You have tried Windows for a while, which crashes a lot and give you some weird error codes that make absolutely no sense to you, and it eats up memory as if everyone in this world is wealthy enough to buy a server.

And then you tried Linux, and it does solve the crash problem. However, the pain of compiling kernels (provided you are a really hardcore Linux fan) would really drive you nuts, let alone searching for drivers for 10000 pieces of hardware you have.

Then, all in a sudden, you see MAC!!!! Ya, they are virus-free, use not as much memory as Windows, and you do not need to compile any kernel and the drivers are basically all there.

But then, you have another problem - compatibility. How many games would work for Mac, how many companies are willing to spend another extra thousands of dollars on a Mac-compatible software license? And on top of that, we have to face the reality that while we can spend 800 dollars on a PC laptop, you would be lucky to get a Mac Mini at that price.

Sounds familiar? That was exactly what happened to me.

So here is the idea: why not put up an Intel machine with dual boot? If I need Windows, I simply boot from Windows, otherwise, I can simply run on Mac to do all the basic stuff like using Microsoft Office and listening to music.

So here I am, a poor university undergraduate with an IBM Thinkpad T42 (2373-MA5). It is a bit old in today's standard, but anyway, here is the configuration: * Intel Centrino 1.6GHz * 1.25GB PC2700 RAM * 100GB Hard disk * ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 Video Card (32MB VRAM) * 14.1“ display

And here are all the gadgets I have attached to this laptop: * Logitech G5 Mouse * External LG 19” Display * A 300 GB Maxtor Drive, 80 GB drive with no brand name (but it is really cheap though) * My dearest Epson all-in-one printer (I am not working for Epson, nor I am selling my printer, but this is a really highly recommended tool for those who have to stay up till 3 or 4am once a week to do all the assignments) * Logitech webcam (QuickCam Orbit MP) * Logitech Stereo USB Headset 250

I know many people have had difficulties in looking for the software that I am going to mention, and since I have them, some people may think: why not we share?

As a matter of fact, we are not supposed to do that.

The official stand is that Mac should only be used on Macintosh machines, and if you want one, you can either buy one or become an Apple Developer and get a free copy. However, note that any “official” copies of Mac will not be able to work on your PC directly and this installation guide is not applicable to you.

The only hint I am going to give is that no one will put up (at least I have no seen any) those “hacked” version of Mac on an HTTP server. Because: *Those files are huge, they are going to eat up bandwidth like crazy. *Copyright issues, since my domain would have all my contact information on it.

P2P may be the best source that you are getting the software.

1. A PC with WinXP installed(obviously), but please, this is the 1000 times I am going to remind people: 'Backup your computer!', anything could happen when you are messing up with OS and MBR, and probably the last thing you want to loss are your Math assignments and the photo you had with that sweet cutie =:)

2. A external DVD burner/reader, if you have not had one on your machine yet.

3. A hard drive that with at least 6-8 GB of free space that is formatted to FAT32 primary.

4. Time and patience and the perseverance to get problems resolved. It took me about 3 weeks with countless trials and errors to get it up. That is why you will need to back up your computer as well. Hint: Google knows everything, anything you have question with, probably 10000 people are having exactly the same question as you do, and Google will know how to get the answer for you.

5. A software named Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 with Acronis OS Selector. This can be purchased at [http://www.acronis.com Acronis webiste] for 50USD.

6. A DVD image named: Mac OS X 10.4.8 [JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2] (Other editions may be fine for your machine, but this is the only one that worked on mine.

Once you have gathered all these, let's get started.

The first step is installing Acronis Disk Director Suite. This is pretty straight-forward step, so I will not elaborate here.

After that, if you open up the program, on the left side bar, you should see an option called OS Selector.

Now you will be asked to install the OS Selector, do that, reboot if necessary.

Once you are back to Windows. Open OS Selector, and activate it.

'Note:'Please activate the OS Selector 'before' you install your OS X, else OS X will override your MBR and you may not able to boot to your XP afterwards.

This is the name of the file I have: Mac OS X 10.4.9 Intel SSE3 [JaS 10.4.8 AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2.iso + JaS.10.4.9.Combo.Update.Intel.SSE3.zip]

The DVD you have downloaded may come as a non-ISO format, unzip/un-rar it first, and then simply change the extension of the image file (it should be the largest file you have, and it should say something like: Mac OS X 10.4.8 [JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2]) to ISO if it is not. (It worked for me). Leave the combo update stuff for now.

After that, use either Nero or anything you are comfortable with to burn the DVD image. Please do not copy the entire ISO file to your DVD, it won't work! (You can laugh at me for this, but really, people have done that before).

Also, please burn it at a low speed, particularly if you are like my case, who has a DVD burner connected to a USB hub that has already had like 5 or 6 external devices on it. I used 4X, it took me about an hour, but I got a perfect installation DVD.

'Note:' After you have burned the DVD, you may open it up in Windows to check for the files. However, all you will see is a couple of small boot files. Do not panic and thought you've just wasted another piece of blank disc. You did not. The reason why you only see a couple of boot files is because Windows have a different file system than Mac.

I am more comfortable playing around my hard disk using PQ Magic, but you can use anything you like.

However, no matter what you have used, you have to give a formatted partition with FAT32 structure and at least 6GB of free space, I put 10GB into it. Some website that I have Googled would like to format the partition to FAT32 Logical and then convert to Primary once you have installed the Mac OS, but I formatted the partition I have directly to Primary.

Here is what I ended up for my hard drive: *Windows XP (NTFS Primary, Active, 25GB) *Formatted partition for Mac OS X (FAT32 Primary, 10GB) *Programs for Windows XP (NTFS Logical, 45GB) *Documents for Windows XP (NTFS logical, 10GB) *Formatted partition for Ubuntu in future (EXT3, 10GB)

You may have a different structure, but it is generally recommended that you set up your Mac partition directly after the Windows Parition.

This is the last chance you have to make up all your data, so please check carefully to ensure you are not missing anything.

First, insert the DVD you have just burnt to your DVD drive, and shut down your computer.

Now you should have configured your BIOS to boot from DVD drive before hard disk, if not, please configure your BIOS. Normally that means press F1 at startup.

If the system was booted from the DVD, you should have the following lines show up:

Darwin/X86 Boot v5.0.132

Now the installation would ask you to Press Enter to Install Mac OS X or Press F6 for more options. Some people would prefer to have more options and use “-v” to see all the debugging messages if in case things go wrong, but I was too lazy to do that, and I ended up press Enter.

You should now see some lines flashing quickly and ended up showing you a blue screen with a colored rotating ball on it. Wait for a while as Mac is copying all the essential files to your RAM to get ready for set up.

Once you see the language selector, please select the language that you are most comfortable with. Note that, however, I will only have the English version here, so you may have to translate the instructions to your own language if you would like to have it installed in another language.

Now it will say “Preparing Installation…” Please wait patiently until the screen says “Welcome to the JAS 10.4.8 OS X Installer”.

Wait, do not click on Continue yet, we need to format the FAT32 partition we have just formatted again.

If you look at the top of the screen, you should be able to see a horizontal bar. The Installer option should be bolded now. Please click on the “Utilities” option.

Select “Disk Utility”, and the Disk Utility program will be opened up, saying “Gathering Partition Information..”

Once that is done, in the bar on the left hand side, you should see all the partitions on your computer. Select the FAT32 drive that you would like to install Mac on, followed by click on the “Erase” tab at the top.

Now it will ask you what format you would like to format your hard disk to, please choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This should be the default. Name the partition to anything you want. Click on “Erase” to format the hard drive.

Once is the formatting is done, the disk should be automatically mounted. If you get an error, try to use the First Aid utility (the first tab on the bar at the top of the Disk Utility window) to repair your disk.

Now close the Disk Utility by clicking on the red button at the top left hand corner of the program, and you should be back to the installer screen.

'update by treehel': sometimes utility shows error (you dont have a permissons). The easiest way to solve it, is to boot from Linux livecd (ubuntu or gentoo), and type in terminal 'sudo cfdisk'. Then you should create Darwin UFS partition (A8). Now you can boot to OS X installer again and skip work with partition manager

Click on Continue, it will ask you which partition you would like to install the MAC OS X. If you have only one partition formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), then there should be only one drive showed up. You can just click on Continue to move on.

Now is the tricky part, the installation type.

I make a special section for this because this is the most tricky part of the entire process.

JAS used Custom installation type only, and once you are here, you should be able to find one whole list of stuff, with something like this: *Essential System Software *Printer Drivers *Additional Fonts *Language Translations *X11 *JAS Intel 10.4.8 ATA ktexts included *JAS AMD 10.4.8 ATA ktexts included *Support for Most Common Hardware *Titan NVidia and ATI Support

Please, do not simply tick everything and move on.

What you will need are:

*Essential System Software *Printer Drivers (If you want to save some space, choose only the drivers for your printer) *Additional Fonts *Language Translations (Select the language you need, unless you can read all the major languages in the world) *X11 *JAS Intel 10.4.8 ATA ktexts included OR JAS AMD 10.4.8 ATA ktexts included, please do not choose both!

Please uncheck the following:

*Support for Most Common Hardware (At least remove all the 950 GMA support and the ATI X1xxx and NVidia support) *Titan NVidia and ATI Support (Please remove all)

This is PC-specific, for me, the ATI drivers did not work on my laptop and I ended up with a blank screen after boot, that is why I unchecked all those options, but it may work for some other better cards. ATI has officially stopped support the 7500 cards since the very beginning of 2007.

Now click on Install.

Note that if you have a laptop that is not plugged into an A/C adapter, the system will give you a warning message, I would recommend you to have the adapter, especially if you are not sure what the current battery level is.

It will then start to check the Installation DVD, if you are confident enough that you have a good copy, click on Skip to save you some time.

The installation took about 20 minutes for me, I used the time to cook my breakfast.

Once the installation is done, the computer will reboot.

When the computer was rebooted, it may boot directly to the MAC system without loading the OS Selector, this is because the Master Boot Record (MBR) was overridden. To fix this issue, you will need to to perform the following actions:

1. Reboot the computer from the ISO image that you used for installing the OS X.

2. At the Darwin boot screen, press 'F8'.

3. The boot screen will then ask you for the startup options, please key in '-v' and '-s' (i.e., '-v -s').

4. Now you are in the command console mode, type in 'fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0'.

5. Now type in 'print' and you should be able to see a list of disk partitions available, please search for the partition that you have installed your Windows XP on, normally, it should be the very first partition on the list.

6. Now set this partition to be active by key in 'flag [PartID]' where [PartID] is the ID of the Windows Partition.

7. Finally, type 'quit' to quit and reboot.

'Note:' An easier way of doing this is discussed in the FAQ section, and that was the way I used since I have a copy of Norton PartitionMagic available.

If you have taken out the DVD by then, you should be able to see the OS Selector.

Now in the OS Selector, you should be able to see two systems, one says “Unknown”, that is your MAC, and the other one would say “Windows XP Professional”.

Rename the “Unknown” system to “Mac” if you want, and select to boot to that.

Now you should be able to see a couple of lines shown on the screen. Followed by a gray-colored screen with a broken apple on it. below the apple, you should see something that looks like a clock that is rotating.

Wait for a while and you should be able to hear the music and see a small animation. Once you see that, welcome to the Mac World!

Ok, so here are the results of the MAC running on my Thinkpad:

First, the good news: It is confirmed, 'All' my USB devices are working properly (Ya!!!), I did not have to adjust anything or finding any extra drivers for any components of my laptop. I was able to hear music, able to run Mac Office 2004 and everything out of it.

Now the bad news: I kept getting a message saying “Kernel Protection Failure” when I tried to run stuff like IChat, Skype and other voice over IP (VOIP) program, I am still working on a solution for it and will keep you posted if I have any. However, if you have any solution for that, please do not hesitate to share with me by posting on the [http://smf.zayblog.com/index.php?board=2.0/ forum]. Thanks!

Please, if you have found this guide useful, donate to this site. This is a very important encouragement for me to bring other guides that may be useful to you in future. <paypal></paypal>

There are not too many releases around for the so-called “Hackintosh”. The only other copy that I had was the Uphuck 10.4.9 version. The installer seemed to be fine, but I was unable to boot into the Mac OS X login window as it simply stucked the prompt:

Boot:  

And nothing would happen from there.

However, I would recommend you to get a copy of that DVD anyway because there are so many useful package in the Uphuck version. I got my Office 2004 and Skype from there.

1. Hey. I have a question about your guide. I followed it exactly, trying multiple times, but I am never able to get back to windows unless I get rid of OS X. I am using acronis 10, and I have a FAT32 partition and I've tried using Mac OS X extended journaled and all the others, but no matter what, it always defaults to OS X and I can never get back to the OS selector. I tried making windows the default OS, I've tried making OS X FAT32 partition logical even, but it always seems to override my windows (even though it still exists).

'Answer:' Please use any bootable partition management software to set your Windows parition (in most of the cases, that means your C: drive) to “Active”. I know that Norton Partition Magic should have a bootable CD to do that. There may be other free software around as well. Thanks Daniel for the question.

Please post all your questions/comments to my [http://smf.zayblog.com/index.php?board=2.0/ forum]. Thanks!

Please note that I am writing this guide for the benefit of everyone, and I am not liable for data loss or any other damage (implicit or otherwise) as a result of people who are using this guide. You have to take your own risk. Also, there are some information here that are specific to my laptop model, it may not work on yours.