Mystified how to move your Hackintosh to a shiny, new, big-ass hard disk?   Let me show you the light my friend – No terminal commands required!

Note that this tutorial does not address booting from MBR or dual booting Windows on the SAME hard disk.  I run Windows in a dual boot configuration, but I do it from an additional/physically separate hard drive.

1.  Connect your new hard disk to your Hackintosh via USB (enclosure) or directly via SATA.

2.  Load “Disk Utility” from Utilities on your Hackintosh and Partition your new Hard Drive.  I recommend creating a single partition formatted with “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.  Make sure “GUID Partition Table” is selected in “Options”.

3.  Clone your disk: Download and Install SuperDuper.  Run SuperDuper, selecting your source and destination drives.  Then hit “Copy Now”.  In my example below “Time Machine” would be the new, destination hard disk and “1TB” being the source disk.  The copy process will take a while.

4.  YOU ARE NOT DONE YET!  Now you must make the new disk bootable.  Download and Run the Chameleon RC2 Packaged Installer and point it to your new disk during the install process.  In this example, we’d be making the “Time Machine” disk bootable.  Requires NO terminal commands: SWEET!

Do you need or want a NEWER Chameleon release? Do this: Run step 4.  Then: Download the desired Chameleon release and replace the “boot” file in the root of your new drive (i.e. RC4 which has no packaged GUI installer).

5.  Remove your old hard disk and replace with the new disk.  Boot up and you should be good to go!  

NOTE: If you are using a USB enclosure for cloning, DO NOT TRY to boot your new installation from the USB drive.  IT WILL MOST LIKELY NOT WORK and you will get a “boot 1: error” in Chameleon!  You are not crazy and your clone is NOT BROKEN.  Simply remove the hard disk from the enclosure placing it directly connected to your system via SATA.

I recommend leaving your original “source” disk untouched and in a safe location for a week (just in case your new hard disk isn’t reliable or breaks, you can swap in your old disk).

I love the Pegasus Montesol 25 in. I bought. During the purchasing process I found it really hard to find pictures other than the off-color default picture that is on the Home Depot website (which has a pinkish Miami-Vice thing going – the color shown is not even close to what you get!).  So I figured I’d post a few for others to see.  I purchased two of these (a 25 in. and a 37 in.) and the 37 in. was a lighter variety with less gold tones. My pictures really wash out a lot of the darker colors. The iPhone pics are actually pretty close to the “real” color seen with a human eye.

Here’s my renovation using a 25 in Pegasus Montesol Granite replacement vanity top (the faucet is a Price Pfister Pasadena and the floors are Home Depot Castle Travertine):

After (with Flash)

After: Front View (with Flash)

After: Full View (with Flash)

After: Side View (No Flash)

After: Macro View (with Flash)

iPhone Pic

iPhone Pic (Close up)

Before Remodel (with Flash)

ghettoVCB Log-2-Email, Version 0.95
Last Update: 8/4/2010

I developed the attached Windows batch file for use with VMware (I use ESXi 4) and ghettoVCB.  When used in conjuction with ghettoVCB’s log file, it will:

1. Detect if:
   a. The backup log doesn’t exist in the specified path (the backup didn’t run).
   b. There is a “Final status: ERROR” message in the log (error condition).
   c. The backup process ran with no errors.
   d. The backup log contained neither a good or bad backup indication (blank file handling).
2. After checking the above, the script will e-mail you the log file/result using BLAT.EXE mailer (enclosed).  It will clearly tell you in the subject if the backup was successful or not.  If your logfile does not exist (job never ran) it  sends an e-mail alerting you to this as well.
3. After e-mailing, the logs are rotated and the script will keep up to 6 backups of past logs should you need to trace an older backup.  The filenames will be “Backup1.log” – “Backup6.log”.  “Backup1.log” being the newest backup log rotated, and “Backup6.log” being the oldest.

Installation and Setup Instructions:

• Ensure that your ghettoVCB command line (cronjob) has the “-L” (capitalized for readability) parameter defined so that your backup log file has the same name and IS NOT date stamped by ghettoVCB.  The file MUST have the same name on every backup or my script will not work!  In my environment I use the filename “gvcb-backup.log”.
• Download the gvLog2Em batch file and BLAT.EXE mailer package here.  Extract to a folder/directory of your choosing.
• Edit the environment variables in gvlog2em.bat to match your environment.

Note: Make sure NOT to use quotations (even for long file paths) in defining variables.
Also make sure there are NO SPACES between the variable and the string “var=string”.

set blatpath=\\computer\share\path      <– The path to BLAT.EXE mailer / local or network
set logpath=\\computer\share\path      <– The path to your logfiles / local or network
set logfile=gvcb-backup.log  <– The name of your logfile

set temppath=%temp% <– Writable path to store temp mailbody text file.  Usually you can leave it as-is (I set it to the user temporary path).  New in 0.94. If the variable is omitted the script automatically sets it to the user temporary path.

set emailfrom=vmware@yourdomain.com  <– Backup log “From” email address.
set emailto=you@yourdomain.com  <– Backup log “To” email address.
set emailsmtp=mail.yourdomain.com  <– Your SMTP server
set emailport=25  <– Your SMTP port

set emailauth=False  <– Make this “True” or “TRUE’ or “true”  if you require SMTP AUTH.
(i.e. TrUe will not be found as a “true” condition in my code).
set emailauthu=username  <– SMTP auth username
set emailauthp=password  <– SMTP auth password

set esxiserver=myesxi.yourdomain.com  <– The name of your ESX(i) server, used in SUBJECT line (cosmetic).

• Make sure the Windows machine running this script has read, write and execute access to the logfile path.
• Test the operation of the script/batch in your environment, checking for errors in the console output.
• Once confirmed working, schedule a Windows task to run after your ghettoVCB backup.  (I use an XP virtual machine running on my ESXi server).

Tip: To enable logging of the batch file so you can troubleshoot your automated process, simply redirect it to a file when scheduling the automated task (after interactive testing), like this:

gvlog2em.bat > \\computer\share\path\gvlog2em.log

or really get nuts and put a date stamp at the end:

gvlog2em.bat > \\computer\share\path\gvlog2em_%date:~12,2%-%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%.log

Troubleshooting:

• “ERROR: Parameters missing or incorrect.  Check the configuration.”
  This means that one of the e-mail parameters is either missing or invalid.  Check your vars to ensure you have no spaces or quotation marks in your variables!
  
• “ERROR: Could not find the BLAT.EXE mailer at <blank>..”
  “ERROR: Without BLAT.EXE I can’t continue!”
  You left the blatpath variable empty or included spaces or quotes in the variable.
• “ERROR: Could not find the BLAT.EXE mailer at \\YOUR\network\path..”
  “ERROR: Without BLAT.EXE I can’t continue!”
  Could not find BLAT.EXE in the \\YOUR\network\path location variable.  Check that BLAT.EXE exists in the path you specified.  No trailing backspashes!

How I use it:

• I run a LOCAL cronjob on the ESXi server calling William Lam’s ghettoVCB.sh
• My rc.local injection boot-up command line for crontab looks like this:
  /bin/echo “0 0 * * 0 /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Tools/ghettoVCB/ghettoVCB.sh -a -l /vmfs/volumes/readynasduo/VMBackups/Logs/gVCB-backup.log” >>/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
  Note: 1. This is a single line (duh) and 2.  I specify the logfile name … no date stamping.
• I scheduled a Windows task to run the script 6 hours after my ghettoVCB backup (mine takes approx 2 hours to complete).

My environment:

• VMware ESXi 4.1 (new*)
• ghettoVCB.sh (latest) running locally within ESXi via rc.local injection cronjob.
• ghettoVCB backs up to a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo via NFS (datastore mounted via NFS)
  My backup happens once a week, Sunday at 0:00.
• Windows XP Professional VM on same server runs the task at 6:00am on Sunday.

Please let me know if you experience any issues or have improvements in mind!  I will continue to update this script as I receive feedback.

Changelog:

0.95 (2) – Fixed minor issue with feature introduced in 0.95, where the log would not be included if error or success conditions were not found.

0.95 – Handling of blank log files that do not indicate good or bad backup – will send an error message email.  Usually blank logs are due to ghettoVCB version issues.

0.94 – Better handling of non-existant/offline NFS systems/logpath shares.  Changed failure e-mail body bug that would not send an error e-mail if the logpath was not found.  New variable introduced “tempvar”.  See revision in the parameters section of the installation tutorial above.

0.93 – Minor cosmetic changes.

0.92 – Changed find behavior to look for final status error messages only, so that NFS sleep errors are not reported for successful backups.

0.91 – Added SMTP high priority flag to BLAT.EXE command line for unsuccessful backups.  Succesful backups are sent with the normal priority.  5/11/2010

0.90 – Initial Release  5/11/2010

Thanks to:

• William Lam for creating ghettoVCB.  The “Rolls-Royce” of ghetto VMware backup solutions.
• BLAT, one of the handiest utilities for Windows in my toolbox.. and all the folks who brought it to fruition!

Every time I update my Hackintosh (P5WDH mobo) with the latest version of Mac OS I lose USB 2.0 speeds (all ports go to 1.1 speeds) and my system refuses to completely shutdown. The fix:

Delete AppleHPET.kext from /System/Library/Extensions

USB is flying and my systems sleeps and shuts down!

Quick and dirty:
Using Finder, copy the Kext to the desktop or somewhere as a backup (or you can use OSX86Tools too). Better be safe than sorry!
sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHPET.kext

I’ve been experimenting with an Avaya IP Office Small Office Edition (4T, 8A, 3 VOIP) in preparation for rolling a few out to clients in the next couple of months.  I finally got around to hooking up my Vonage V-Portal to the IPO and was excited to start testing.

To my chagrin, there was really serious local echo (hear myself talking) on my 4620 IP phone when using either of my two Vonage channels.  This ECHO issues was isolated to external calls on the Vonage device.  I spent 3 hours experimenting in the Avaya Manager on both the VoIP extension forms and the Trunk configurations trying to fix it to no avail.  Sometimes the echo would eventually cancel out if you were on the phone long enough, but there was definitely something very wrong with my configuration.

I was Googling and found a forum post mentioning something about the impedance on the line being a possible cause for Echo on analog lines in an IPO environment.  So I tried each of the Impedance settings and sure enough the Impedance setting “Alternative 2″ fixed the echo 99%. Other’s mentioned this change fixing POTS lines too.  Who knows, maybe it applies to more VoIP ATAs as well.  Keep me posted in the comments.

UPDATE

I also found that disabling HANDSET/HEADSET AGC (Auto Gain Control in the system menu) helps eliminate  voice clipping in conjunction with the V-Portal.

UPDATE 2

I gave up trying to use a V-PORTAL with my IPO.  The call quality wasn’t very good, with lots of clipping.  I don’t know if this is a Vonage issue or something to do with IPO talking to Vonage.  I ended up moving my lines to a SIP trunk with Vitelity.  I will post a blog entry detailing how I got that working (easy) soon.

From my post at InsanelyMac:

I had a perfectly working 10.5.4 setup on a Dell Precision 370 with AC97 audio… that is until I attempted to install 10.5.5. I ended up reloading Leopard from scratch (I use this machine as a web browser and for my work iTunes music) so it was of no consequence to lose any data. I selected AC97 as the ONLY audio driver to be installed (AppleAC97Audio.kext) on my Kalyway 10.5.1 DVD.

Last time I installed Leopard, I remember fumbling and bumbling with the audio to make it work. It would LOOK like it’s working (you see an output device, can lower/raise volume), but of course no sound would eminate from the speakers. Frustrating.

Today I remembered the Audio MIDI setup in Finder/Utilites. Even though the Dell has a speaker output (technically a single output), line in and a mic input – I had to tell the system that the card had 6 outputs.

When selecting STEREO in speaker setup when outputs 1 & 2 were selected you’d hear nothing. When I upped the outputs to 6 and used 3 & 4 for the stereo output… VOILA… Sound from the speaker jack.

During testing I would just have something in iTunes playing as I fiddled with the settings. The default sounds would only work out of the speakers once I got something from iTunes on the speakers (made sure SOMETHING was working) and then reboot.

I’d suggest the following if you HAVE controls for output (slider works, you have a device in output), but don’t hear anything:

1. Fire up iTunes and start playing something. Crank up all the volumes so you don’t have to do a sanity check later.
2. Fire up Finder/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup
   
3. In Audio MIDI Setup, view properties for OUTPUT
   
4. Make sure you have more than 2 channels in the Format section (pull down). Note: if you don’t have more than 2 channels, you may want to try loading the various Azalia installers. I know I went through a few trying to get this to work – have no idea if the 6 channels were native when I installed Kalyway.
   
5. In the Format section of the OUTPUT control, select “4ch-16bit” or “6ch-16bit” You can mess with it later if you get it SOMETHING out of the speakers..When I used 6ch-16, I got only the LEFT audio channel working (but you could hear something – PROGRESS!). When I retooled, and selected 4ch-16 in Format, then selected Speaker Outputs 3 & 4 – BOTH CHANNELS worked.
6. Now hit the CONFIGURE SPEAKERS button.
7. Select STEREO at the top (speaker config) and pull down the FRONT LEFT and FRONT RIGHT output to 3 & 4 versus the original of 1 & 2. If that doesn’t work, try 5 & 6. 3 & 4 was the winning combo for me.
   
8. If you’re hearing your iTunes play, close down reboot and then your APPLE sounds should work as well.
9. If the above worked for you – please post here and let us know your system make/brand/specs and the steps you followed to get your sound working.

Sidebar: On some Dells, you may experience a very weird situation. When I initially couldn’t get the sound working (even with my steps above, in my first install which is now defunct), I got frustrated and started removing and plugging my headphone/speaker cable into all of the jacks, one by one. I was playing iTunes while this was happening. The strange part, is that by MOVING the jacks from output to input to input to output the sound suddenly started playing from the speakers with no software changes. I think there may be some circuitry that allows for sounds to come out of the system speaker when you are using Windows (with no external speakers attached) and I had to “trip” the circuit for the system to realize that the hardware should be playing from the jack, not the speaker (although the speaker didn’t work either). I know it sounds friggin nuts, but I swear this fixed my last problem with my Dellintosh and it’s never been a problem since.

If you need the Azalia drivers/kexts/installers – they can be found here.
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=36520