- Joined
- Jan 20, 2019
- Messages
- 45
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte GA-H61M-s
- CPU
- i3-3220
- Graphics
- GTX 1060
- Mobile Phone
Budget dual-boot Windows 10/Hackintosh High Sierra build:
GA-H61M-s - i3-3220 - GT-210
There’s nothing much to see in the cabinet/case as it’s an old, standard, and cheap desktop cabinet from Zebronics.GA-H61M-s - i3-3220 - GT-210
Components
- Western Digital Blue 2TB Hard Drive
- (2x) Kingston 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM
Already Owned
- Western Digital Green 1TB (WD10EZRX-00L4HB0) ; with Windows 10 already installed
- Gigabyte H61M-s Motherboard
- Zotac GT-210 GPU
- Intel Core i3-3220
- Zebronics 450W Power Supply (it came along with the cabinet but I wouldn’t recommend this brand)
- A standard ATX cabinet from Zebronics
- Acer P166HQL 16” VGA Monitor (Native resolution: 1366 x 768)
- A Dell USB Mouse
- A PS/2 Keyboard from Logitech (Y-SM46) which is probably around 2 decades old (As Mac doesn’t use the PS/2 ports, this keyboard is OOB unresponsive on macOS and I later had to connect a USB keyboard)
Comments
Please note that I did this back in February 2019. Due to me being lazy and some other reasons, I was unable to post it earlier.
I had a secondary PC (with Windows installed) at my home which wasn’t being used much. I decided to have some fun with Hackintosh on it and had planned to dual-boot it. The Hard Disk already present in the system was running out of space. And also, it made more sense to have both the operating systems on different drives. Therefore, I got a brand new Hard Disk and also upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 16GB.
Before installation, I had read several guides (both here on tonymacx86 and outside, especially the ones in “success stories” section, specific to the motherboard I have), watched many installation videos on YouTube, and went through many random troubleshooting threads here for some days, which helped me gain a lot of knowledge. However, the main guide that I followed was this one. Below, I have tried to note down everything that I did, in as much detail as I could. Furthermore, at the end of this post, I have posted a (low quality but watchable) video recording of the monitor which I made during the installation. So if you find difficulty in understanding a step, you can watch the video to see it in action.
Installation Notes
I first removed the previously installed 4GB RAM stick and installed the two new 8GB sticks. Then, I installed the new 2TB Hard Drive. For safety sake, I unplugged the SATA cable from the previous Hard Drive (which had Windows installed) so as to not accidentally format it during Hackintosh installation. I was now done on the hardware part.
Due to the new Apple graphics framework, my GPU, i.e. GT-210 is unsupported under Mojave (10.14). After taking advice on this forum, I decided to install High Sierra (10.13) as it’s probably the last version of the macOS that works with my GPU.
- 1. I started with the downloads. I already had the High Sierra installation file on my Mac Pro. I downloaded Unibeast 8.3.2 and Multibeast 10.4.0. (Please take care of the versions that you download and make sure that they correspond to the macOS version that you intend to install. Also, note that the macOS installation file should be present in your applications directory, for Unibeast to find it.)
- 2. Plugged in the USB stick and formatted it to MacOS Extended (Journaled), using Disk Utility, as mentioned in the tonymacx86 guide.
- 3. Fired up Unibeast, and made the USB stick bootable. It took about 25 minutes for the process to complete. These were the settings that I used:
- 4. Closed Unibeast, ejected the USB stick and plugged it in my to-be Hackintosh.
- 5. Opened up BIOS and changed the following settings. The most important was the SATA mode selection which needed to be set to AHCI.
-BIOS Features
Boot Option Priority: USB Drive at #1
Fast Boot: Disabled
Intel Virtualization Technology: Disabled (I enabled it later on after some days and it had no negative impact)
Windows 8 Features: Other OS
Secure Boot State: Disabled
-Peripherals
SATA Mode Selection: AHCI
EHCI Hand-off: Disabled
“Save & Exit Setup”
Boot Option Priority: USB Drive at #1
Fast Boot: Disabled
Intel Virtualization Technology: Disabled (I enabled it later on after some days and it had no negative impact)
Windows 8 Features: Other OS
Secure Boot State: Disabled
-Peripherals
SATA Mode Selection: AHCI
EHCI Hand-off: Disabled
“Save & Exit Setup”
- 6. Restarted, opened up boot menu (F12), and booted into the USB (The option in my case was “UEFI: Kingston DataTraveler”).
- 7. From Clover menu, I chose to boot from the external drive (USB) with Verbose mode enabled.
- 8. Sat back, relaxed and saw all of the text scroll by. The verbose stopped about 4 times with errors (such as “no such file or directory”, etc.) but then continued anyway. I really don’t know what they meant, but the installation continued without issues. (I’d still like to know what caused them, if anyone can watch that part in my installation video and analyze) After exactly 3 minutes, the Apple logo made an appearance along with a progress bar. The progress bar got stuck at around 90% for a while, but continued finally.
- 9. Now I was at the setup screen where you choose the language and run the Disk Utility.
- 10. Chose the language, opened up disk utility and erased the hard disk into Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Afterwards, made 2 partitions. I set the first partition to be 400 GB (which was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) by default). This partition was meant to be the system partition (i.e. contain the macOS system files). The remaining partition was about 1.49TB, which I formatted into ExFAT format. I wanted this partition for storage. Exited the Disk Utility.
(If you do not intend to dual-boot, unlike me, you can skip the partitioning part.)
- 11. Continued with the installation. Chose the 400GB Partition for installation, as of course, it was the only selectable option due to its format.
- 12. Installation started and the PC rebooted after 3-4 minutes. Due to my boot priority in BIOS, the system by default booted into the USB, but I didn’t see the Clover boot menu this time. There was a black screen for about a minute after which, the Apple logo finally appeared. When the progress bar was at about 20%, I was greeted with the error: “macOS could not be installed on your computer. The installer resources have expired.” Felt really bad but didn’t give up. Did some quick googling on my phone and found this post, according to which, you need to enter the following command in the terminal window:
ntpdate -u "time.apple.com” - 13. Opened up terminal from the same screen (you can watch the video below to see how), entered the command and saw the Ethernet LED on the motherboard start blinking.
- 14. Exited terminal and rebooted. Went into BIOS settings to check its time. The date was correct, but the time was 5 hours behind from IST. Corrected it according to IST. Though, I don't think it really mattered.
- 15. Saved it, rebooted, Clover > Boot macOS from Hard Drive, same problem!
- 16. I decided to start all over again.
- 17. Repeated the steps 6 to 9.
- 18. Now, before disk utility, I opened up terminal again and ran the same command mentioned in step 12.
- 19. Exited terminal and repeated the steps 9 to 11.
- 20. Just like happened in step 12, the PC rebooted, Apple logo with a progress bar appeared. This time, when the progress bar reached about 20%, “installing: X minutes remaining” appeared below the progress bar, instead of the error. And I sighed in relief!
- 21. The system rebooted after a minute and I was at the Clover boot menu. Chose the Hard Disk > Verbose, and the Apple logo, progress bar and the time remaining continued.
- 22. After 12 minutes, the system rebooted, Apple logo and the progress bar appeared and then I was finally at the Welcome screen.
- 23. Chose the country, and other following settings. And the system was successfully booted into macOS.
Post-install
When the system booted, the screen resolution was odd. Internet was working, but the audio wasn’t.
- Ran MultiBeast and chose the following settings:
- Meanwhile, installed Google Chrome, but its UI was glitchy.
- After MultiBeast finished working, I rebooted the system and booted from Hard Drive.
- After the reboot, the screen resolution was fixed. It was working at monitor’s native resolution. Google Chrome was fixed. But audio still wasn’t working.
- After a little research, I managed to fix the audio, thanks to the user @Geert-Jan, the post of whom helped me fix it.
- Next, I installed FCP X (10.4.5), which works like a charm. Though the rendering and exporting times were unbearably slow. Found some information on another site which is a little complicated. Now, I think there’s a slight difference in the performance, but still not up to the mark. But again, considering the hardware that I have, I can’t complain. For this hardware, the performance seems to be decent, and FAR better than Premiere Pro on Windows on the same PC.
Summary
So, overall, it was a great experience. I am very much happy with this Hackintosh. I have achieved what I wanted without much hassle. The installation was WAY easy and smooth than I had been expecting. I now have a perfectly working dual-boot budget system with decent performance, and a shared storage drive/partition for me to access my files from both the operating systems.
The only problem that I face now is switching the SATA mode in BIOS again and again. Setting it to AHCI makes macOS boot fine, but causes BSOD while booting Windows (with error NO_BOOTABLE_VOLUME). Setting it to IDE makes Windows boot fine, but causes kernel panic while booting macOS.
What Works
- Both Hackintosh/macOS and Windows
- Internet over Ethernet (OOB)
- Display at native resolution, that too using VGA port
- Audio (thanks to the user Geert-Jan)
- Sleep/Wake (OOB)
- DVD drive (OOB)
- After a few days, I also managed to make my old PS/2 keyboard work using the following kext: RehabMan-Voodoo-2018-1008.zip: https://bitbucket.org/RehabMan/os-x-voodoo-ps2-controller/downloads/
I am having two minor issues regarding dual-booting with Windows (one of which is mentioned above). I’ll post a separate help thread about it soon.
I’m also having trouble with the HDMI port. My second HDMI monitor (Dell U2415) stops receiving signal after the Apple logo. A separate detailed thread about it too will be posted soon.
You could check my profile for updates.
If you had a problem understanding any step, I have also recorded the whole installation process. The quality of the video isn't good, as I have recorded it through my phone and also because the monitor used is around 9 years old with bad color-bleeding around the edges, but it’s watchable. I have sped all parts of the video up, except Verbose screens. If you want to watch a part in lower speed, you can always change the video speed by clicking on the gear icon on the bottom-right side of the YouTube player.
After 01:05, if you want to skip the first attempt which was unsuccessful, you could jump directly to 09:30. Timestamps can also be found in the video description on YouTube.
Lastly, I would like to thank all the hackers, developers, the community and all the other people who have made Hackintoshing possible. I’d also like to thank all the moderators/admins on the tonymacx86 forums. They are extremely knowledgeable and helpful, which is also evident from the Activity section of this website. I was an absolute beginner when I posted my first thread, and the moderators were really helpful and polite. Really appreciate their dedication to help others.
If you have any questions/queries regarding my build, installation, etc., feel free to ask below and I’ll be happy to answer.
Now just getting used to pressing Windows+C and Windows+V keys to copy-paste, until I receive a new keyboard.
Please note that there might be some formatting errors in this post which I'll fix as soon as I get time.
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