Saturday, February 01, 2014

My HP8540w Hackintosh

I had this in my mind(staying idle) for so looooong that I don't remember when it had dawned on me.
So finally... today was the day that I did take it up seriously to setup mac on my pc, though I wanted to build a new hackintosh with latest compatible hardware that I could get, first wanted to try it out to see how it would work out, and, to check on myself if I would use the mac beyond the point when the cool transitions and UI would loose its freshness :-).

So, went ahead and googled out many links and forums to set it up. It took me 3 installs to get all the correct drivers and a working mac up and running. Since I did end up wasting lots of time trying to find the right mix of drivers, thought of sharing it so that it may be useful in case you have a HP 8540.

... and here it goes, my guide to set up a mac on an HP EliteBook 8540w.

To start off, here is a list of what all works..

Full 3D accelerated graphics
LAN
All USB ports
DVD Drive
Audio
Bluetooth
Shutdown and Restart
Touch Pad

... and what doesn't

Sleep - Did not bother to look for the proper driver some claim it works though
Built in Wifi - No compatible drivers (works via a usb dongle)
Built in Card Reader - Not important at all for me
Finger print reader - who cares ? right ?

that's it I guess. Almost everything works except a couple of things that don't matter much.

For simplicity, I followed this guide..
http://www.macbreaker.com/2013/04/install-mountain-lion-hackintosh-niresh.html
and decided to install the niresh distro.
The most important thing is to customize the installation so that your newly installed mac boots successfully from the hard disk.

Now for the actual steps, I just did the following...

1. Burned the source iso to a dvd.
2. Setup my BIOS to its defaults, checked that tha SATA mode was set to AHCI(it was by default).
3. Booted from DVD.

It takes some time on the apple logo screen with the progress ring running... and if all goes well you will end up in the OSX Installer as shown in the guide mentioned above.

Now for the most important step, to customize the installation. Just hit customize button after selecting the destination disk(refer to the guide mentioned above)

Here, you will have to skip display driver installation so that you can boot into your new OS in VESA mode. All other options can be left as it is.



Then proceed with the installation. Once complete, try to boot your new installation, it should be up and running.
Is that it ? no way, you can boot but pretty much nothing else works no LAN, Audio, USB ports except Bluetooth !!!

Now next step is to download Multibeast for Mountain Lion from Multibeast.com and then transfer it to your mac via bluetooth.
I downloaded Multibeast on my phone and then transferred it to the mac. Once you have Multibeast image, run it and carefully choose only the drivers that you want. Below is the list that I chose.




After installing these drivers, restart your pc and you should end up having a working LAN and USB ports.
Now all you have to do is download official display drivers from Nvidia here:
1. Display driver - http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-304.00.05f02-driver.html
2. CUDA driver - http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cuda-5.5.28-driver.html

Audio drivers from here...
http://www.osx86.net/files/download/1257-idt-92hd71b7/

Once audio drivers are installed, add the -f boot flag to avoid a kernel panic on boot.

..and finally you will have a working mac !!! enjoy.

BTW for Wifi, just check which chipset has the official driver for mac and buy a dongle which uses that chipset.
I have a Digisol DG-WN3300N which has a Realtek RTL8192CU chipset, it works like a charm.



No comments: