Episode: 1374 Title: HPR1374: Updating The 2009 LifeHacker QuadCore Hackintosh to Mavericks Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1374/hpr1374.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:24:56 --- All right. Hello, Hacker Public Radio. My name is Richard Hughes or you might know me as Flying Rich from the Linux Link Tech Show Podcast and that's live every Wednesday at 8.30pm at tllts.org. But I'm not here to talk about Linux today. I'm here to talk about Hackintosh's and Mavericks and if you're a free BSD fan, you know that the Mac OS X is based on free BSD. So back in 2009, my birthday present to myself was to buy all the parts to build a Hackintosh and there was an article in LifeHacker on how to build a snow leopard Hackintosh start to finish no hacking required. So it was pretty simple, it wasn't as simple as the Mavericks install I just did. So I want to share that with you. Now in the meantime, a snow leopard has been around for some time now, well since at least 2009 and I've been wanting to update and there are several reasons to update because the device drivers and hardware and I wanted USB 3.0 and to drop a USB 3.0 card in I need at least mountain line. Now the way I was going about installing mountain line was a little bit of a challenge and it might be I wasn't pursuing it the right way. Now before I get into that, let me talk about the hardware that I have. So I'm going to include a link to my blog post and you'll be able to see the original LifeHacker article and you'll see some of the hardware that I have installed in the case and one of my favorite things is a removable drive bay. So it's a SATA removable drive bay and I have two of them in there. One for the boot drive and one for another drive. Now the boot drive is removable and that allows me to select what operating system I want to run on the computer. Likewise I have a second bay and that allows me to drop either other storage in or to be able to back up and mirror my boot drive and have a backup drive available and along with that I have a number of SATA docs that they kind of look like toasters with bread and ump but the bread is the hard drive. So you can take the drive back it up if you want to clone your boot drive. It really facilitates things and I also have pogo plugs and a couple of SATA docs. So I have four terabytes of online storage with my pogo plug. Anyhow, getting back on topic here. This week it's the week ending October 25th 2013. I think it was Tuesday and the week they Apple released Mavericks. Now Mavericks is a free download. I don't know if you can download it if you don't have a Mac. So I have a one year old MacBook Pro and I did the upgrade. The bad part about the upgrade is that it broke my cold fusion. I'm a cold fusion program and that's where I make my money. So I will need to fix that but in the meantime I was looking around on how to upgrade my life hacker hackintosh quad core that had snow leopard on it. I have another drive with mountain lion on it but sleep wasn't working. So I went to Tony Mac X86 and Tony Mac has a lot of great tutorials on how to build a hackintosh. So I'm looking at their front page. They have this great story on how to install Mavericks on a hackintosh and it says anybody can do it. So I'm game, I'm anybody, I'm ready for the challenge. I was pretty impressed with it. It went almost as seamlessly as they described. There's one or two hitches in it, not major hitches. I'll get me wrong but my blog post does cover those issues and so read their blog post and then go through my blog post and see the steps you need to change. Also I have the config file that I use. So if you have the life hacker quad core hackintosh you can use the same config when you're doing the multi beast. So you can build the multi beast based off that config and have a working Mac at no time. So let's go over the steps here. So you have to have a Macintosh, you have to download Mavericks. What I did because I didn't know what was going to happen is I backed up the download of Mavericks because I also made a bootable USB drive and so I needed an 8GB USB to make a bootable version of Mavericks. So this is a great utility in case you have a problem with your computer need to restore it if you have an original Macintosh and you have a time machine backup. But I also made a base copy of the actual download. It's in the application directory and after I did the upgrade on my computer it had removed that. So it's no longer in existence. So the problem was when you go through the steps that Tony Mac tells you to do, it says hey, you know, upgrade to Mavericks on your Mac, well, if you do the upgrade and don't back it up, the software isn't there for you. So when you go to Run Uni Beast, it'll fail and it doesn't tell you why it fails. So what I did is from my external USB hard drive, I copied it back to the application folder and I ran the Uni Beast and I was able to do the build. Now the only thing, two squawks about Uni Beast, it ended without telling you what the error was like, hey, by the way, I can't find the Mavericks install. And the other thing is for the 20 minutes it took to write to the USB drive, it told me less than a minute remaining. So what I did is I ran, right mouse clicked info on the USB and I could see the space going because that USB drive didn't have a light to show me that it was being accessed. And of course, the Mac doesn't give you any clue as to whether the hard drives are getting access to files are written. So the only way you can do that is by looking at info and seeing how much space is still there. That was the Uni Beast. So they talk about what you need to do to set up your BIOS. Now if you're already running the Mac OS, you have the BIOS set up correctly. When it came to boot parameters, I had to add a couple of boot parameters to make it work right. So I had to graphics enabler equals yes and PC root UID equals one. And from there on in, I was able to get the USB boot key to work and installed the OS. You select your language and then you've got a partition the drive and it gives you all of the steps. So I'm not going to read you each individual step that you have to do on the Tony Mac blog post because you can read that yourself. The link is on my blog post. So the only thing in post installation is at step seven, instead of following what they're doing, and this is for you, if you have the quad core life hacker hack and Tosh or life hacker quad core hack and Tosh instead of doing step seven where it says quick start to choose easy beast, do load and load the file that I've given you and that's on my blog post. There's a download link. And then all you have to do is skip to 11 where it says build and install and then you restart your computer and bam, you have mavericks. So right now this thing is working pretty good for me. I'm pretty impressed. This has been the second easiest hack and Tosh hack and Tosh install I have ever done. So if you're interested, give it a try. If you have any comments, you can comment on my blog post. And this is my first hacker public radio contribution. And I contributed because I was told they're running out of episodes. So if you want to contribute some tech to hacker public radio, please do yourself. And I'd also like to give a mention to Jonathan Nadau at the Accessible Computing Foundation. And his site is the ACF.co. And please contribute to Jonathan's cause, which is making computing accessible to those with handicaps, challenges, however you politically correct want to say it. But Jonathan himself is blind and he has a version of Linux that he's producing called Sonar. And it's not only for the blind, it's for people with other handicaps or challenges themselves. So thanks for listening and support hacker public radio. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself. If you ever consider recording a podcast, then visit our website to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the economical computer club. We are funded by the binary revolution at binref.com, all binref projects are crowd-responsive by linear pages. From shared hosting to custom private clouds, go to lunarpages.com for all your hosting needs. Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution, share a like, please don't lie to us.