GA-P55M-UD2 Mavericks Install

Greetings all,

I've been a lurker here for some time, and a long-time apple/hackintosh user. My first hackintosh was a Dell mini 9 which I bought new and converted to OSX many years back. Really enjoyed the learning process, and having a 10" Mac with a Dell logo long before the air was fun!

Yesterday, I purchased a used PC which had been purpose built as a hackintosh. The previous owner had been booting El Capitan via USB and seemed like he had given up on it a while back after purchasing a new MacBook. I'm ready to dig in and start fresh, but I'm not too sure where to start. I've installed OS X on two laptops, but I was following guides and relying on previous user experiences to guide me through the process. I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction, to a previous guide, which I can get started with.

What I'd like to do is install Mavericks on the machine, bootable from the SSD. Not particularly interested in running Windows at all.

The specs for the machine are:

GA-P55M-UD2 Motherboard
2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 (quad core)
16 GB DDR3 Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896 MB
512 GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD (currently partitioned for OSX)
1 TB HD (for PC)

If you happen to know a good place to start, I'd appreciate a point in that direction.

Thanks,

J

You can follow this guide https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...ricks-on-any-supported-intel-based-pc.112389/
This is a nearly 7 year old system and was used by many back in 2010-11. Use search to find out some more info on BIOS setup and multibeast choices.

trs96 said:

You can follow this guide https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...ricks-on-any-supported-intel-based-pc.112389/
This is a nearly 7 year old system and was used by many back in 2010-11. Use search to find out some more info on BIOS setup and multibeast choices.

Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Glad to know this was a common build, should make it easier to find what I need when I need it. 2010 eh.. pretty old machine I guess! I picked it up for under $300 USD. Hopefully it will give me a good chance to muck around with a hackintosh until I'm ready to build my own from scratch when the timing is right.

Thanks again,

J

Hey all,

I've managed to "successfully" install 10.9. I do have a few questions regarding stability and boot management though.

1. I had to go through quite a few things to get Mavericks installed and running. After perusing a dozen or so threads during installation errors, I found a way to get Mavericks installed with a number of variations on the above linked guide. These included using numerous bootflags to get to the installer screen, and some changes to the BIOS (I had to switch over to ACHI from IDE to get OS X to even boot after install), and a few other tweaks (custom DSDT, etc). How do I know if my methods are merely a short term fix or a long term solution?

2. Is there a fairly surefire way to determine the stability of my computer at this point? I'd love to move my work over to this machine (essentially Logic X, Sibelius and FCPX), but I am hesitant at this point due to the unstable nature of the process thus far. On my little dell mini 10v that I had installed OSX on years ago, I had Snow Leopard running virtually flawlessly, no additional boot screens etc. It's been a long time since I did that, and I'm not sure how I had it running so smoothly (probably because I had followed a sure-fire guide intended for that specific hardware). Are there a couple of ways for me to determine how stable this machine is running OS X at this point?

3. How do I have a seamless/quick startup? Currently bootup requires an F12 and choosing the SSD that OSX is on each startup. Is there a way I can get the machine to simply boot OSX right off the bat? Once I have things up and running smoothly I'd like to delete the windows HDD and use that as an additional file storage device within my SSD OSX disk.

Hope I am making some sense here...

J

Jgor said:

Hey all,

I've managed to "successfully" install 10.9. I do have a few questions regarding stability and boot management though.

1. I had to go through quite a few things to get Mavericks installed and running. After perusing a dozen or so threads during installation errors, I found a way to get Mavericks installed with a number of variations on the above linked guide. These included using numerous bootflags to get to the installer screen, and some changes to the BIOS (I had to switch over to ACHI from IDE to get OS X to even boot after install), and a few other tweaks (custom DSDT, etc). How do I know if my methods are merely a short term fix or a long term solution?

Click to expand...

If it boots consistently, then you're probably OK.

2. Are there a couple of ways for me to determine how stable this machine is running OS X at this point?

Click to expand...

You could run some benchmarks on it, both to "burn it in" and to see if you're getting in the ballpark of performance you're expecting out of it. The most popular choices are Geekbench (https://www.primatelabs.com/) and Xbench (http://xbench.com/).

3. How do I have a seamless/quick startup? Currently bootup requires an F12 and choosing the SSD that OSX is on each startup. Is there a way I can get the machine to simply boot OSX right off the bat? Once I have things up and running smoothly I'd like to delete the windows HDD and use that as an additional file storage device within my SSD OSX disk.

Click to expand...

You should be able to select the boot drive you want to use in the system BIOS, bypassing the need to hit a key and choose your macOS SSD at startup.

Thanks for your reply nobodynose,

It mostly boots well. Occasionally reaching a screen claiming checksum error - CMOS. Is this avoidable?

I'll run Xbench next chance I get. As I purchased this machine used, I'm not totally sure what I should be looking for in terms of performance. I do notice that on the windows side of things I've got a 2.8GHz machine displaying, but looking under system prefs in OS X I'm getting only 2.0GHz...

I do have that HD (the SSD with Mavericks) set as option 1 in the BIOS. However, I still get the Gigabyte motherboard menu popup at start (with the F-key menus), and a few DOS-looking loading screens before I finally reach the tomato selector where it waits for a key press to bring up the menu. On my Dell Mini it was straight to the apple bootup screen upon turning the machine on.

Thanks for your assistance,

J

To fix the checksum error:
Select in Multibeast /Drivers/System/AppleRTC Patch for CMOS Reset If you didn't install that yet.

It's also a good idea to replace the CMOS battery on that ancient motherboard. They only last about 7-8 years. After that they fail to hold a charge. Make sure you are completely powered down, unplug power cord as well. Reset your BIOS settings after you restart your PC with the new battery in place.
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000239.htm

A tomato selector ? I think you mean the red apple/tonymacx86 logo.

Thanks TRS69. I ran MultiBeast and installed the patch you suggested. The error tends to happen when I manually sleep the machine, as it treats it like a bad restart.

Yes, I meant the Tmac86x logo

Any idea why OS X is only detecting a 2.0GHz while with windows I'm seeing the 2.8Ghz?
Any way to bypass the Gigabyte boot menu and jump straight to the OS X bootup?

I did get audio running, but it appears to be MONO only (left channel). Have a suggestion?

Any suggestions for:

1. OS X Detecting the wrong CPU speed under OS X only?
2. A way to bypass the motherboard startup menu and boot right to the OSX boot screen?
3. Audio out only working mono?

I'll give this one more bump... any advice for the aforementioned questions? I searched the forums quite a bit but wasn't able to find a solution.

Cheers,

J