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I finally updated my work Hackintosh from OS X 10.9 to 10.10. It took a lot of time. Here is how I did it and what problems I ran into.

I finally updated my work Hackintosh from OS X 10.9 to 10.10. It took a lot of time. Here is how I did it and what problems I ran into.

So, here is what we need for the update:

1. OS X Yosemite installer. Open the Mac App Store and download it from there. In my case, as before, trying to run it directly to upgrade the OS was pointless: the installer says it is ready to install everything but needs a reboot. You reboot, and nothing happens — you just land back in Mavericks.

2. An 8 GB flash drive or larger. A USB hard drive also works.
3. Unibeast to create a bootable flash drive (download it here).
4. Multibeast to install drivers and the bootloader after the OS is installed (download it from the same place, here).

Bootloader

I used to have Mountain Lion, which I updated to Mavericks a year ago, and now I updated Mavericks to Yosemite. Since then I had the Chameleon bootloader installed. It was an old version. Because of that, after installing the OS I could not get the new bootloader from Multibeast to install, and the old one could not boot macOS — it just sent the computer into an endless reboot loop. So I could not even see the boot error that was preventing the OS from loading.

So it is better to download and install in advance the latest version of Chameleon and the latest version of Chimera, because for some reason they do not install from Multibeast after the upgrade.

Foreign guides also say that you need to edit the file /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist and remove these 2 lines:

Kernel
mach_kernel

Preparing the bootable flash drive

So, the Yosemite installer has been downloaded from the App Store and the latest bootloader version is installed. Time to prepare the flash drive. Start Disk Utility in macOS, select the target drive, then open the Partition tab. There is one important detail here. I had an external 160 GB drive. If I formatted it as one large partition, Unibeast, which creates the bootable drive, simply did not recognize it as a flash drive. The workaround was to split the drive into 2 partitions. I made one 32 GB partition and left the rest in the second one.

After that, click Options and choose Master Boot Record. Click OK, then Apply, and wait until Disk Utility prepares the flash drive / hard drive.

Then launch Unibeast and follow the installation steps. Select the flash drive or the partition on the external hard drive:

On the next step, choose Yosemite:

On the next step, if you have a laptop, choose Laptop Support. If not, continue. I do not know about the USB Legacy Support option. Most likely it is for people whose USB ports do not work out of the box. I did not need that option.

Click Continue, then Continue again, enter your user password, and wait until Unibeast creates the bootable installer flash drive.

When it is done, reboot the computer, choose the flash drive at startup, and boot from it.

Updating OS X Mavericks to Yosemite

If everything goes well, you will land in the Chimera bootloader. Select the USB drive there. After that you should end up in the OS X Yosemite installer. Most of the time it does not start that easily. So when selecting the USB drive in Chimera, you can also type boot flags (just start typing on the keyboard and the entered text will appear at the bottom). I booted with the flags -v -f -x (without quotes) and got into the installer. Although I think I first saw a black screen, so besides those 3 flags I also had to add GraphicsEnabler=Yes. Then follow the standard installation steps. When you get to the disk selection step, choose the disk that already has OS X Mavericks installed — the installer will automatically upgrade it to Yosemite and keep your settings and files.

When the installer finishes, it will ask you to reboot. Reboot. Again boot from the USB drive. This time choose the disk where Yosemite was installed. I had to boot again with the -v -f -x flags.

Then comes the part where you clean up the problems. If everything goes well, you will boot into OS X safe mode, where you can install all the drivers you need from the Multibeast package downloaded earlier.

I was less lucky.

Pitfalls

First I realized that my old OS bootloader would not boot, while the USB bootloader would. Installing the bootloader from Multibeast simply did nothing. That is why I had to download and install Chameleon separately and then Chimera. It took me a long time to figure that out through trial and error. It took so long because every reboot of the computer took about 10 minutes.

Then I noticed an error in the console saying that FakeSMC.kext was already loaded, and the OS did not like trying to load a duplicate. It turned out that back when I was randomly poking at drivers, I had some myHack.kext lying in /System/Library/Extension, and it already contained an old FakeSMC version. It did not fit the new OS and blocked the loading of the new one installed by Multibeast. I had to remove it.

Editing the file /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist did not go smoothly either. Because my bootloader was old, it complained when that line was removed. So if something went wrong, you could no longer boot at all. In the end I had to boot into Single User Mode (add the -s flag at startup) and edit that file again in the console. The working solution was to keep those lines but replace mach_kernel with /Systems/Library/Kernels/kernel. Or maybe that was not even the real reason. With the confusion caused by the bootloader, I never fully figured it out. In any case, if you have the latest bootloader installed, either remove those 2 lines or write /Systems/Library/Kernels/kernel instead of mach_kernel. In my currently working system those lines are gone :)

When installing packages from Multibeast, there is a Customize -> System Definitions section where you can make the OS think your PC is a Mac Pro, Mac Mini, iMac, or Macbook Pro. In my case the system booted normally when I defined the machine as iMac 14,2. But after that I decided to update the native NVIDIA drivers for macOS, and the installer said that this computer was incompatible. I started trying Mac Pro variants starting from the latest one (6,1), after which the system would not even boot in normal mode anymore (I had to boot again with -v -x -f). In the end the working option turned out to be Mac Pro 3,1. With it, the system booted normally and the installer for the new NVIDIA drivers agreed to install.

And the last pitfall was the one I described earlier in my cheat sheet: a Kernel Panic with the error Kernel extensions in backtrace org.apple.driver.applertc(1.5). In the new macOS version, the number in parentheses is no longer 1.5 but 2.0. To solve it, you need to install the package “10.8.1 Rollback” from Multibeast, in Drivers -> System -> AppleACPIPlatform Rollback. The catch is that it exists only in the Multibeast 6 branch. Luckily I still had the old 6.4.2 version and installed it from there. In Multibeast 7 it is gone. There is a package called “10.9.5 AppleACPIPlatform Rollback”, but it did not solve my problem. I had to install the old package.

So, after about 6 hours of poking at it, I finally got everything configured and decided to write this post. I hope it saves someone some time so they do not have to poke around blindly like I did. At the very least it may help me too if I have to do this again later. By the way, many common problems and their solutions are listed here. That link is where I found the short upgrade guide and some of the fixes. It is in English, though.

Good luck, damn Hackintosh :)

I upgraded my work Hackintosh to 10.9 today. Everything was rather strange, but doable.

Before that it was running 10.8.5 Mountain Lion. I downloaded the Mavericks update from the Mac App Store. I launched it, the installer asked for a reboot, and after the reboot nothing happened — Mountain Lion simply loaded again.

To install the update, you need the following:

1. Download the myHack utility.
2. Take a USB drive or flash drive with at least 8 gigabytes.
3. Launch myHack, enter your password, and choose Create OS X Installer from the menu
   
   
4. Select the flash drive/USB drive in the list of disks
   
   
5. Select where your Install OS X Mavericks package is located — usually it is in the Applications folder. Then agree that your flash drive/USB drive will be erased
   
   
6. Watch your installer disk being created
   
7. At the end of the installation, myHack will ask whether to patch the installer for MBR support. People on the internet say you should press No because Mavericks does not support that.
   
   As far as I understood, it creates a regular installer disk with Mavericks, while also installing the Chameleon bootloader onto the disk together with various bells and whistles so all of this can start. On top of that, some myHack scripts are run at the end of system installation, installing something into the new system during setup itself.
8. Next, boot from our disk. In my case, installation started from the USB disk, but it did not get any farther than a gray screen with a mouse cursor. Apparently some kexts were missing. So I set it to boot from the main hard drive, where 10.8.5 Mountain Lion was installed, and in the bootloader simply selected the USB disk. For some reason installation started with that setup. The system installed without any problems. Moreover, it upgraded Mountain Lion to Mavericks while keeping all files, accounts, and settings.
9. After the reboot it will already boot from the main hard drive into Mavericks. The upgrade is complete.

And after the upgrade the dancing with tambourines begins again: installing kexts and all the rest. Naturally, after the upgrade macOS did not start for me. It only started with the -x -v -f flags for the bootloader. In safe mode I launched Multibeast 6, which was made specifically for Mavericks, and installed EasyBeast — some kind of basic set of kexts.

I installed it, rebooted, and got a black screen. As it turned out, Multibeast 6 now uses the GraphicsEnabler=No flag for the bootloader by default. That is exactly why my video did not start and I got a black screen when the system booted. Once I googled that, I added this flag at system startup and everything worked. I then used Multibeast to add this flag in Bootloader, and that was it. After that I had to deal again with the Kernel Panics that traditionally appeared after the update and are described here. Add sound drivers, and my Hackintosh is upgraded and now runs on Mavericks.

I am saving this here just in case — if I had known all of this in advance, I would have saved myself 2-2.5 hours of reboots and googling.