated iTunes Device Support Update and Security Update 2019-003 10.12.6.
Afterward, I couldn’t get past the Clover bootloader. The OS became stuck in Kernel Trap 14 when booted normally, displaying “panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff800affe255): Kernel trap at 0xffffff7f8ba4330, type 14=page fault” overtop of the Apple logo on bootup. The computer would then force restart, only to hit the same error and repeat, over and over. Booting to safe mode, recovery mode, etc. would display a blank gray screen with the mouse doing the spinning wheel of death. Strangely enough, I couldn’t even boot to the Clover-configured flash drive. Trying would give me a blank, black screen after choosing Mac OS from the Clover menu.
The fix ended up being disconnecting my wifi card from the motherboard, disabling legacy support and enabling UEFI in BIOS, formatting the USB with UEFI instead of legacy, and booting from that. This allowed me to finally get back inside Mac OS, which I then installed from the flash drive onto the SSD.
Since then, I’ve been too gun-shy to update Safari, and have just used Chrome to browse Facebook instead.
Persisting Problems:
Aside from the audio hiss and an out-of-date Safari (mentioned above), the only shortcomings of my build are no bluetooth, no microphone, and no webcam. But I don’t need those functions, so I’m happy!