Techie Musings

Build your own Core i7 Hackintosh with an Intel DP55WB motherboard

The following are step-by-step instructions for building a PC based on an Intel DP55WB motherboard that runs Mac OS, otherwise known as a Hackintosh.

While this is a complete set of step-by-step instructions, all the information was gleaned from tonymacx86’s P55 Hackintosh Blog, the forums there and the InsanelyMac forums. If you have questions or problems with the instructions below, one of those links will be much more beneficial to you than contacting me.

Parts

For the build, the following components are used:

Motherboard	Intel DP55WB LGA 1156 Intel P55 Micro ATX motherboard	$99.99
CPU	Intel Core i7-860 Lynnfield 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core CPU	$279.99
RAM	2 x OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-pin DD3 1066 SDRAM	$195.98
Video Card	EVGA nVidia GeForce GT 240 1GB 128-bit GDDR3 PCIe video card	$84.99
Optical Drive	ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner - Bulk - OEM	$22.99
Hard drive	3 x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s drives	$209.97
Case	Cooler Master Elite 335	$49.99
Power Supply	Antec BP550 Plus 550W PSU	$64.99
Card Reader	Rosewill RCR-IC001 40-in-1 USB 2.0 3.5” Internal Card Reader with USB port	$14.99
Bluetooth Adaptor	IOGEAR GBU241	$12.84
Mouse	Apple Magic Mouse	$69.00
Keyboard	Apple Wireless Keyboard	$69.00
Operating System	Apple Mac Box Set	$169.00

Apart from the Apple stuff above, all the items are from NewEgg. The total comes to about $1350 before any rebates. This is for a Core i7-860 system with 8GB RAM, 1TB system drive and 2TB RAID 0 array. A 27” monitor is about $350, so for $1800 you’re getting something similar to the custom build iMac that sells for about $2450. However, you’re also getting expansion and a built-in card reader.

Build

If you’ve put together a computer before, there are no surprises here – the build is very straightforward. The only thing you might want to do is to add a 120mm fan inside the front of the case to cool the hard drives.

If this is the first time you are building a computer, there’s a good guide here. It is really very straightforward. If you can change a light switch, you can do this.

Software Installation

Assuming the build went correctly and you can power on and get to the BIOS screen, you’re ready to do the software installation.

You will need the following to install Mac OS:

• Mac OS Snow Leopard installation disk (in parts list)
• iBoot Supported disk (burn an image from this article)
• DVD containing Mac OS 10.6.4 Combo Update and MultiBeast 2.0.2.
• AppleHDA.kext from Mac OS 10.6.2 from here.
• Wired USB keyboard and mouse (something like this is great)

Also, you will need to do the initial installation with 4GB of RAM rather than 8GB.

BIOS Settings

The current BIOS is WBIBX10J.86A from the Intel site here. Follow Intel’s instructions for updating should you need to do so.

Set all BIOS settings to default except for:

• Boot from CD first
• SATA mode to AHCI

Pre-OS Installation

Boot with the iBoot Supported disk in the drive.

Once you get to the screen with drive icons, eject the iBoot disk and insert the Snow Leopard disk and press F5 to refresh.

When you see “Mac OS X Install DVD” as one of the selections, select it using the cursor keys and type –x to select a safe mode boot. Press Enter to boot.

It will take several minutes before you see the Mac OS Apple logo and spinning wheel to indicate that Mac OS X is booting. During this time, the DVD will be accessed.

Mac OS X Installation

Once Mac OS X loads, you will be prompted to select the installation language and then you’ll see the “Install Mac OS” screen. Here, you must select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

In Disk Utility, select the hard drive you will install Mac OS to. Choose Partition and set the Volume Scheme to 1. Name the Volume (say Hackintosh HD) and check that the Format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Now press the Options button and set the Partition Scheme to GUID Partition Table. OK out of all of that and once Disk Utility has done its thing, you can exit out of it.

Go through the installation, which will take about 30 minutes before rebooting.

The reboot will fail because the Mac OS X installation disk is in the drive. Eject it (you may need to press eject immediately after powering the machine on), and put the iBoot disk in. Reboot and this time select the hard drive (e.g. Hackintosh HD) and type –x for a safe boot.

Go through the installation screens, though I suggest that you do not opt to transfer information from another Mac at this time.

Once all of this is complete, you’ll get a login screen with Safe Boot in red under the Mac OS X banner. This is because we booted with the –x switch.

Making it all work

When logged in, you will notice that neither sound nor USB work. We now need to install the Mac OS 10.6.4 update, and since there’s no USB this is where you will use the DVD that you burned.

Eject iBoot and insert the update DVD. Copy over MultiBeast to the desktop and install the Mac OS X update. Restart the computer and boot with the iBoot disk again and the –x switch.

Once you login, start MuliBeast and choose the following installation options:

· EasyBeast -> EasyBeast for Supported CPU

· System Utilities

· Advanced Options -> Kexts -> Audio -> HDAEnabler -> ALC888

· Advanced Options -> Kexts -> Audio -> LegacyHDA -> ALC888

· Advanced Options -> Kexts -> Network -> Intel82566MM

· Advanced Options -> smbios.plist -> iMac11,1 -> Core i7

· Advanced Options -> OSx86 Software -> Kext Utility

Once the installer has finished (the last phase takes several minutes), eject the iBoot disk and restart the computer.

Your computer should boot Mac OS from the hard drive without requiring safe mode.

At this point, USB and networking are functional, but audio is not.

Now, open the Applications folder and retrieve the AppleHDA.kext file from a Mac OS 10.6.2 insllation. Drag the kext onto Kext Utility in the Applications folder and let it do its thing.

Restart the computer and you should have working audio output.

Now run Software Update and download the various updates, shut the system down and insert remaining memory.

Turn the power on and you should have a working Hackintosh running Mac OS 10.6.4 with 8GB RAM.

Note that Sleep mode does not work and you should disable it.

This is what will be in your /Extra/Extensions folder:

· EvOreboot.kext

· fakesmc.kext

· Intel82566MM.kext

· IONetworkingFamily.kext

· IOUSBFamily.kext

· JMicron36xATA.kext

· JMicron36xSATA.kext

· Legacy888HDA.kext

· LegacyAppleRTC.kext

· NullCPUPowerManagement.kext

This is what has changed in your /System/Library/Extensions folder:

· HDAEnabler.kext (new)

· AppleHDA.kext (from 10.6.2)

Setting Up RAID

I use the two additional drives as a striped RAID array (RAID 0) for video editing. You can set this up in Disk Utility simply by selecting the RAID tab and dragging over the two unused drives.

Dual Booting Mac OS X/Windows 7

The way I have done this is to dedicate a new drive to Windows 7. Unplug all the other drives, plug in the drive that will contain Windows 7 and install Windows 7 to it.

Once Windows 7 is installed and happy, reconnect the other drives and go into the BIOS to ensure that the drive containing Mac OS X boots first. Now when you boot, you can hold down the Alt (Option) key to select which OS to boot.

Install Microsoft Windows 7 ISO from USB Flash Drive

Want to install Windows 7 from a bootable flash drive? The easy way is to use Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to make your USB flash drive bootable and copy over the files.

Silverlight Podcast - Expression Encoder 3

Download and listen to a podcast on Microsoft Expression Encoder 3, featuring screen capture and flexible compression profiles.

Right click to save either of the following files:

Download Microsoft Silverlight Podcast - Expression Encoder (Enhanced AAC Podcast for iPod)

Download Microsoft Silverlight Podcast - Expression Encoder 3 (MP3)

Follow the Blue Rabbit

I love Windows Live Writer for blog editing. But if I'm in Mac OS, firing up VMware just to run it seems like overkill. I used to use ecto as a blog editor but not only has it not kept up, it never really worked well for images.
Enter Blogo, featuring ease of use and a minimalist UI, it might fit the bill. It supports a large number of blog services out of the box and adds microblogging support for Twitter, and anything that is on ping.fm.
For those who like a full screen approach to editing their blog, Blogo's full screen editor almost delivers the goods. You're edit window is the middle third of the screen, but the pleasing grey background removes most distractions.

Home Built Intel Atom-based Windows Home Server

I completed my Intel Atom-based WHS build last night. This is a project that has languished for about a year and started with a “free after rebate” mini tower case from Fry’s, a spare motherboard, CPU and RAM. I bought a 5 drive internal SATA backplane like this one and five 500GB SATA drives (these days, I expect you can get 1TB drives for the price I paid).

The build was left incomplete for a while because (1) the SATA backplane didn’t actually fit in the free case, (2) in another case it required surgery to fit without hitting the motherboard, (3) the motherboard wasn’t compatible with the SATA RAID card I had, (4) the other motherboard was not suitable for a WHS build since it was too powerful. You know what it is like: the quick weekend project that ends up consuming time, parts, blood and sweat.

Fast forward to today and I came across the Intel D945GCLF2 board. It sells for around $80 and has Gigabit Ethernet, one PCI slot, one PATA port and two SATA ports. All you need to add is RAM and storage. Note that there is also an Intel D945GCLF board, which is very similar other than it has a single core Atom and a 10/100 Ethernet adaptor. I specifically wanted GbE for this application. I’ve had good luck with Intel boards, though there are a few other Atom-based mobos out there.

For installation, I temporarily added an IDE CD-ROM drive. This also proved useful for installing the motherboard drivers, since the out of the box WHS install didn’t recognise the network driver.

Since this board only has 2 SATA ports and I need 5 for the SATA backplane, I added a cheap 4 port SATA PCI card based on the Silicon Image 3114 chipset. Fry’s had a Sabrent one for $25 but this was either DOA or incompatible (no card ID banner on POST and unrecognised by WHS). I picked up an otherwise identical but differently branded card from another store. This card displays a Silicon Image RAID BIOS banner on POST and once I installed the driver and management utility, appeared in WHS. The SATA board is configured in pass-through mode so that it isn’t doing any form of RAID, leaving WHS to manage the drives, which appear as SCSI devices.

With everything set up, WHS now sees the two drives connected to the motherboard SATA ports and the other three drives connected through the PCI card. It has a “whopping” 2.5TB of storage!

Adobe CS4 Installation Joys

My copy of CS4 Production Premium turned up today. Four DVDs and 7GB later and I have everything installed. Well sort of.

First off, the installer was too dumb to shut down other Adobe products. Here’s the helpful dialogue box that came up when I fired up the installer:

Hmmm looks like something to do with Acrobat, but what exactly because there is no Adobe Acrobat SpeedLauncher process. Or rather there is but it is called something else. But why couldn’t the installer just do this for me? Exactly what unknowns are there for it to deal with?

OK so a few disks later and we’re all done. Let’s start an application and get the updates from its menu since the Adobe Updater doesn’t run automatically after install or appear under the Adobe Creative Suite programs menu.

So off we go and install the updates and look, we have half a gigabyte of them!

Now Microsoft is by no means perfect with regards to the installation experience and the size of updates. However, generally the products try to be intelligent about closing running applications and inform the user of an update immediately.

Silverlight vs. Flash Installation in Firefox

I recently went through the exercise of installing both Flash and Silverlight in Firefox on Windows on my new netbook. I’m using a beta build of Windows 7 and IE still comes with an old version of Flash which usually gets updated by Adobe fairly painlessly when you hit a Flash site. However, Firefox doesn’t come with Flash and if you hit a Flash-enabled site, you get prompted to install the plug-in by Firefox. What amazed me is the number of steps required to install Flash in Firefox compared to Microsoft’s competing technology called Silverlight. Let’s take a look:

Visit a Flash-enabled site like Hulu

 

Step 1: Click on Install Missing Plug-in button in Firefox.

Step 2: Can’t install it automatically, so need to do a Manual Install…

Step 3: Manual Install means being sent to Adobe Flash download page.

Step 4: Download the Flash player installation file in Firefox.

Step 5: Firefox asks me if I *really* want to install this binary (yes, I know I can turn this nag off).

Step 6: Doh! Firefox is running and needs to be closed down.

Step 7: All Firefox instances need to be close – I had 4 open including the download box.

Step 8: Flash is installed.

 

Step 9: I finally get to the content.

 

So after 9 steps, I get to the content. Now let’s take a look at the Silverlight installation experience.

Visit a Silverlight-enabled site like Netflix Watch Instantly.

Step 1: Click on Install Now to get the Silverlight plug-in

Step 2: Run the Silverlight installer.

Step 3: Install the Silverlight plug-in.

Step 4: Silverlight is now installed. While you’re told to restart browsers, the Silverlight Netflix player had already started in the currently open Firefox session.

So what’s the takeaway? It is an easier and quicker experience for the end-user to install Silverlight in Firefox than it is to install Flash due to a more streamlined installation experience, lower user interaction and reduced cognitive load.

I don’t care about download size, installation time, or the fact that once one of these plug-ins is installed you don’t need to reinstall them. I’m just looking at this from an initial installation experience standpoint.

(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, though these are my personal views and findings.)

Make a Bootable USB Flash Drive

UNetbootin is a great utility that creates a bootable USB flash drive and installs an operating system like FreeDOS or Linux to that drive. Even better, it enables you to put an ISO image on the USB drive, so you could download a Ubuntu ISO and put it on a USB flash drive, then boot from it.

Useless Error Message

This one is from Adobe Reader 9 and happens every time a PDF is opened in IE.

MS Paint: The Future is in the Past

Friday humour.

Internet Humor: Why using desktop software is like watching Paint dry - Valleywag