Hackintoshin' a Mac?

[ericstjohn]

Hello all… I reckon we keep drifting in, don't we? We "legacy" Mac users, that is…
This is a tired old subject by now, but I reckon I may need someone to hold my hand -so to speak- throughout the whole, "this guy's and that guy's hacks," to make my wonderful MP 1,1 Lion roar like a Mountain Lion or a Maverick.
Naturally I began consulting Dr. Google when I suspected that my wallet was about to be accosted in order to "keep up with Apple".
I've "built" computers (PCs) in the past, but have very little experience "flashing" firmware, etc. or whatever it takes to jumpstart a dormant 64 bit boot efi.
I use this beast MP 1,1 2x 266 xeon "quad" for Logic Pro mostly, plus Photoshop, Premiere, etc, for music-related business… but as I've gleaned from the fine techy folk such as y'all, I can "wake up" the 64-bit capabilities of my beloved MP in order to accommodate the newer systems… That beautiful black trashcan can wait until I can afford it LOL
On Utoob, there are a couple methods that "require" (??) Core2 cpu's to accommodate the install… Again, I'm on Xeon's. Then there are the web threads, of which one led me to Jabbawok's "first" post, which is now down, but there's a link to a newer one for Yosemite, I think. Tiamo's *seems* pretty straightforward, but he speaks computalk and I don't.. (But "hanging out" with you guys, I will soon enough!)
I'll definitely read both several times before going to the operatiing room.
I found another thread that pretty much requires a "current" mac to help creating a boot drive, I think.
I found several usb's on evil bay so an installer isn't too big a deal. My Transmission isn't playing nice so there must not be an easier way than evil bay…. Plus, I'm watching some upgrade gfx cards.
I've already Carbon Copied my Snow and Lion to a separate partitioned drive and made a backup of my "projects" storage. I can get Xcode (?) off my retail SL disc.
Those couple methods where I won't need a "current" Mac for assistance, if I'm correct, involve switching a text in certain places, etc… I guess… ??

So::: That's where I need that over the shoulder eyeball to make sure I do it correctly. I ain't scared. But that can be dangerous. And expensive. LOL
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[Ph.D.]

Your post is a little hard to decipher, but I gather that you want to update your 1,1 to use a more modern operating system?

Personally, I think some systems are best left in the past, e.g. updated to the last officially supported OS (Snow Leopard?). You might want to reconsider going beyond that unless you have a pressing need.

 

[jbarley]

Check out this thread here on MR, all the latest up to date info in one place on what you are trying to accomplish.
Easy to do and definitely worth the time and effort, even easier when using Pikes pre-configured installer.

 

[ericstjohn]

Personally, I think some systems are best left in the past, e.g. updated to the last officially supported OS (Snow Leopard?). You might want to reconsider going beyond that unless you have a pressing need.

You won't get me to argue with you about that. My trusty old G5 purrs like a leopard to this day. It's just never on the web anymore.
And in reality, I'm not dissatisfied with the performance of the MP 1,1 in question except when in Safari (6) doing Outlook email where I spend more time watching the spinning beach ball than communicating. Oh and I bricked my wife's iPad trying to update it on my machine with outdated iTunes. That was a kick in the teeth. I managed to get her back in business though...Systems older than Mountain Lion are being abandoned by the browsers so I'm left with two choices. Three actually. Buy a more current Mac, Hack my Mac or dump Mac altogether and go PC. Option 3 isn't really on the table because of my preference for Apple Pro wares.

 

[ActionableMango]

Buy a more current Mac

Not sure what your budget is, but a base Mac Pro 4,1 would be a massive upgrade to your G5. Even a newer Mac Mini like 2012 or 2014 would be, and save you space and electricity too.

 

[ericstjohn]

Check out this thread here on MR, all the latest up to date info in one place on what you are trying to accomplish.
Easy to do and definitely worth the time and effort, even easier when using Pikes pre-configured installer.

Thanks for the link! However, Logic Pro 9 has issues with Yosemite. In fact, Team Logic says to remain on SL (I can boot Lion or SL in this machine.)
Is it required to install Yosemite or can I use any of these methods I've found to install ML or Mavericks instead? I suppose my bottom line is that I want a more productive browsing capability without having to buy a new Mac every few years… It's unlikely that I'll outgrow Logic or Photoshop, etc so as long as my machine(s) still run, I suppose I could live without Facebook. Wait, I don't do Facebook...

 

[840quadra]

Couldn't you add a drive so you can boot into SL as needed?

I second the recommendation of looking for a 4,1 or even base 5,1 . They are (more or less) supported, and have great speed as well. AFIK the 4,1 also supports SL (Possibly the 5,1 as well).

 

[ericstjohn]

Not sure what your budget is, but a base Mac Pro 4,1 would be a massive upgrade to your G5. Even a newer Mac Mini like 2012 or 2014 would be, and save you space and electricity too.

G5? No, that's my good ol' mobile recording studio. I love it. I wanna upgrade my MP 1,1 to fully 64 bit boot. Up to Mavericks at best. Yosemite and Logic 9 don't play nice with e/o. I boot SL and Lion fine and I'd like to have a go at waking up my 64 bit system lying dormant bc Lion and older only boots in 32...

 

[ericstjohn]

Couldn't you add a drive so you can boot into SL as needed?

I second the recommendation of looking for a 4,1 or even base 5,1 . They are (more or less) supported, and have great speed as well. AFIK the 4,1 also supports SL (Possibly the 5,1 as well).

I have two boot drives; one each for Lion and SL. In one of the threads on this subject, it's author answered the, "why hack my Mac?" question pretty simply: pony up for upgraded hardware and extend the life of a perfectly good Mac Pro at fraction of the cost of a newer model. In a word, money, honey! My dead MP 1,1 cost $300 and is slotted for a major hardware, system upgrade as I can afford the parts. My current MP1,1 cost me HALF as much. It's all about the Benjamins, baby! FWIW, Apple has inspired me to learn as much hacking as I can in protest of their bottom line which forces Mac users to spend, spend, spend.
One guy posted a how-to hardware upgrade to 3,1 but in reality dude didn't hack anything. He bought the parts, including a case, and assembled a 3,1 in his living room. Anyone can do that...

 

[840quadra]

I have two boot drives; one each for Lion and SL. In one of the threads on this subject, it's author answered the, "why hack my Mac?" question pretty simply: pony up for upgraded hardware and extend the life of a perfectly good Mac Pro at fraction of the cost of a newer model. In a word, money, honey! My dead MP 1,1 cost $300 and is slotted for a major hardware, system upgrade as I can afford the parts. My current MP1,1 cost me HALF as much. It's all about the Benjamins, baby! FWIW, Apple has inspired me to learn as much hacking as I can in protest of their bottom line which forces Mac users to spend, spend, spend.
One guy posted a how-to hardware upgrade to 3,1 but in reality dude didn't hack anything. He bought the parts, including a case, and assembled a 3,1 in his living room. Anyone can do that...

I don't really know what you are trying to say here. I understand keeping perfectly good systems around as I regularly use a 1993 Quadra 840av, B&W G3, as well as a Quicksilver G4. All perfectly fine, and do their respective jobs quite well.

On the subject of your build, You can spend Benjamins building up an old Mac Pro, or, you can spend those same Benjamins building a Hackintosh. There really isn't any hacking involved with either methods. In a sense, getting newer OS's to install on older Macs is the same type of activity that gets MacOS to run on standard PCs (hackintosh). In both cases it is trivial, well scripted, and in some cases, as easy as running an app, installing MacOS, then continue on with your life.

 

[Jankypox]

Looks to me like you're mostly looking for a Mavericks partition/hdd on your Mac Pro to keep your Logic Pro goodness going, while staying as current as possible with day-to-day web and mail apps etc.

I have a similar thing going on my Mac Pro 1,1 with about the same specs as yours. Two quad 2.66s, with 12GB RAM, the original Radeon x1900xt 512MB and a PC Radeon HD 6670 1GB. I have Mavericks on one HDD so that I can run legacy Line 6 software (Gearbox in particular) to manage my Pod X3, which is neigh impossible to run on anything later than Mavericks. I've thus dedicated this Mavericks install to music editing, production and legacy software only. My second HDD (actually SSD) is rocking an up-to-date El Capitan for my Graphic Design work and general everyday use, which is basically the very limit of these machines now, as it is becoming ever more apparent that Sierra and beyond now relies on CPU instruction sets that are just not possible on the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 CPU architecture short of some serious programming genius and workarounds going forward. As it stands this setup has worked so well, that I haven't had Snow Leopard or Lion on this machine for ages!

The good news is that the geniuses like Pike, Tiamo and netkas have now made installing and running things like Mavericks on our legacy hardware a piece of cake. The only drawbacks are really related to graphics cards. What Graphics Card do you have right now? If, like me your machine has a x1900xt, you're going to want to upgrade that baby. While it doesn't physically prevent you from installing or running Mavericks and later, Apple didn't see fit to update the drivers for this card to 64-bit when they transitioned away from 32-bit capable OSes like Lion, so you will get slooooow stuttering video refresh rates with absolutely no acceleration. Good enough for booting and installing, but that's about it. So your options are to either find an expensive genuine Mac Edition graphics card that will work with your Mac Pro 1,1 and that will give you boot screens at startup where you can select your OS at boot; or use an OS X compatible PC version graphics card and forego the convenience of the boot screen selector altogether; or use a flashed for Mac PC graphics card which 'might' get you boot screens; or run a combination of these (like I do) to get you what you need in the video department.