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[jeffball610]

I feel as though this question has probably been asked and answered, but I don't seem to find it on the forums. I'm looking to build my first Hackintosh and want to know if I can load an image of my current Mac onto an external drive and copy it to a Hack drive. I know there will be some setup that needs to be done, but can I copy my OS and files to a hard drive and then run Uni and Multi Beast etc?

 

[jeffball610]

Am I wasting my time looking at devices like this? Is it even a consideration to clone my current drive? Or do I have to run Uni Beast before I can install OSX on the new hard drive? Or am I looking at this all wrong?

 

[jeffball610]

After more reading and watching videos like that posted by beelzebozo, I still do not have a clear answer. From what I can gather, Uni Beast is only useful for those using PC components to install OSX. It should not be needed if the drive is already formatted and has OSX installed on it. (mobo bios settings will still need to be adjusted before hand) Am I wrong about this? If this is the case, wouldn't it be easier to clone drives than go through this process? You need a Mac to get the OSX from the App Store anyway. Why not just copy the drive? I know Multi Beast will be needed to make the drivers work, but Unit Beast does not seem necessary.

It doesn't seem as though there are many active experienced members willing to chime in. If I can't get a definitive answer in the next week or so, I guess I'll just try this myself and see what happens.

 

[jeffball610]

This thread is the closest I've found to answering my question. However, it doesn't really say it won't work. One issue I didn't consider was that the clone would have my iMac "info" on it when copied. I don't know what issues that might cause when trying to recognize the new hardware. ANY help would be appreciated. The rest of my parts should arrive on Monday, and I'd like to be able to play with my Hack by the weekend. Unibeast, downloading OSX and copying over all of my old files seems like the long way around. Maybe it's the only way, but I like to keep things as simple as possible.

 

[samisnake]

well potentially you could (as long as the basics are covered, eg. the os of your mac supports the specs of your mac, so using mtn lion with ivy bridge cpu or 6xx nvidia cards).

how you could do it is by cloning your current drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or similar, then using rboot to boot off the cloned drive.
rboot will have the bootloader, and the smbios.plist (which includes the model ident and serial).
if that works, you could then do a typical multibeast post install setup.

best way is a clean install though. especially if its your first build.

 

[jeffball610]

I've already started taking steps for a clean install. I didn't want to mess with unknown issues on my first project. I might make a second drive when I've got my system up and running just to try it out. I think being able to copy your existing drive over would be much more appealing to those coming from Apple to Hack. My parts should be here today, so hopefully I'll have my system up and running by this weekend. Lots of case mods left to do first though.