Install Mac OS X Lion 10.7 on PC Hackintosh

After writing a number of Hackintosh Guides, we are revealing curtains off the next big Guide that had been keeping us Busy for last few weeks.

Its now possible to Install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on your PC with the standard Hackintosh techniques.

Note: Hackintosh PCs are for nerds who desire to have them with effort, if you are lazy, you may quit now.

This Hackintosh is based on the developer release of Mac OS X Lion released to Apple’s developers.

Update: You can checkout the video of my hackintosh at the end of the post.

Minimum Requirements:

* Intel Core 2 Duo or better i.e. Core i3, i5, i7. (no Core Duo or AMD right now).
* 2GB RAM (4GB recommended)
* A Nvidia or ATi radeon graphics card. (On Intels get ready to go glitchy)

Pre-Requisites:

 

Microsoft MCTS Certification, MCITP Certification and over 2000+ Exams at Actualkey.com

 

* Mac OS X Lion .dmg image (Search on torrents or ask your Apple developer program friends)
* Existing Hackintosh PC – Can be a Snow Leopard or Leopard form any of our existing guides. OR ask any of your friends to lend you a Mac for preparing USB.
* EFI Boot Loader – iBoot Download (Let me know @taranfx on twitter if link goes down)
* 2 USB thumb drives, one  atleast 8gb in size.

How to Install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on PC/Laptop

1. Boot into existing Mac OS X installation (Leopard or Snow Leopard). This can be your friend’s Mac, it doesn’t matter.

2. Double click Mac OS X Lion.dmg to mount it.

3. In the Terminal, Type the following:

open /Volumes/Mac\ OS \ X\ Install\ ESD/BaseSystem.dmg

4. Plug your 8gb USB drive and Open Disk Utility.

5. Format the USB drive as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.

diskUtility-Lion

6. Navigate to Finder and locate the restored drive and goto folder System > Installation and there you will see “Packages”. Remove it. Create a new Empty folder called “Packages”.

7. In Terminal, type:

open /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/Packages

copy the contents to System > Installation > Packages (empty folder).

8. Locate your “FakeSMC.kext” (typically in Extra > Extensions) and copy it to USB’s  “System > Library > Extensions”.

9. In Terminal navigate to “Extensions” (you can do this quickly by typing “cd ” and then dragging & dropping “Extensions” to Terminal) and fix permissions using:

sudo su

[your password here]

chown -R 0:0 FaksSMC.kext

chmod -R 755 FakeSMC.kext

That should be all for the USB. It now has all the basic stuff for kicking the installation. We’ll add few more things to the USB to make it bootable and compatible with hackintosh hardware.

Phase 2. Installing iBOOT

Option I: If you have Windows Installation on same PC

1. Boot into your Windows installation (on same PC where you wish to install the Mac OS Lion) and extract the iBOOT, run the installation from iBOOT_SetupToolBeta.2.exe

2. Plug in your second USB drive and format (FAT preferred). Replug the usb drive and click “Prepare iBOOT” inside the iBOOT app.

At this time you can add DSDT (place it in the DSDT folder in your iBOOT USB stick, i.e. “iBOOT USB Stick > efi > dsdt”) or EFI drivers, if your hardware needs any. Checkout OSx86 wiki or insanelymac forums if you are not very sure. Option 2: No Windows. Use Mac instead

1. Navigate to folder iBOOT > DuetToHDD. Drag and drop this file to Terminal, press space bar and type “write /dev/rdiskXsY”

Where X = your second USB’s Drive number and Y is Partition number. Y should be 0 for most cases ,since its single partition.

2. Press space bar again and drag the file “Efildr20″ into terminal and hit Enter.

That’s it Both your USBs are ready to get into Action.

Phase III: Installation of Mac OS X Lion

If you’ve made it well so far, you shouldn’t face much problems, provided your hardware is compatible.

1. Go to BIOS settings of your PC, enable USB booting and give USB the highest priority for booting.

2. Plugin both of your USB drives (iBOOT USB & installation USB) and switch ON your PC. You should see a GUI interface in few moments. In some cases you might even see a white line for couple of seconds.

iboot

3. If you see GUI interface, Press “U” to increase resolution. (alternatively “D” to decrease). Do so until you see the available USB drives. If you still don’t Press “V” to probe the USB volumes.

4. Lets now set Boot flags by pressing “M” followed by boot flags i.e. “-v” to enable verbose mode. You can also use other flags that you know of from previous hackintosh guides like arch=i386, arch=x86_64, cpus=1 etc.

5. Select your Installation USB which might be shown as “Mac OS X Base System”.

Troubleshooting Tip: If somehow you don’t get this visual, you have either done a blunder during preparation of Installation USB or you are missing an important flag for your hardware.

6. Soon you would enter the installation where you can select your Language and continue with standard Mac OS X install. If you are confused over this, checkout the Video in Step 3 of this Hackintosh guide, its very much identical till the point you reboot. Basically, what you have to do is format the hard drive you want to install OSX Lion to (go to Utilities -> Disk Utility, then click on the drive, select 1 Partition, Mac OS X Journaled, give it a name, and make sure GUID Partition Table is set in the Options. After you Apply the new partition, go back to the installer and install like normal to that drive. You may want to customize the install to remove unnecessary stuff like printers, etc.

Phase IV: Finalizing and Fixing stuff

Bear it with us, we are almost done. This is the last part that would ensure that you can boot into Mac OS X Lion without trouble, everytime!

1. Once your Installation completes, Boot into iBoot again and Load “MAc OS X Base System” from USB. When installation screen appears, Goto “Utilities > Terminal” and type in:

cd /Volumes/Lion/System/Library/CoreServices/
rm -rf PlatformSupport.plist
cd /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System/System/Library/Extensions/
cp -R FakeSMC.kext /Volumes/Lion/System/Library/Extensions/
chown -R 0:0 /Volumes/Lion/System/Library/Extensions/FakeSMC.kext
chmod -R 755 /Volumes/Lion/System/Library/Extensions/FakeSMC.kext
exit

Where “Lion” is the name of the partition on which OSX Lion was installed.

2. Reboot and load iBOOT again, this time select your “Lion” Partition where you installed it, instead of USB.

3. All should go well and you should see a welcome Video. Congratulations, You now have Mac OS X Lion installed on your PC.

Mac-OS-X-Lion-Desktop

Phase V: Post-Installation Driver (Hardware) tips

Chances are most of your hardware like Graphics card, sound card, network card don’t work yet. Lets fix them one by one.

1. Add KEXTs to iBOOT

You can customize iBOOT to install kexts from “Extra > Extensions” from any of your previous hackintosh machines into “System > Library > Extensions”. If its your first time, you will have to checkout OSx86 wiki to see what kexts do you need to make your hardware work.

2. Essentials:

We are listing some of the must have KEXTs:

* FakeSMC.kext – We’ve already installed it. Essential for System Management controller emulation
* ElliotForceLegacyRTC.kext – Prevents the CMOS Reset encountered on some motherboards.
* NullCPUManagement.kext – Disables AppleIntelCPUManagement.kext which may cause Kernel Panics with incompatible DSDT.

Optional  KEXTs:

* EvOreboot.kext – Makes your hardware compatible for Shutdown and Restart (yes, Really!) without actually needing a DSDT.
* IOAHCIStorageBlockInjector.kext – Makes external drives behave as internal.
* NVEnabler 64.kext (NVidia GeForce 9500GT)
* VoodooHDA.kext 2.7.1 (2.7.2 doesn’t work, ALC888b)
* RealtekR1000SL.kext (Realtek 8111)

3. Making Graphics Card Work with Lion

Most of the Modern ATi, Nvidia Graphics card would work out of the box since Apple supports them in macbooks. If on a Nvidia graphics card, you are not able to get the optimal resolution, try using Fermi drivers NVDAResman.kext and NVDAFG100hal.kext from NVIDIA drivers into /System/Library/Extensions/ of Lion, and remove GeForce.kext.

I’ve achieved QE/CI out of the box with my ATi Radeon card (Desktop), and with some additional work on Nvidia GT 230m (laptop), but mileage may vary. I`ll update more about QE/CI support as soon as I get handson different machines.