PXE Booting Hackintosh

[blackthund3r]

I'm pretty sure this hasn't been properly discussed elsewhere so I'm going to open a Pandora's box here and ask something that may or may not actually be possible: is it possible to PXE Boot the hackintosh installation? (Also apologies if this is in the wrong section of the forum; I thought this would be the best place for it)

I would guess it is possible to PXE Boot iBoot (could probably use PXELINUX / memdisk to launch the ISO) but how far could we go? I know the various d1str1but10ns (yes, they should be unnamed because they're very bad) come as ISOs so could they be PXE booted too? I haven't tried these because I don't even want to download them; I used the iBoot Ivy Bridge + Retail SL DVD + UniBeast for ML method to get my hackintosh going, but is there anything preventing someone from converting the Base System DMG to an ISO and PXE booting it?

PXE Booting could pave the way for discless hackintoshes, as well as automated / unattended installs. It would also help those with a real Mac or a hackintosh that want to install Mountain Lion quickly on a machine without a DVD Drive. It would likely be much faster than making a UniBeast USB then booting this. I guess it would be kind of 'gimmicky' but every other desktop OS I can think of supports PXE booting, as well as OS X via NetBoot / NetInstall. In fact, on the subject of NetBoot, would it be possible to bootstrap this via a standard PC PXE boot then use an OS X Server?

I'm not sure if anybody has done any work on this before but it's something I'd like to see!

Otherwise is there any support in OS X for an iSCSI boot? This can be done with PXELINUX / iPXE / gPXE.

If I figure anything out I'll post it here

 

[Paradigm99]

Ive been wondering the same thing for a while now... Haven't explored it yet though

 

[blackthund3r]

Ive been wondering the same thing for a while now... Haven't explored it yet though

I'm glad I'm not the only one that's wondered this! Business hackintoshing might irritate Apple though so I guess nobody has spent any real time attempting it.

 

[virtual]

I found a somewhat useful idea methodology... (I think)

http://www.netboot.me/

I think (considering with Hackintosh we have seriously limited if not zero use for open firmware) Looks like this or something very much like this is a path of least resistance...

I have looked into this... and...
and I think this is the closest I have come so far to getting something to work
(I booted most of the examples with sucess... WTF...!!!!)

My storage solution would be latest FreeNAS 8.3.xx


Come on guys....
someone who actually knows something about this subject...
Please chime in and say something encouraging...!!!

Please... (hey I'm sayin please...!!)

 

[4t0m1cw07f]

I've been googling senseless trying to find an answer to this problem too. My IBM Server wont allow me to boot via USB so I cant use the Unibeast USB I created, so my thinking was, why not make an iso of the USB and boot it over PXE?? An answer to this would be great

 

[SimplyRyan]

I realize this is a pretty old thread but... I've been working on this myself. I have a tftp (pxe boot) server set up on my network. I have tried multiple methods of booting hackintosh installer disks and so far, the furthest I've managed was to boot a chameleon boot CD. However, that's as far as it goes. As soon as you try to F5 to another disk it fails (and kind of defeats the purpose of PXE booting).
I've tried creating IMG and ISO images of Chameleon, Unibeast and Clover prepared install images and none of them will boot. This is with the 'memdisk' method. It seems as though the issue is that the kernel needs to be loaded, the way it can be with Linux.

It's also possible to PXE boot BSD the same way as a Linux distro, so it's possible that you could boot the OSX kernel (which is a modified BSD kernel), but I think it would probably require compiling the kernel in some format other than the single binary file the kernel comes int now.

hate to be the bearer of bad news...

 

[Shiitaki]

I've been googling senseless trying to find an answer to this problem too. My IBM Server wont allow me to boot via USB so I cant use the Unibeast USB I created, so my thinking was, why not make an iso of the USB and boot it over PXE?? An answer to this would be great

Try using a usb to hard drive adapter, do everything like you would for a usb stick, except it's a usb hard drive. Then pull the drive out of the adapter and connect to the computer directly and do the install from there.

Booting OS X on a non Apple computer requires a boot loader to fake the Apple hardware, and that requires chaining boot loaders. As well as all of the steps for a PXE server. The method above with a spare hard drive is an easier way I think.

 

[llothar68]

I wish some chinese guy could come up with a transparent iSCSI to 3,5" Sata harddrive device where the network is completely hidden from the host. With a 10Gbit Ethernet network card i would assume that there is a professional market for it.

 

[stonexing5]

I got success on booting Clover.iso throw PXE boot.
Here is the way.
I use a Raspiberry 3B as PXE server.
But I can only boot success Clover, the clover can not find apfs to boot macOS.

 

[Trtox]

You can't find apfs unless you have needed apfs drivers.