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Exploring hackintosh!

Exploring hackintosh!

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Krish
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4 min read

What is Hackintosh?

From wiki:

A Hackintosh (a portmanteau of "Hack" and "Macintosh") is a computer that runs Apple's Macintosh operating system macOS (formerly named "Mac OS X" or "OS X") on computer hardware not authorized for the purpose by Apple

For more information read up here.

The whole concept of installing an OS on a HW that's not meant for it sounded like a hack when I first read about it. It kind of got me intrigued and decided to give it a try on a HP laptop for the kicks. Note: we were NOT successful in installing hackintosh on the pc, but the process was really cool and I was on a roll throughout. This article is not about how to install hackintosh on a pc, but what failures we ran into during the process. It's more like a documentation of failures.

The PC in subject was a HP spectre x360 with processor type Kaby Lake and the Mac OS we attempted to install was Big Sur

failure1.jpeg

Fabulous failures

We looked up reddit, twitter and few other sites to collate procedural information and finally settled with this .

Failure 1: Process halted with ACPI error after bootup.

  • We used a Mac book to create the bootable usb. This is by and large the easiest. The detailed procedure is outlined here
  • We chose all the EFI files mac recommended to create the folder.
  • It took about 45 mins to create the bootable disk.
  • After selecting Install Big Sur on startup, it did a whole bunch of stuff and finally failed at an ACPI error.

Congratulations, this was our first error!

Failure 2: hdii error after booting off usb

  • We used a windows PC to create the bootable image this time.
  • The instructions here were followed to download Big Sur recovery file and some of the drivers
  • Next we had to gather the base files for open core, the relevant device drivers and SSDTs for ACPI patching. This was the most involving part of the project. The result is kind of dependent on this step because this is where the hack is. We followed the procedure outlined here for gathering base open core files. Here for the device drivers and look here for ACPI.
  • Using the bootable USB device we booted the PC and ran into our second failure. The process halted with a Hdii error.

Failure 3: No errors! But process halted after printing "199:635 00:033 AmiShimTimerBoostExit changed current period to 550000"

  • To overcome the previous error we had to patch the efi folder of the bootable usb. After going through few reddit threads and other sites we realized that hdii... driver was not necessary and it could be safely removed from the efi folder and unsubscribe it from config.plist.
  • We removed the efi from the folder, re-built the config.plist and booted off the usb. This time hoping to actually see a GUI some where down the process.
  • To our surprise, after selecting Install Big Sur on startup, it did a whole bunch of things and eventually halted after printing the lines below. Apparently, there were no errors printed during the boot up process.
199:115 00:045 AAPL: #[EB.BST.FBS|ADSZ] 0
199:148 00:033 AAPL: #[EB.BST.FBS|KSSZ] 0
199:181 00:033 AAPL: #[EB|SB:SBGMFNS] j137ap.im4m
199:214 00:033 AAPL: #[EB|RH:PF] usr\standalone\OS.dmg.root_hash
199:258 00:044 AAPL: #[EB|RH:MF] <"usr\\standalone\\OS.dmg.root_hash.j137ap.im4m">
199:292 00:033 AAPL: #[EB.LD.LF|IN] 0 1 <"usr\\standalone\\OS.dmg.root_hash"> <"0">
199:337 00:045 AAPL: #[EB.LD.OFS|OPEN!] Err(0xE) <"usr\\standalone\\OS.dmg.root_hash">
199:370 00:033 AAPL: #[EB.RH.LRH|P!] Err(0xE) <- EB.LD.LF
199:404 00:033 AAPL: #[EB.BST.FBS|!] Err(0xE) <- EB.RH.LRH
199:437 00:033 OCSMC: SmcReadValue Key 4D535463 Size 1
199:482 00:044 OCSMC: SmcReadValue Key 4D534163 Size 2
199:515 00:033 AAPL: #[EB.B.WFDW|!WF] Err(0xE) 0
199:549 00:033 AAPL: #[EB|LOG:DT] 2021-07-10T01:29:06
199:602 00:052 AAPL: #[EB|LOG:EXITBS:START] 2021-07-10T01:29:06
199:635 00:033 AmiShimTimerBoostExit changed current period to 550000

That brought an end to the experiment because we did not find any leads on how to proceed from here yet. I'll be sure update this article if we manage to resolve the glitch.

Until then, if you liked or didn't like what you read, let me know. I'd love to read your feedback. If you want to collaborate, feel free to drop me a text here or twitter and we could either ethically hack together or build new stuff. If you are not one of those who wishes to do any of the above; do not hesitate to share :)

Talk to you later, ciao!

hackingoperating systemmacOS