Hackintosh with a P55A-UD3 (Rev.1.0)

Now that I have a spare 1TB drive with me, I wanted to try something that I wanted to do for a long time. Which would be, installing OSX natively on the PC. Few months ago, I installed it in Virtual PC, but it was no good.

On TonyMacX86 forums, I saw a thread that someone with the same motherboard got OSX up and running. Alas, it wasn’t the same revision of the board I have, and he had a different graphics card. But it looked promising, as he had posted all the steps that he followed to get OSX up and running.

After a lot of fiddling around and cursing, I got mine to run OSX.

There are few issues remaining though. In time, if I have any interest, I will look into them. But let me tell you the things I had to get it to work.

Note: Here is the basic guide I used.

1. The hard drive and optical drive were connected like below.
   1. Optical drive: SATA0
   2. Hard drive: SATA1
2. The SATA interface had to be changed to AHCI. I am using RAID (XHD) with Windows because I have setup two RAID arrays there.
3. The hard drive had to be empty. Empty as in no partitions. Otherwise, it would stuck while loading the setup.
4. Set HPET (High Precision Event Timer) to 64-bit mode in Power Management options in the BIOS.
5. Some people say bring the CPU to stock and install with only 4GB RAM. But I didn’t have a problem with overclocking or 8GB RAM.
6. Launch setup using the PCIRootUID=1 command. –x command, which is commonly used, did not work for my HD5870 video card.
7. I created one big partition of 1TB and proceeded to install with minimum features.
8. I didn’t see the welcome video, maybe because the video card was not working then, but it rebooted into OSX just fine. From there, I installed the 10.6.7 update. Before rebooting, I installed the DSDT for my motherboard via MultiBeast.
9. I had LAN before the things I did in no.8, but after rebooting I lost LAN. So I had to look for a kext for the Realtek LAN chip. I found one in this website. After installing it, LAN came back.

The problems

1. I don’t have sound yet. I installed a kext, but it didn’t work. I also tried MultiBeast, but it didn’t work. After some googling, I found out that I had to check 3 options to MultiBeast to get Realtek ALC888 working. I will try that later.
2. Skype would crash at the login window. It must be because of the webcam. I will unplug and confirm it is the cause. Too lazy for that.
3. The mouse behavior is insane. I cannot fully utilize the G500 with OSX. The extra buttons wouldn’t work. The pointer moves very slow. The mouse acceleration sucks. After some googling, I found out that the sucky pointer behavior could be fixed by setting the USB Polling speed to 125Hz. I have to flash a profile to the onboard memory in the mouse. Right now, in Windows, I am running at 1000Hz polling frequency. Windows rocks! 
4. The command button is a pain in the arse. Why cannot Apple just use the normal keyboards. It works perfectly well.
5. App store didn’t work. I wonder why. It said there was a problem with the purchase, even with multiple accounts and free software.

On the plus points, it boots pretty fast for a HDD. It is almost as fast as my dual drive SSD RAID. I don’t know if it is beautiful. For me, Windows 7 looks and works perfectly fine. I have to agree that Windows on a regular hard drive sucks.

P.S

I tried the audio drive thing. No, it didn’t work for me.

Also, it was surely the webcam causing Skype to crash. Disconnecting the webcam let me sign into Skype.

Mouse also worked better with 125Hz polling frequency.

Back in loving Windows. <3