It’s that time when I decide to buy a new hard drive and install a new Hackintosh on my computer. I just bought a Samsung 850 500GB SSD. This will now house OS X rather than the 5 year old 64GB SSD it was on previously. I was struggling with the 64GB I had previously - it just wasn’t enough, and I constantly had to remove things to make space.

This time around I’ve also decided to try a new boot loader, Clover. Not much reason for this other than it’s new and meant to be “the way forward”. It’s also compatible with UEFI (which my motherboard, the Gigabyte Z77-UD3H, supports).

I used this website as a general guide.

It’s a great, general guide for installing OS X with Clover. Of course, each system is unique and has its own issues.

Here are the specs of my system in full:

  • Intel i5 3570K
  • Gigabyte Z77-UD3H (can’t remember which revision)
  • XFX Radeon 6870

These three are really the only important parts, as far as I know.

I made a silly mistake when installing Clover on my installation USB drive, and that was selecting my Macbook Air’s boot hard drive instead… Yeah, smooth. So I had to spend 15 minutes making sure I cleaned all the Clover files - there was the risk that Clover would alter my actual Mac’s boot drive.

The other main thing I did differently to Tony’s guide above was to make sure I disabled all my other hard drives in the BIOS - I don’t know about OS X, but Windows loves (loved?) to install files on partitions it’s not meant to. Anyway, to be safe, I disabled the rest and everything went smoothly.

Booting into OS X for the first time showed me a few issues: only one monitor was working, and I had no sound or ethernet connectivity. On the upside, I had these issues with my last installation and I kept instructions to my future self on how to resolve them. On the downside, the graphics instructions told me to alter my Chameleon plist file… well, I’m not using Chameleon anymore! So I had to find the necessary file to fix up Clover.

For those wondering, here are the kexts/instructions I went with for graphics, audio, and network:

  • Installed ALXEthernet.kext 1.0.2 via MultiBeast
  • Installed AppleHDADisabler.kext (I don’t remember where I got this kext from originally, sorry)
  • Installed VoodooHDA.kext (also don’t remember where I found this one)
  • Changed VideoPorts=4 and FBName=gabba in the Clover config.plist of EFI

I hate OS X mouse acceleration so I installed a driver for my simple Microsoft Mouse. I believe I just searched ‘Microsoft Intellipoint 8.2’. Works perfectly. Currently, I have to manually launch the preferences pane for this to work every time OS X launches - there is a way to automate this, I’ve just been lazy.

I’m pretty happy with the setup. I think in the future I will go with motherboard and graphics card that are even more compatible. This installation isn’t perfect because there are times where the audio will no longer work after waking up from sleep; I would say that’s a minor problem though. So far no kernel panics or any other major problems.

Next on the list: format one of my storage drives to be exFAT because I don’t trust any of the NTFS OS X drivers after one wiped one of my hard drives. Thanks, Paragon.