It’s been a few weeks now since I first started building my Hackintosh and I have to say the experience was much more challenging than I thought it would be. When I started the project I had about 4 hours each evening for about a week to complete the project. Since this was not my first Hackintosh build, I thought that would be enough time. I gave myself two evenings to put the project together and then I figured I would use the evenings through the rest of the week to troubleshoot any problems I had with audio not working or networking issues or any other similar types of problems that might crop up.
As I mentioned before, the Silencio 550 computer case that I chose has a reputation for having restricted airflow so as I put all the components together, it was really important for me to take my time and route all the cables so that they did not restrict airflow and open up the case is much as possible. As you can see by the pictures I’ve attached, I think I did a pretty good job of keeping everything clean and neat inside the case and allow plenty of space for clean air flow. I also removed one of the hard drive racks to open up space inside the case even more and allow for complete unrestricted air flow. You may also remember that I chose to replace the stock fans of the computer case with some higher RPM fans and that I think was a good decision. The fans I purchased are a little bit noisier, but the computer is operating at very cool temperatures and it is still within the noise specifications that I needed for my studio. The motherboard came equipped with all of the documentation that I needed to know where to attach the components, and the zip ties that came included with the computer case allowed me to manage all of the cables and keep them out of the way of air flow. It did take me a little bit longer to assemble the entire computer than I originally thought that it would. This was in part due to the CPU cooler assembly. It is made to work with either Intel or AMD processors so I had to go through the instruction manual carefully to make sure that I used only the pieces that I needed for my processor and that it was assembled correctly.The end result is a very clean computer interior that has great airflow and delivers excellent performance.
After the assembly was complete, it was time to start installing my legal copy of Lion that I purchased from the Mac App store. I followed the guide found here from TonymacX86.com and used a legal copy of lion that I purchased from the Mac App Store. Before I started the actual installation of Lion, I went to Disk Utility and formatted the hard drive as a single 1.5 TB partition. The first time I installed Lion I clicked on the Utilities menu and then chose “Restore System From Backup.” My Time Machine backup is over 400 GB in size, so this took a couple of hours to complete. After it was finished, all my programs and information were transferred accurately. However, the hard drive was not booting into Lion without first booting via the USB, so I used the EasyBeast Install found in MultiBeast to try and fix this. Unfortunately, this still did not allow the hard drive to boot without first using the USB. I spent quite a bit of time on this and never could get it to boot properly. I finally decided that the problem might be related to my Time Machine backup, since it contains information from a non-Hackintosh machine. I decided to do a clean installation of Lion and I re-formatted the hard drive once again.
Lion was successfully installed in about 15 minutes. At the completion of the installation, it asked me if I wanted to “Transfer Information To This Mac.” I chose the “get info from Time Machine” option and the installation of the Time Machine backup took a couple of hours just asked before. I then went into MultiBeast and installed EasyBeast, but, once again, I could not get the hard drive to boot without the USB. I double checked and triple checked all of my settings on my BIOS and I tried several of the other options in MultiBeast including Chimera and UserDSDT Install. I also tried Repairing Permissions afterward. After having no success, I decided that perhaps the Time Machine backup was still the problem, and I decided to once again format the hard drive, do a clean installation of Lion, and try to get the Hackintosh working without my Time Machine backup in the picture.
However, this time when I tried to install Lion, Disk Utility said that there was no hard drive available. I then rebooted the computer and this time it DID see the hard drive. I started installing Lion but after about 10 minutes the installation quit and it said that there was no hard drive. I then tried reformatting the hard drive again and was successful. However, this cycle of not seeing the hard drive, rebooting, seeing the hard drive, and the installation failing, continued to happen over and over again. Since the hard drive was still under warranty. I returned it to Newegg and they shipped me a replacement. However, this meant that I was not able to work on the project for a full week. To Be Continued…
