Retail Snow Leopard Installation on Gigabyte GA-G31-ES2L with ATI HD4670 QE/CI.
- A simple guide on how to get Snow Leopard running on your hackintosh.

Unlike others, this method does not require a Mac machine prior to installation.

What you’ll need.
-  A retail Snow Leopard $29 DVD Disc
- An Intel Core Duo/Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad/Core i5/Core i7 processor
- Gigabyte G31M-ES2L Rev 1.x F10
- >1 GB RAM (you wouldn’t want to run it if you have less than this)
- Sapphire ATI HD4670 card
- SATA HDD
- Prasys – Empire EFI v1.085
- 64bit VoodooHDA drivers (for 2 channel sound)
- Netkas EFI 10.5 bootloader
- Mac OS X 10.6.2. combo update
- Beta Universal 46xx drivers

and all the other necessary drivers for your other devices.

Let’s get started.

• Download the Empire EFI iso and get it burned onto a rewritable/writable CD.
• Assuming that your pc has the HD4670 in it already, boot up the Retail Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD by replacing the Empire EFI cd with it and press F5 to refresh the bootloader. Boot -x because you’ll get a kernal panic if it is booted normally.
• Load up the setup and format your hard drive with the GUID partition. Proceed with installation until it comes to halt where it says there’s something wrong with the startup disk. Ignore that and reboot.
• Boot up the Empire EFI disk again because we have yet to install Chameleon. Start -x and configure your hackintosh. After configuring, switch it off and pull out the HD4670. We’ll use the integrated GMA 3100 now.
• Start the pc and boot up normally. Install the 10.6.2 update. Then run the “Post-Installation” folder in the Empire EFI disc then run MyHack. Select “com.apple.plist , graphics enabler, legacy apple rtc, nullcpupowermanagement,open halt restart, platformuuid. Install that and then replace your boot file with netkas boot file. After that, install the beta universal 46xx drivers. Shut down. Fix the HD4670 back into position.
• Now with Chameleon installed, you’ll no longer need the Empire EFI disc. Keep that aside for future usage. Boot up with -pci1 .  Notice that now Snow Leopard is able to boot up with the ATI card showing only 256mb and no qe/ci support. Fixing disc permissions could solve this issue but you could also do this method below

Launch terminal and key in the following
sudo -s
(type password)
cd /System/Library/Extensions
chown -R root:wheel *
chmod -R 755 *
kextload ATIRadeonX2000.kext
kextload ATI4600Controller.kext

• Reboot with -pci1 and now you’ll have full QE/CI support with Snow Leopard displaying 512MB video memory.
• To enable 2 channel audio, add the VoodooHDA.kext file into /System/Libary/Extensions and then do this in terminal.

  sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
  sudo chmod -R 755 /system/library/extensions
  sudo diskutil repairpermissions /volumes/NAMEOFHDD
  sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions

• Run the 64bit prefpane and reboot.

There you have it, a fully workable hackintosh PC. I know there are many other shorter methods out there, but this is how I’ve done mine and it works. Basically, this is a compilation of the many many methods available with trial and errors.

This guide only brings you to a workable Snow Leopard but you’ll have to figure out how to enable 7.1 surround and make this thing sleep. Yes, its on steroids now and once you set it to sleep, it sleeps forever. Perhaps installing sleepenabler.kext would work, but I’ve not tried that yet. Note that there is the CMOS error when it is booted up. Messing with the DSDT will fix this problem. It won’t be explained here though.

Here’s a benchmark I did on this rig. You can compare the results with the other macs here.
Nowhere near the MacPros though =P

And a video of the hackintosh performance. You’ll notice that it starts to suffer when more than 100 web browsers are fired up.