Elegant Chaos

Last night, with a bit of trepidation, I let my eee 901 hackintosh upgrade itself to MacOS 10.5.7. I'd been putting it off for fear that I might end up with a non-bootable machine (I could have recovered from it, but it would have been a pain).

As luck would have it, it mostly worked ok.

After reboot, the main problem that I had was that the monitor settings had reverted to 1024 x 768, causing the top & bottom of the screen to be cut off. Since the Mac menubar is at the top, this was a bit of a snag, but luckily I know the layout of everything pretty well, and I also had the advantage of Spotlight. Hitting Cmd-Space brings up the spotlight search box (in the right place, interestingly, even though the menubar was in the wrong place), and typing the name of an application allows you to launch it.

After a bit of experimenting, I ended up just re-installed the kexts from the EEE-Utilities package put together by Gregory Cohen. This seems to have sorted everything out.

As you may have noticed, I've got an eee901, which I've turned into a Hackintosh (I've installed OS X on it). I've previously mentioned that I found it a bit sluggish - but no more!

I finally got round to upgrading the default 16Gb SSD drive to a much faster 64Gb one made by Runcore. By hell does it make a difference! The machine feels substantially quicker, and I very rarely hit the spinning beach ball these days (which happened all the time, previously).

If you've got one of these machines, I'd seriously recommend upgrading the SSD, regardless of the operating system you're using. If my experience is anything to go by, you won't be dissapointed.

Come home. Drink two generous vodka & cokes whilst washing up & chatting to Caroline. Decide to "fix" one or two minor issues with the hackintosh.

Use Kext Helper to attempt to re-install some kernel extensions that I suspected hadn't been installed properly. Reboot said hackintosh.

Experience the "no smoking" / grey boot screen. Experience extreme fear/rage/wish-that-one-had-got-time-machine-working-on-the-eee.

Spend rest of night figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.

In the end I had to bootstrap off the install cd I used for the original install, then boot into an iDebeb install image I had on a DVD, then use the terminal to copy back an original Extensions folder taken from my MacBookPro. Arse!

On the plus side, I think I now have a better understanding of what's going on under the hood. On the minus side, it's 3.38 in the morning, and I'm now back to where I started.