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Going from Snow Leopard to Mavericks on an old build

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Hi all!

Back in 2010 I built a Hackintosh for music production use.
It was installed with Snow L. 10.6.8 and has been serving me perfectly ever since so I never had any reason to upgrade or change anything. However, less and less software is supported for SL and now I'm forced to upgrade. I was considering going Mavericks.
I'm using that on my MB Pro and believe it should work well for my needs.

My money is a bit tight these days and I was hoping I don't have to upgrade any of the hardware. The good old i7 930 is still strong enough for my processing needs, and the built in FW in the motherboard is working well with the UAD Apollo Quad.

My question is therefore, will I be able to get Mavericks up'n running on my now almost vintage build?


The setup is as follows:

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0)
Intel i7 930
XFX GTS 250 Geforce(I also have an Sapphire Radeon HD 4350 256MB DDR2 laying around)


Any input or advice would be highly appreciated!
 
Should be no problem, many have been able to install and run El Capitan on similar hardware.
The hard part is getting Mavericks. Apple does not let you download it unless you have it in
your Purchased section of your Mac App Store account. Did you download Mavs when it was
available as a free update back in late 2013 or the first half of 2014 ?
 
Thank you for the reply!

Unfortunately I didn't download it back then.
However I do have Mavericks on my MB pro.
My plan was actually to clone the disk and try to install the bootloader on
top of it. I know it's a controversial procedure, but I know some success stories and I do believe
I did it with my current OS as I was using Snow leopard on my MB pro back then.

Anyone successfully tried this before?
 
Thank you for the reply!

Unfortunately I didn't download it back then.
However I do have Mavericks on my MB pro.
My plan was actually to clone the disk and try to install the bootloader on
top of it. I know it's a controversial procedure, but I know some success stories and I do believe
I did it with my current OS as I was using Snow leopard on my MB pro back then.

Anyone successfully tried this before?

Yes, you can do this.
Create a Chimera USB booter by formatting it as if you were going to create a UniBeast USB installer. Download and launch MultiBeast for Mavericks and point it at the USB drive, selecting the Chimera bootloader only.
Once this is complete, copy your /Extra file over to the USB. Copy MultiBeast for Mavericks to the USB
Clone the Mac drive and install it in your X58A
Boot with the USB you created, select the Mac drive and boot it.
Copy your DSDT from the /Extra folder on the USB to desktop
Run MultiBeast and select UserDSDT and your audio and networking kexts along with 3rd party SATA and any others you need and install to the drive.
Eject USB and reboot.
 
Hi,

I'm trying to do a similar thing by taking a Super Duper image of my existing Mtn Lion Hackintosh drive, and restoring that to a 2nd partition on my OS drive, then installing Mavericks on top of that. That should work in theory right? Any tips before or after?
I tried making a Mavericks installer as described in the guides here, but 3/3 Mavericks installers I've tried all failed when I point Unibeast to my Mavericks installer in my Apps folder. Is it looking for a 10.9 specific installer? Mine might be 10.9.3 etc and maybe that doesn't work. The error I get is that my installer is incomplete, please remove the OSX installer from the Applications folder. No idea what's going on.
 
Hi,

I'm trying to do a similar thing by taking a Super Duper image of my existing Mtn Lion Hackintosh drive, and restoring that to a 2nd partition on my OS drive, then installing Mavericks on top of that. That should work in theory right? Any tips before or after?
I tried making a Mavericks installer as described in the guides here, but 3/3 Mavericks installers I've tried all failed when I point Unibeast to my Mavericks installer in my Apps folder. Is it looking for a 10.9 specific installer? Mine might be 10.9.3 etc and maybe that doesn't work. The error I get is that my installer is incomplete, please remove the OSX installer from the Applications folder. No idea what's going on.

When did you download the installer app? This may be your problem:
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/03/older-os-x-installers-broken-by-certificate/
 
When did you download the installer app? This may be your problem:
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/03/older-os-x-installers-broken-by-certificate/

It was a year ago I think, but I since then I used an installer from my work that also wouldn't install to the USB stick. My problem was the date as mentioned in the article. As soon as I changed the computer date to 2015, it worked perfectly.
Now my problem "is can't find mach kernel error" and I've been up all night trying to resolve this.
I can boot into Yosemite as long as the USB key is connected, but otherwise, I can't get past that error.
Someone mentioned this in another thread and I think it applies to Mtn Lion as well:

From 10.6 to 10.9 the "kernel" was named mach_kernel and located as a hidden file in your OS X root partition. So, in 10.6.8 org.chameleon.boot.plist you have the kernel key pointing to the mach_kernel. Then in 10.10 Apple changed the location of the kernel and named it kernel, rather than mach_kernel. Latest org.chameleon.boot.plist for Yosemite installed with MultiBeast does not have the kernel key/string - the latest boot loaders know the difference.

Your original boot loader for 10.6.8 does not address this, so it is looking for mach_kernel in the root.
First, remove the mach_kernel file you created in the Yosemite partition, restore the kernel file to the /Kernels folder and reboot to the Yosemite partition with your UniBeast USB.
Install Chimera boot loader from the latest MultiBeast. This boot loader knows where the kernel file is located in Yosemite

I'm going to try this and see if it fixes my issue. Otherwise, I'll have to keep digging.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!
 
Update.
I finally got past the "can't find mach_kernal" by installing/updating Chimera 4 to my Mountain Lion partition and can now boot into Yosemite without the USB key!
I still need to get Ethernet and Audio working, but this is a HUGE relief!
My system is an SSD drive with Mtn Lion on 1 partition and Yosemite on the other. My guess is the old version of Chimera was nit allowing me to boot to Yosemite for whatever reason.
Hope this helps someone. I spent about 7 hours digging through the forums last night.
 
Well, that didn't work :(
It's too bad so many people are having this problem and there's not a solid solution...

Solid solution is to edit the org.chameleon.boot.plist to remove

<key>kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>

as explained in several threads

or edit the Clover config.plist to remove same if using Clover as boot loader.
 
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