I’ve written several times in the past about the lack of network shares showing up in the Finder sidebar. The issue has been around since I first built my hackintosh using 10.5.2. Nothing would show up, other Macs or Windows (SMB) shares. I’ve tried many suggestions with no luck until this morning. My motherboard, a Gigabyte P35-DS3R using the Realtek 8111B chip.
Insanelymac has an old post about a Realtek driver than was originally released in 2006. It’s been updated a few times since, and was reported to work with leopard. I’m no expert on installing kernel extentions so I installed using the kext helper app that came with the Kalyway Leopard install. After reboot the second part of the recommendation was to install an IONetworkingFamily Fix package. This went on, another reboot and suddenly the Macbook and Hackintosh could see each other. They can both connect to the others shares, and have been stable now for a couple of hours.
So that’s the Mac to Mac part fixed, but SMB shares are still not displayed. A PC can see and access both Macs shared using SMB, but the Macs cannot see the PC unless I use Command-K to connect the old way. The Synology Diskstation is also invisible so it looks like this is a problem with all SMB shares.
Insanelymac post for the Realtek driver
Sourceforge Realtek driver page
Get IONetworkingFamily Fix.pkg from Mediafire
UPDATE Two steps forward, one step back. The Realtek drivers worked fine until I woke the hackintosh from sleep (I have been using the modified Kalyway 10.5.3 sleep kernel). The network interface lost its IP address and wouldn’t renew until I manually refreshed from network settings. Another search of Insanelymac showed the solution was to manually specify an IP address rather than use DHCP. Works fine, so I’m now looking for an SMB fix.
Glad to see you were able to at least fix part of your problem. I plan on building a hackintosh very soon and i have been reading up on which components to use. Your articles on hackintoshes has been very helpful.