Hackintosh part 10

When I completed the build and testing of my hackintosh I still had plans for some future updates to the hardware. 2Gb of Ram is fine for general use but gets used up fast if you start running windows in a virtual machine as well as Mail, Firefox, Graphic Converter and several other apps. I’ve now added another 2Gb of PC800 Kingston ram of the same spec as the original, and it’s working fine. System Profiler reports four banks of 1Gb PC800 ram and no problems. I can now allocate 1Gb of Ram to a virtual machine without slowing down the rest of the system.

In my hackintosh disaster recover articles I used an external USB hard drive to make a bootable backup of my 500Gb internal drive. The cost of 1Tb drives has steadily fallen to under £100 so my second upgrade was adding a 1Tb Samsung Spinpoint hard drive to the system. I used Aria again for the order, and paid £96.29 including VAT. This drive has been partitioned into two equal parts (465Gb each) with one as a bootable backup of the main drive and the other for Time Machine. I did a fresh kalyway 10.5.2 install onto the backup drive and tested it was bootable before using Superduper to clone my existing drive to it. I set Time Machine to ignore a couple of my working folders and the Desktop since that hosts a lot of temporary files. It automatically ignored the Backup partition I’m guessing as it was on the same drive. I set it off to backup 200Gb of data, which took around two hours to finish. Much has been written about the Time Machine interface so I won’t repeat it here, just mention that it’s very slick and easy to use.

The final upgrade for now is a replacement for the occasionally problematic Plextor Px755SA DVDrw. I have suffered with this becoming inaccessible to the system after burning a disc, so was looking to try another drive. Pioneer have a cheap SATA model, the DVR-215, which currently costs around £16 so I ordered one to try. I removed the Plextor unit and fitted the Pioneer, then burned a Disc using iTunes. All went well until I tried to eject the disc. The drive disappeared just like the Plextor had, and was inaccessible until the computer was restarted. A second try with iTunes had no problem burning a CDr and ejecting it, and Toast burnt a DVD-r with no issues. I’ll do a bit of searching on this one, as I initially thought the Plextor drive was being flaky. Looks like the problem may be a bit more Leopard/hackintosh based.