Hackintosh upgrade from 10.7 to 10.8

There are plenty of excellent reviews of Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, so this post will focus on the steps taken to upgrade my fully working 10.7.4 system to 10.8. This is not intended as a complete install-from-nothing guide, requiring a working 10.7.x system to start with.

First some details on the hardware used. My Gigabyte P35-DS3R/Q6600 system was re-purposed at the start of 2012, and replaced with the following:

• Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 Motherboard
• Intel Core i5 2500k cpu
• 16Gb DDR3 Ram
• Nvidia 9800GT 1Gb video card from previous system
• 2Tb and 1.5Tb hard drives from previous system
•  DVD-RW  and BD-Rom from previous system

10.5.6 on Hackintosh

The latest update to Mac OS Leopard is now out, and 10.5.6 looks so far to be working fine on my hackintosh. I installed Leopard using the Chameleon/Boot132 method a while back which allows the use of Software Update for OS upgrades. This time around the update installed just as it would on any other Mac, a couple of restarts and the system was up and running again. Apple have an article listing all the fixes and changes for anyone interested.

As usual, I strongly recommend making a backup before the upgrade, especially for hackintosh users. SuperDuper has been suffering a problem recently on my system so I’m back to using the excellent (and free) Carbon Copy Cloner.

UPDATE While the install was painless the results since have been less than smooth. I expected to copy some kext’s from my backup to get audio and the basics (reboot, sleep etc) working, but even with these the hackintosh would not sleep correctly. Every time I tried waking from sleep the system rebooted, so for now it’s back to to 10.5.5 using Carbon Copy Cloner to restore from the backup.

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.

Hackintosh disaster recovery part 2

In part one I looked at the steps I took to get my hackintosh working again after accidentally overwriting the boot information. The computer has been working fine for over three weeks since, and I haven’t found any side effects with software or hardware. My latest efforts have been focused on making bootable backups for use in the event of an unbootable hackintosh.

10.5.2 is finally here

I know it’s only a software update, but this one has enough bug fixes and tweaks to justify a service pack 1 title. 10.5.2 is now available in software update as a substantial 341Mb download. Good job software update supports resuming as I would hate to get 99% of this and have to start again. I’ve stopped all other internet traffic on my network so I can get this asap, but it’s still a relatively slow download. More news on the changes once it’s installed, and don’t forget to back up all your valuable data before updating. I ran Superduper this morning so I have a bootable backup waiting if there are any problems.