I have a similar setup: i7 930 + Asus P6T + BFG GTX 260. And I also had success upgrading from a Snow Leopard Hackintosh to Lion, but I am still working through a few issues.
Prior to upgrade:
I primarily use Windows 7 64 on my PC for gaming, but have a dedicated drive I can connect via eSATA for Hackintosh play.
I originally built my Hackintosh on an i7 920 + Asus P6T + BFG GTX 260 on 10.6.1 or 10.6.2 using
Searay_X's Guide on the Insanely Mac forums. Over time, I updated to 10.6.4 and then 10.6.6 (I always backup the drive first with SuperDuper!), and somewhere in there, I also upgraded my CPU to the i7 930. The original Hackintosh build was done using Chameleon and booted off a USB, but at some point, I followed
this tonymacx86 guide to boot off the EFI partition.
Everything was mostly fine, except:
- Never got sleep completely working. I could live with that because I generally booted to OS X for limited activity.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- Each time I performed a system update, I would lose sound until I reinstalled the AppleHDA.kext file per iBram's guide (common issue).[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- I upgraded my video card to an Asus GTX 560 TI DirectCU II, and this was not supported due to lack of nVidia drivers. But I still had my GTX 260 and that worked, though it is a pain to have to swap out video cards, and thus I kinda stopped playing with my Hackintosh after the 10.6.6 update.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
But I started hearing that the GTX 560 TI was supported in Lion, so I was excited to upgrade my Hackintosh when I bought the Lion update for my Macbook Air and my wife's iMac.
The upgrade:
I started scouring the internet for guides to upgrading a Hackintosh from SL to Lion, and it wasn't clear to me whether or not I needed to be on 10.6.8, so I decided to go ahead and perform that update first, and it went the same as the others--went fine, but lost sound until I reinstalled AppleHDA.kext.
Here are some stumbles I had along the way:
- I started off following this guide, but mistakenly ran xMove against my Snow Leopard partition that was being upgraded instead of the Installer partition. I later found that other guide's explicitly stated, "WARNING: DO NOT choose existing Snow Leopard as the Destination." Unfortunately, the guide I used just said, "Open xMove from tonymacx86 and run it. All this program does is copying all the files OSX Lion Installer unpacked on your Snow Leopard partition to your newly created partition." After doing this, I could no longer boot to SL, so I had to restore my SL partition from backup. Yay, backups.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- After correctly running xMove against the Installer partition, I then found I couldn't boot into the Installer partition. (I should of taken notes, because I can't remember exactly what would happen, a kernel panic, a restart, or a freeze). Turned out my version of Chameleon, RC5 r730, was incapable of booting from a file, as is required in the Lion install process. I upgraded Chameleon to RC5 r752 and was able to get a little further.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- But I still couldn't get the Installer to run--I would get stuck on a white screen with a spinning beach ball
. At first, I thought it was still a bootloader issue, so I switched to Chimera, which tonymacx86 recommended. But that didn't resolve this issue. I did a lot of searching and found that I needed to copy fakesmc.kext to S/L/E on the Installer partition. Once I did that, the installation ran to success.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- I rebooted into Lion (yay), but as usual, I had no sound. Reinstalling the AppleHDA.kext per iBram's guide worked once again.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- But I also had no network access. I think I saw this before in one of my SL updates, and followed the instructions on iBram's guide to copy IONetworkingFamily.kext into Extra/10.6/Extensions on the EFI partition. Unfortunately, when I dragged the extensions folder to the Kext Utility, I got an error that said extensions.mkext could not be created. It deleted my existing extensions.mkext, but had automatically made a backup, so I renamed it and tried again. Same issue. So I renamed it again and rebooted, thinking that might help. It rebooted fine, but now I could no longer see my files on the EFI partition! Somehow the files appeared to be gone (the partition is hidden, so it has to be hidden), but it still allowed me to use the Chimera bootloader. Very strange. So at this point, I still couldn't fix my network issues, since I could not install the networking kext file. Could I have somehow switched the bootloader to boot off of my Installer partition? I don't know--before thinking of that, I went ahead and rebuilt my EFI partition, and was then able to use iBram's guide to copy IONetworkingFamily.kext into Extra/10.6/Extensions on the EFI partition and then create the new extensions.mkext file using Kext Utility. [/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- Unfortunately, networking still didn't work. So I resorted giving MultiBeast a try. I didn't know much about MultiBeast, but I found an option for the installation of a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet 2.0.6 kext. I gave it a try, and it worked.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- And unfortunately, I still can't use my new GTX 560 TI. I tried using the GraphicsEnabler=Yes boot option and removed the device properties string I use for my GTX 260, but that didn't work. I still have to work through this, as it seems there are some forum threads where they got it working.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- And I also got a new 23" monitor with 1920x1080 resolution. I couldn't get that to work, either, so I'm still using my 21" 1680x1050 monitor. Ideally, I would love to have dual monitor support like I do on Windows 7, but I haven't really worked on solving this yet.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
- Sleep appears to work only if I manually put the machine to sleep, but it doesn't go to sleep per settings in System Preferences. I haven't really dug into this at all.[/*:m:2kdl9tcz]
So that's it for now. Lion is working, but I can't currently use my new video card or new monitor. Sleep is only partially working.
And I'm considering no longer using the EFI partition trick. Yes, it's kinda cleaner, as a lot of the hack stuff is hidden and not on the root directory path. But a lot of updated OSX86 utilities and installers, like Multibeast, Chimera, etc seem to want to update the primary partition, and some of these aren't able to see the EFI partition at all, even after mounting it. For the Chimera install, I had to resort to using a utility called pacifist to extract out the correct files. This wasn't ideal, and in the end left my asking if it was worthwhile to hide my hack files in the EFI partition.
As you can see, I've gotten where I am by doing a lot of googling and forum browsing, and have been very dependent on the shared knowledge of others. And in fact, Searay_X at InsanelyMac provided a couple EFI strings for me for my GTX 260 in single card and SLI configurations (I used to have a second 260). I really wish I had a better understanding of all of this, from EFI strings to DSDT.aml files to bootloader options to kext files. I know the nature of all this is that we all have different hardware, so there can't be a single guide or a single script for all of us to use for builds, but if there's a great guide out there that explains each of these things in a generic but helpful and consolidated way, please let me know.
Zinzan
I think this was accomplished by the Graphics Mode = blank setting mentioned above, and getting rid of the EFI string I had tried to create and using GraphicsEnabler.[/*:m:s499va50]
Unfortunately, it seems like when I use dual monitors, I can't restart or shutdown without having to press and hold the power button. I don't have this problem when in single monitor mode. Any ideas?[/*:m:s499va50]
