Hackintosh on HP Pavilion a6769de

2018-02-23

I owe an HP Pavilion a6769de desktop computer.

Hardware Specs
Motherboard ASUS IPIBL-LB (Benicia)
BIOS AMI v5.43
Chipset Intel G33 (Bearlake)
CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 @ 2.5GHz (Penryn)
CPU Intel Xeon E5450 @ 3.0GHz (Penryn)
RAM 8GB DDR2 @ 800MHz (4x 2GB)
Video Intel G33/G31 Express Chipset
Audio Realtek ALC888S
Ethernet Realtek 8111C

I checked if I can install Mac OS X High Sierra on it.

Compatibility boils down to:

  • Chipset: Intel
  • CPU: Core 2 Duo 775 or above (1156, 1366, 1155, 2011 compatible)
  • Audio: Realtek
  • Ethernet: Realtek 8111 or Intel
  • Video:
    • Intel - HD3000 or HD4000
    • ATI - 5850, 5870, 5770, 6850, 6870
    • NVidia - 520 or above, 640 or above (any 6xx)

Almost all of my hardware is supported.

Troublesome is the Intel GMA 3100 and the Realtek ALC888S.

I bought:

Hardware Name
Video  NVidia GeForce GT 710 [10DE:128B]
 Audio  Sound Blaster Tactic(3D) Alpha [30DC:041E]
 WLAN  Realtek 8812AU [0111:0BDA]
 SSD  Samsung 850 EVO

Create a bootable USB stick

You need Windows to create the USB stick.

Download “CloverBootDiskCreator.exe”, “Clover.img” and “OSX_10.13.6_Installer.hfs” from here.

Then run the “CloverBootDiskCreator.exe”.

Clover Boot Disk Creator

  1. Select the “Clover.img” file
  2. Select the “OSX_10.13.6_Installer.hfs” file
  3. Select your USB drive
  4. Click “OK”

Fix Clover

When you install Mac OS X High Sierra on an SSD, it automatically create an APFS volume.

You need to configure Clover to recognize them:

mv EFI/CLOVER/drivers-Off/drivers64/ApfsDriverLoader-64.efi EFI/CLOVER/drivers64/ApfsDriverLoader-64.efi
mv EFI/CLOVER/drivers-Off/drivers64UEFI/ApfsDriverLoader-64.efi EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI/ApfsDriverLoader-64.efi

Change the BIOS settings

You get into the BIOS by hitting “F10”. (You see an advanced menu with “Ctrl+F10”.)

Change the BIOS settings to:

  • SATA mode: AHCI
  • Video: PCIe x16

Booting from the USB stick

When the boot screen is shown, hit “Esc” to see the boot device selection screen.

Select the USB stick, and hit “Enter”.

Choose “Boot Macintosh Install from HD”.

Be patient. It takes around 5 minutes until the Mac OS X installer screen shows up.

Install Mac OS X High Sierra

The installation takes around 30 minutes, with three reboots in between.

Install Clover to harddisk

Download the Clover Installation Package.

Mount the EFI partition:

diskutil mount EFI

Install Clover:

Clover Installation Type before clicking the Customize button

Clover Installation Type after clicking the Customize button

Fix Clover

See fix above.

Configure Clover

[TODO]

Install additional drivers (kexts)

Workarounds

Settings -> Energy Saver -> Computer Sleep: Never

Tweaks

Enable subpixel font rendering on non-Apple LCDs:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

Enable TRIM:

trimforce enable