Seb's Blog

In an earlier post I wrote about how I had put an ordinary Asus P7P55D motherboard inside a Power Mac G5 case. This is all very well from the hardware and modding perspective however having a Mac Pro but not being able to run Mac OS X on it is all but encouraging. This is more of a summary than an actual guide of how to get Snow Leopard working on your own Asus P7P55D system.

To get started I assume that you have a working Snow Leopard disc ready, some spare time and a bit more than an ounce of patience. Thanks to TonyMacx86 for some of the files we will be using. If you have not heard of him before I would suggest taking a look.

Requirements:

• A working system including the Asus P7P55D motherboard.
• A blank CD and Snow Leopard DVD.
• A memory pen of some sort.
• Hard drive to install snow leopard onto.

Before you start, because the P7P55D does not have inbuilt graphics, make sure that your graphics card is hackintosh compatible.

1. Download the latest combo update from Apple’s website (at the time of writing: 10.6.7), download multibeast and iboot from TonyMacx86 as well as the DSDT.aml. Copy the combo update and multibeast to your memory stick for later. Burn iboot to a CD at a slow burn speed
2. Make sure you have clean hard drive for the install (you can wipe it with disk utility once in the install). Make sure only the to be snow leopard hard drive (sata) is plugged in. Boot the iboot disc, once on the chameleon menu eject the disc and insert the Snow leopard disc.
3. Boot Snow Leopard with the kernel flag “-v” (known as verbose). (just type in -v and hit enter)
4. After a bit you should be at language selection. If you are not, you have probably had a kernel Panic and you will need to look into the problem. Open disk utility and format the hard drive as mac os x extended (journaled). Close disk utility and install Mac to the hard drive (you can customise the install to exclude printer drivers and other languages if you wish).
5. Once the install has finished (don’t worry if it says install failed) shutdown and boot from the iboot CD again with “-v”. Hopefully you will now be facing the Mac OS X desktop, well done, but its not over yet. Run the combo update, do NOT RESTART when it has finished, instead run multibeast. Select the below:

• UserDSDT Install (this installs chameleon as well as apple.com.plist)
• Rebuild Caches
• Repair Permissions
• VoodooHDA 0.2.56
• JMicron 36x SATA
• JMicron 36x eSATA
• Fakesmc
• RealtekR1000SL
• OSx86 Software

6. Once multibeast has finished copy DSDT.aml into the Extra folder. Once restarted you should have a fully working snow leopard system.

[Update] Although not necessary, installing nullcpupowermanagement.kext may stop you from having crackling audio but will stop you being able to put the computer to sleep.