Installing OSX on a Hackintosh

Because I don't have enough grey hairs I have decided to try to install OSX on my Intel PC Hardware.  Couple of reasons for this.  One, I have an iPhone and and iPad and I want to see what the fuss is about Apple Personal Computing without selling a kidney to buy their hardware.  Two, it's a technical challenge innit.

I HAVE managed to install OSX on an AMD Frankenmachine, and it seemed to work OK, but is very slow.  The graphics card does not support any of the Steam Games I have for OSX (Portal et al).  If I put a bigger graphics card in the Frankentosh the PSU cries enough and shuts down.


So I have decided to do it properly this time.  I started off with a completely genuine (not really) image of Snow Leopard.  I wanted to install it onto a USB Key so I could boot from that.  OSX didn't like the DVD Image.  It refused to write it to the USB Key.  It said it needed to be "scanned" and then refused to scan it.

I managed to find a useful OSX command which forces the machine to write the image without scanning it, and it is thus:

sudo asr -noverify -source "/[location of image]/Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg" -target "/Volumes/[mount point of USB Key]"

This did at least manage to write the image to the USB Key, and it does seem to boot when using the iboot system.  However it failed miserably at the bit which says "When you get to the installation screen, open Utilities/Disk Utility.".  It doesn't do anything, it just sits there spinning a circle for fecking hours.  Ah well.

This maybe because I have failed to follow all the previous instructions about removing all non essential hardware from the machine, resulting in it being festooned with TV Cards, USB Peripherals and so on.  Or it could be because the completely genuine (not really) DVD Image I was using is not really completely genuine.

So I have shelled out for a boxed set of Snow Leopard, iLife '11 and iWork '09, and I will try this again with the genuine kit when it arrives.