Mac OS X on PC Tutorial

Well this is one of the most exciting things I've done lately with my pc. I know lots of people enjoy Mac and Mac OS X , or the new Leopard and I have to say I was quite excited about it myself even though I've never owned a Mac. I saw the Apple presentations about the new Macs and Leopard and I liked everything so much that I decided to actually try and install Mac OS
on my pc. Now if you're anything like me, you're just going to be curious about the way I did it so I'm going to do this in two posts, the first being the actual steps, and the second being my feedback on Mac OS .

So here goes the tutorial.

1) First of all, unless you're willing to risk it all, you're going to need a separate hard disk than the one you are using for Windows. The two OSs can't coexist on the same hard even if they are on different partitions. ( Now I've heard of people who actually installed them on the same hard but based on my own experience and the way the two different systems work that seems fairly impossible).

2) Secondly you're going to have to download the "VMWare files for patched Mac OS X Tiger Intel” from the net. This usually can be found around on torrents under the name : "tiger-x86.tar.bz2". Note: this is only Mac OS X and NOT Leopard.

3) The last thing you are going to need is a program with which you can burn ( dd ) an image onto your drive. I actually tried two things. First i tried Cygwin, which emulates a Linux type command promt for Windows and with which you can dd images. This didn't work out at all. And what I used after that, and the program that I recommend is TransMac. It's a simple easy to use program that opens all kind of Mac files under Windows so it can be quite handy. It can be found around the net either in this simple form or as part of " Mac OSx Hacking Tools" pack released some time ago on torrents.

4) Ok , now that you have all of these, all you need to do is unrar the tiger-x86 archive. This make take some time depending on your machine. The files you are going to use is tiger-x86-flat.img . As you noticed it's an img file, older format used before OS X by Mac ( the new one is .dmg but don't worry TransMac has no issue with this).

5) Next thing you have to do is burn the image using TransMac ( or whatever other program you prefer) on the hard disk you want to install on. Note: Windows will now see this drive as unformatted and of unknown format. DO NOT FORMAT IT as Windows will suggest.

6) well, technically that's it. Restart and boot on the respective hard drive. Check your bios settings if it's not already set to boot on it. A grey/white screen with an Apple logo should appear if everything worked and if you're one of the lucky ones MAc OS will boot and you'll be happy. If not I suggest you keep on reading this.

7) If for some reason Mac won't boot try the following:
-> At the Darwin boot screen press any key and then type -x . This will boot the system in safe mode. It shouldn't pose any problems if this works.
-> In case that didn't work , again restart and at the darwin screen type -v . This will boot in Verbose mode and you will most likely see what drivers failed to load and what's causing the problem. If, by any chance, after loading whatever driver you see a " Still waiting for root device " message, then welcome to the gang. This is probably the most common error us pc users encouter when trying to use MacOS. This is a generic error meaning that no one actually knows what causes this error or how to solve it. The error actually happens because MacOS can't actually see the device from which it just booted, it can't find itself so to speak. Well, after I searched around the net, and saw that way too many people adviced starting to modify kext files from the original image I decided to do my own thing and this is what you can try also without actually fearing you'll destroy the image ( Disclaimer : Try this at your own risk. If you're familiar with BIOS settings such as drive configurations, s-ata / ide drives , and boot sequences you should have absolutely no problem. If not you may end up crashing your computer. ).

What I noticed is that MacOS can't even conceive not being the primary IDE drive. So if you have IDE drives be sure to set the one on which you have mac to Primary Master. This should fix the problem in most cases.
If you don't have IDE drives ( I only have sata hard drives) than it's trickier. I fooled around with the settings but I just couldn't make it work until I specifically disabled all IDE drives in bios ( i had my dvd rom in there ..so I can't use my dvd rom while using Macos :( ). That's it, if this still doesn't work there's nothing specific that I can say. Search around the net and you're sure to find tutorials on how to edit the kext files, and that might solve the problem, then again it might not.

I'm posting my own specs here, just to show you on what I did this :
Pentium D 3.4 ghz
Intel D946GZIS Motherboard
1GB DDR2 RAM
Nvidia Geforce 7300 GT
And I have 3 160gb S-ATA Hard Disks

Note #1: If you do get to use Mac with this install, and you will want to install other applications you'll have issues with the user acount password. The image was made by DeadMoo and so that's the acount. Now the original tutorial ( out of which 3/4 didn't work for me ) said you could modify the password in the control panel while booting in verbose mode. But this is the
much simpler solution. Deadmoo's password is BOVINITY ( without caps in case it's case sensitive). And now that you know this you can simply go and change the password from inside the OS.

Note #2: The onboard ethernet controller didn't work under MacOSx. I had to install a separate one. Also Mac didn't recognise my video card. Whenever Mac doesn't recognise a card that you can take out , well do just that. Take it out and boot MacOS. Then put it back in. It might just do the trick. If it doesn't ..well ..get a real Mac. Also remember that certain chipsets and pieces of hardware are not supported at all so that might be an issue. Look around the net for a full list.

Hope this has been of some help, and you have good luck and this works for you. Have fun!