I recently spent an evening converting a PC running the Windows 7 RC into a Hackintosh. While reasonably impressed with Windows 7, I’m an OSX user at heart. While a large majority of the software I run is not platform dependent, there are a few that are OSX only, and the idea of having a server box running OSX instead of just my Macbook appealed to me.

First things first, hardware support for a Hackintosh is getting better, but you’re obviously going to have more success if you start with a something that has been inside a legit Mac (i.e, Intel processors over AMD, graphics cards that have been OEM on iMacs/Mac Pros). I got lucky, the computer I built out of cheap parts happens to have impeccable compatibility and a number of in-depth write ups already done for it. The important specs look like this:

• Intel E5200 processor
• Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L 775 ATX motherboard
• 4GB OCZ DDR2-800 RAM
• Diamond Multimedia Radeon HD 4850 PCIe
• Western Digital 500GB SATA drive

Of this list, the key ingredients are the Gigabyte motherboard and the Radeon HD 4850. Everything else is interchangeable, assuming you’re using a relatively recent Intel processor and a SATA hard drive. On top of the PC, you’re also going to need:

• a Snow Leopard DVD
• a USB stick or external USB hard drive 8GB or greater

I had an old 40GB laptop drive hanging around collecting dust, I threw it in a cheap external USB case and went to town. Since there are so many excellent guides to getting this board running out there already, I’ll just share the links and some notes I picked up while working on this.

First, setup the USB drive as a copy of the Snow Leopard install DVD and add a bootloader to it. Directions are here (infinitemac.com).

This part is fairly easy. In fact, if you follow the directions above, you’ll have a mostly fully working Snow Leopard install in no time. The only notes I have from this part are:

• The HD4850 didn’t work on the first boot. The solution was to unplug it, and boot off of the onboard video. You’ll be stuck at 1280×1024 resolution for a bit, but it’s easy to get the ATI card up and running once Snow Leopard is installed.
• I never saw the Snow Leopard installation progress bar get to 100%. It started at about 45 minutes remaining, got to ~50% progress and said there were 30 minutes remaining and stayed there. It will appear completely frozen (no animation on the progress bar), but give it time and it should reboot itself.

Once you’re in Snow Leopard, follow the guide above to get sound and bonjour working. Ethernet was fine out of the box, using the onboard jack, but I will say that of the two PCI wireless cards I had, neither had compatible chipsets. If you’re insistent on getting wireless working on a desktop, you’re going to have to hunt down a card with a compatible chipset. This guide (osx86project.org) will help, but be aware even if there are drivers for the card, it might require a separate app running instead of having airport integration. For me, it was easier to just move the router into the same room.

Now that you’re in OSX, you can get the video card working. Following the guide above, I tried rebooting using video off of the reinstalled HD4850, and was treated to a solid Apple-gray screen. Some searching led to this guide (insanelymac.com), which fixed the problem, and after a reboot gave me full support on the HD4850. Once you’re done with this, copy the kext and kext utility onto the Snow Leopard boot drive, it will make the install much easier if you need to do it again.

That’s that. Start installing some apps, and see if you can break it. A few leftover notes:

• Sleep doesn’t work. I realize the guide I linked to claims it will, and it probably does in some fashion, but as of now sleep will shut down the display and disks but leave all the fans running, and it won’t wake up with any input. Could be a BIOS issue, I’m still working on it.
• I haven’t tried Time Machine yet, although I assume it will work. Time Machine has been clutch for me on my Macbook, and one of the best features of Leopard, so I’d like to make sure it works before going using this full time. As it is, everything important is on multiple disks, but if I wanted to do a full wipe/reinstall OS/reinstall apps and files I’d just run Windows ME again.
• You have to check before running any updates to the OS. That only makes sense, and after watching an Ubuntu install go supernova on me during a routine upgrade, I think it’s an issue I can live with.