Hackintosh Newbie Questions!

[lazlow]

Alrighty, so I've done homework over the last few weeks while I've been building myself a new computer. I would like to have both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on it for varying reasons. From what I've gathered the best course of action is to do a dual HD boot. Put my Mac OS on one hard drive and the Windows on another.

To get Mac OSX on my machine I have found the "http://osx86.sojugarden.com/installer/" Which is the myHack installer guide. However this created a perhaps obvious question. But I start with Windows correct? Or perhaps I'm wrong. Also, for this install it says to only have 4GB of ram installed. Thats fine but after the install can I add more?

Anyways, once I get Mac and Windows installed on the machine I start up in something I learned as Chameleon? However I'm not sure what exactly this Chameleon does so any help would be great.

Finally my major concern with having Mac on a non mac machine is how will the drivers work? I ask because a friend of mine who knew about my plans laughed and said "Good luck finding drivers for mac for the various components" That made me realize that might be problematic.

Anyways any help or advice or corrections to my method would be great. I'll include the system specs below.

Motherboard = Asus Rampage III Extreme
CPU = Intel 3.2 Quad Core i7
Ram = Corsair 8GB / 4x2gb
Video = GeForce GTX470
Hard Drives = WD 300GB x2
WD 150GB x1
Power Supply = 850Watt Corsair

Also not sure if its important but It has a tuner card.

[aquamac]

The only hardware problems you are likely to encounter would be the tuner card and graphics card. There is little or no support in OSX for PCI TV tuner cards but plenty for USB versions as most are Mac friendly nowadays. Currently the GTX 400 SERIES cards are unsupported afaik but support will hopefully be with us in 10.6.5. This means you are going to have to install with another graphics card - there is full support for the 200 series, 9800 GTX and +, 8000 SERIES and 7000 SERIES (but use 256 mb versions as 512 mb usually need to be flashed as the roms need to be fixed.

Chameleon is a boot-loader that injects EFI information normally injected by the macs bios but which is lacking in a PC's. You cannot boot OSX 86 without it. Once you get the correct drivers (kexts in OSX) installed, the mac operating system literally flies on PC hardware. My Asus Core i7 benchmarks faster than all mac pro's except the latest 8 core versions.
A good resource for modified drivers is Insanely mac.

Also study how to make and use GFX strings on this forum:

aquamac.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hack1&action=display&thread=509

This will be needed to get your graphics card working as information needs to be injected at boot that is missing from a PC's graphics card. This is not the only way though, by entering "GraphicsEnabler" into your com.apple.boot.plist, Chameleon can pick up your graphics card and inject your information. This is obviously a much simpler method, but ony works with one graphics card. GFX strings will be required to install more than one card if you use SLi in windows and don't want to have to swap cards around.

I prefer to install windows and OSX on separate hard drives. Putting them on the same drive stores up problems for the future as windows uses the NTFS file system and OSX the GUID partitioning scheme. You will be able to choose the HD you want to boot from with Chameleon.

Also one of the holy grails of installing OSX on PC hardware is to keep it as vanilla as possible. To do this the idea is to boot Chameleon and all the specific files for your kit from a USB flash drive. This makes your system more mac like in that your hard drive with Mac OSX on it is more like a real mac hard drive.

There are loads of resources around and you could do worse than starting at:

www.kexts.com/

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

[lazlow]

First off thanks for all the information. I didn't expect that my TV tuner would work with the Mac OS, the graphics card however. Hmm I'm thinking I might just wait till 10.6.5 comes out and its supported

When it comes to installing the OS is it alright if I install Windows 7 and go from there or should I install Mac OS first?

[aquamac]

If you put the OS's on different HD's then it makes no difference which is installed first. You could do with partitioning your HD on a real mac with disk utility if you are using 1 HD.