I'm A Mac and I'm a PC

have you seen all the ads that apple made for Mac vs PC with "Justin Long",
you can spend about 15 minutes at this apple page and see them all, some are boring but most made me laugh, my favorite is the one with the vista body guard (named: "Security")

make sure to see this very funny Mac vs PC south park style.



Enjoy.

Prepare the disk partitions

This post is a continue to the "Gather Hardware Data" post.

in this post we will prepare the disk space needed for the leopard and/or tiger install, although you can do this (partially) from the install screens at the Disk Utility menu, still there are several things that can't be done from there, for instance resize partitions, delete partitions, etc.

after you see the number of hard drives you have and the number of partitions, its time to decide in what partition should the tiger and leopard installations shell reside in, (if you wonder why do you need tiger then the answer is if you have an upgrade version of leopard then you need it see more at this post.) both leopard and tiger needs separated partitions, the minimum size required is 5G - 5.5G i would use 6G for tiger and as much as needed (above 5G) for the leopard, the tiger can be wiped and used for other needs after we finish with it.

so from XP right click "My Computer" and choose "manage"

from vista open "Start Menu" and right click "Computer" and choose "Manage"

next the management console appear (from here looks the same on XP and vista), on the left tree select "Storage" and "Disk Management"

on vista it looks like this:

now you can do operations like select the appropriate partition and delete it and create an empty one so there will be a free space for the installation (note if you delete the partition data on that partition is lost forever there is no undo)

in vista there is another option, you can shrink the partition on the account of the free space available, so for instance if you have a 50G partition with data on it, but 30G is free space, you can shrink the partition to still exist in vista and keep the data intact but take for instance 25G from the free space in order to create another partition, in that case the windows partition win bbe 20G occupied data 5G free space and the new partition 25G unformatted. (there is no need to format it since we will not use windows format (like NTFS, FAT, FAT32) but mac format (HFS+)). in order to shrink a partition do this:

right click on the selected partition from the graphical representation and choose "Shrink Volume":

then you see a dialog asking you to specify the data to convert from free space to unformatted partition

in the end you will get something looking like this:

the problem with this solution is that like every Microsoft solution it looks as if the developers did not take the time to learn, design, or test the feature, sometimes there are blocking files that reside at the middle or end of the partition, they are not movable, and they prevent from shrinking the whole partition free space, the way to workaround this is to use external Defrag tool (Microsoft built in defrag does not do the job), tools like: "Paragon partition manager", "DiskKeeper" (i used it its fast reliable and delivers),

before activating these tools do this:

1. disable System Restore and shadow copy
2. disable on the designated drive the virtual memory system cache
3. then you can defrag MFT
4. and defrag the files

in order to disable the virtual memory (A.K.A Paging file) do this:

open "Start Menu" right click "Computer" and select "Properties",

a "System properties" window appear,

on the left sidebar at the bottom there is a "System Performance" link, press it, and a "Performance Options" dialog appears,

in "Virtual Memory" click the "Change" button at the bottom, "Virtual Memory" dialog appears,

in the upper HD table select the HD you wish to shrink and choose for it the "No paging file" radio button, then press set and ok, reboot the computer.

in order to turn off "System Restore" do this:

from the "System Property" windows choose the "System Protection" link,

it will display the "System Properties" dialog, choose the "System Protection" tab,

then click on the "System Restore" button, uncheck the HD you wish to shrink, it will ask you to verify, then press "Turn System Restore Off".

press OK and close all dialogs and reboot the machine.

thats it, next you need to start the install procedure for that please goto the "BIOS Options for hackintosh" post.

Enjoy.

Gather Hardware Data

this is a continue post to the first post of "how to install hackintosh"

in this post i explain all there is to know about gathering the hardware information from the windows already installed on the PC, if this is not the case, you can skip this post or install windows and gather the info, it sounds crazy i know, but worth it, it will allow you to setup the correct drivers and avoid incompatibility issues.

the gathering data starts with checking that your computer is "hackintosh ready",

this is done by executing the CPU-z app that you downloaded in the previous section,

there you will see several tabs each elaborating on the hardware you own.

tabs include: CPU, Cache, Mainboard, Memory, SPD, About.

the most important tab we will use is the CPU, what you need to check is that your CPU support the feature SSE3,

although today you can download "iatkos v1.0iR2" leopard 10.5.2 image that supports SSE2 for older PCs or AMD based PC, non the less i urge you to gather all the info you can and save it, you never know what application/driver/hardware you will install/custom/buy in the future that will require this info, and if you are like me, removed your windows partition (since loosing 40-50G just for the need of 3-7 apps is not justifiable) then you will need this info stashed.

after saving all the tabs in the CPU-z (probably as jpg on a remote computer or disk on key), next we will head on to the Device Manager.

on XP right-click the "My Computer" icon on the desktop and choose "Properties"

on vista open the start menu and right-click "Computer"

on XP after that you see the "System Properties" dialog, choose the "Hardware" tab and click the "Device Manager"

on vista you see this next screen (the new System Properties), and on the left side bar you click on "Device Manager"

from this point both XP and Vista look the same (beside look and feel) so next we go through major hardware components that usually needs drivers, for instance Display Adapter, Network Card, Sound blaster, if you have some special mouse or keyboard, Bluetooth, Power Management, etc. and then we right click these icons and save the info as much as we can.

what we need to save is: irq, memory range, the exact name and model of the component, in several i would suggest saving the device id and vendor id, these parameters can be found at the "details" tab under the first drop-down item "Device Instance ID",

the line that appear includes the Vendor ID next to the VEN_ string in this example it is: "10DE", also next to it you find the Device ID next to the string DEV_ in this case it is: "00C0".

next we will collect the EDID information of the "Display Adapter", you do that using the previously downloaded "softMCCS" app.

1. run the application and you will see this next screen
2. open the EDID Identification section
3. go to "Raw Data" and copy the content, save it as text

next step is to clear HD space or decide on what disk/partition the Hackintosh will reside on.

in order to do that we need to take two steps: 

1. learn/save your hard drive/partition data 
2. take action such as delete partition or shrink a partition.

first step:

open command box (A.K.A DOS Box) from run write CMD

next write (XP or VISTA) DiskPart, it will enter the windows "Disk Partition management" CLI (Command Line Interface).

if you write ? and press enter you get a help screen that display the available commands and a short explanation next to them.

now use the command "list" in order to see all the available hard disk, partitions, and if needed volumes

in order to see all the hard drive installed on your system use: "list disk"

after displaying all the HD you need to choose the hard disk you want to work on / see further details on. you do that using the command: "select disk X" where X stands for the hard drive number.

after selecting the drive you can see all the partition on the selected disk write: "list part"

now that you know your hard drives and installed partitions (especially size and their number) write it down, you will need it in the install stage.

you can select the partition (in case you need it) using "select part X" where X stands for the desired partition number.

and you can display the list of volumes on your PC (volume can be a single hard drive, CD, DVD, several Hard Drives combined together into a single volume etc.) using the command: "list vol"

Note: the bootable Hard Disk is marked with an astrik (*) sign next to it.

you may change it using the "Active" command but we will do it after the install stage so there is no need to do it here.

you can also ask for details at any stage on a specific object (disk,part,vol) using the Details command.

in order to exit the DiskPart utility simply write "Exit"

next we need to prepare the disk space needed for the leopard and/or tiger install goto the post: "Prepare the disk partitions"

Enjoy.

Should i install Tiger or Leopard or both

my first question was should i install Tiger (10.4) or Leopard (OS X 10.5) or both.
at first i installed tiger, then i installed leopard as an upgrade to the tiger in a different partition,


Side Note: i tried tiger for a while to get the feel of the OS learned what is so good in mac, that was a quite a reprogram of my habits and knowledge regarding how OS should be, Microsoft has ruin us all but i was willing to learn and try, once you get the hang of it you understand how good the OS is, and, little by little i found that all new features that i was exited about on MSOS was just a rip-off a copy from OS X and not only that, but a bad copy, a heavy copy and slow copy! so today i enjoy both worlds since i have parallels and dual boot, but you should know that i use MS only for gaming purposes although most of my games i use in OS X many more accessible only to MS, i am an average joe but i develop, do office stuff, surf the web, blog,see video, listen to music, gaming, torrents... etc. but i have yet to find why i need MS OS (beside gaming) but again on mac i can get both worlds.
a cute youtube movie on that:

then i upgraded to leopard, that was an amazing leap from windows especially from vista, after leopard i had no need for tiger, i upgraded the tiger partition into leopard as well, so at this point i had two separated installation of leopard, i use the tigerToLeopard partition as a test partition and every install that can crash (Panic) my system i test there, kind of a sand box. after perfecting the install i deleted the partition and joined it with the primary leopard installation but that how-to will be covered in another post.


also note that since leopard (that i used, i assume all other hackintosh are also upgrades) is upgrade to an existing mac, so it is mandatory to install mac os x before leopard, if you try to install it without previous system it will display the welcome video in a loop 3 times and crash

i tried in the "Do you already own a Mac" screen to choose "do not transfer my information now" but it looped through the welcome screen, so the conclusion (4 me) that Tiger is mandatory, but if you find a better method please comment here.




Note: i think tiger is a very good OS it has all the basics of leopard that i love and enjoy, it is more stable and less hardware demanding, but leopard has made the final leap and got me converted, it has spaces and time machine that realy leaves no question as to if i will indure windows for another year or two,