Running a hackintosh as my main desktop involves keeping on top of quite alot of knowledge, which I’m prone to forget. This combined with the rapid development of hackintosh technology and the vastness of the osx86 forums means I need to keep more documentation about what I’m doing. Here I’ll do an overview

Multiple Drives, Multiple Installations

Ideally you need to have more than one drive and more than one partition on each drive to work with. This is so you can maintain a working installation you can boot to when you bork your other installations. All of the following are HFS partitions (so we can put really big files e.g. disk images on them)

1. Spare - used to store disk images and as a dumping ground
2. osx - aims to be my main osx86 installation
3. osx-alternate - aims to be my secondary osx86 installation
4. osx-alternate-x - another alternative on seperate disk

The main reason for this is speed. Booting an OSX DVD is very slow, so we want to do everything on hard disk. The nature of hackintosh installation is that you will require alot of reboots before you get things correct, there is also a fair chance you’ll bork an entire drive and not be able to boot from it.

Useful Tools

Universal OSx86 Installer known as “UInstaller” is the main tool of choice, though its so powerful you have to be very careful with it. This should be installed on all you osx installations

PList Edit Pro - helpful for editing plists, particularly the command line tool which is installed on first usage

Booting Drives

If you’ve borked a drive and can’t boot it use UInstaller to install PC_EFI to volume (currently v9 Chameleon 1.0.12). This should get you back to at least having a boot menu