Hey guys,
I've been around the Hackintosh world for about the past eight years. I've built a couple of machines. The first Hackintosh I built was in 2010 running Snow Leopard, in 2013 I upgraded (kept the case) to a Gigabyte Z77-DS3H running OS X on a 120GB Crucial SSD.
This past November I picked up a used HP 8300 CMT on eBay for £160 (approx $210) and put the SSD in that, after reading through this guide and at how foolproof the whole process looked it seemed like a perfect machine. It came with 4GB RAM, but I kept the 16GB from my last build and added that too.
I've always kept things pretty simple on my Hackintosh builds. I use the built-in HD4000 graphics because I'm not fussed about gaming or intense graphical demands. I use a USB sound card. I never bothered with all the faffing around installing Chameleon on the SSD during any version of OS X, I'd just boot it off the Unibeast-prepared USB stick that I left permanently inserted into the machine.
And yet with every installation I've had, I get the same basic error: on a seemingly totally random basis, the machine will lock up.
With my first build it just used to freeze and I'd have to turn the computer off and back on again. On the second and current ones it's just a total reset. Sometimes, one of these resets will somehow corrupt the SSD and prevent it from booting (black screen, circular logo with a line through it), and the solution is to boot into another working installation of OS X on another hard drive (I have a selection of USB hard drives) and run DiskWarrior 4 on the corrupt drive. This has worked for me without fail over the past five years.
I've never really messed around with much in the way of kexts. When I got this HP, I followed this guide exactly as stated, used Clover Configurator (which was something I'd never bothered with before), and it was working fine... for a few hours, and then I got a reset once more. It's still going on: sometimes it could reboot multiple times in an evening, other times it could run for days without issue.
I don't do much in the way of heavy duty work, the odd WAV editing, video encoding, etc. Most of the time it's pretty basic stuff like iTunes, VLC, Chrome and the like.
Am I doing something wrong? Is this a sign of a faulty power supply or something? RAM issues? Am I just fundamentally missing something in all this process and tinkering? I've done enough fooling around with Hackintoshes to know how to get things up and running but I can't seem to find a solution to this and it's driving me mad. Without the resets, I'd have a 100% working computer instead of the 99% it's currently at, and I'm really stumped.
The main reason I bought this next-generation model to use instead of my previous generation build was that I was sure it would "just work" - almost as Mac-like as you can get, right?! - and yet I here I am, still getting the same damn problem as before.
Please, can anyone offer me some useful suggestions?
Thanks <3
