Anyone who has tried to install Mac OS X on his PC, knows how hard can it get. Install a wrong kexts, system doesn’t boot – reinstall. But that’s the easy part. Getting your system to boot into installation mode is the tricky one.
I did alot of research and there’s not much info about this motherboard, there are few videos on youtube but they only shown how the installation goes through which is not helpful at all.
I’m writting this for those of you who have the Asus P5K SE motherboard.
My currect PC spec is:
Motherboard: Asus P5K SE
CPU: Core2DUO e6750 2.66GHz
Graphics: nVidia GeForce 8600GT 512MB
HDD: WD 320GB SATA
DVD-R/W: Asus on a IDE connector.
RAM: 2GB DDR-2 800
Monitor: Philips Briliance 234CL LED 23″
Here are the problem i had to get through to get to the install process:
1. Patching the motherboard BIOS
As you may have found out by now P5K SE doesn’t support AHCI mode for SATA in BIOS configuration and OS X requires your SATA controller to run in AHCI mode. The workaround this issue is to find a modified BIOS for the motherboard and patch it. I don’t remember where i found the patched BIOS but do a google search for it, you should find it quickly.
2. Problem with IDE DVD-R/W
Now, you won’t be able to boot into the installation with an IDE DVD-ROM no matter what you do. This was the only problem that held me from installing after i fixed all other issues.
I used a USB Sony DVD-ROM and that did the job.
3. USB ports
Not all USB ports will work when getting to the installation so you’re left only with the ones that are built into the motherboard (usually just two of them). Installation can get very disturbing at first since you need to switch between your mouse and keyboard when you need to use either one.
4. Hard drive partition
Your hdd has to be with a GPT partition – I booted Backtrack 4 from USB, using GParted I did a format on the whole drive and then repartition to GPT.
Boot into installation using -v busratio=8
If you did all the above your installation will be a breeze.
After I installed the OS everything was working fine. Quartz was enabled, sound was working, but i could not set the highest available resolution (1920×1080), the highest i could go was 1600×900 i believe. Also the fonts were a bit blurry round the edges and that was bad on the eyes. Other thing that appeared as a problem was after i patched the bootloader with Multibeast, the sound would not work, and i could only patch using an older version of Multibeast or Easybeast boot loader for that matter.
To this day i haven’t found a solution to getting the native resolution to work (there are no drivers for GeForces 8600GT 512MB but there are plenty for the 256MB one).
To fix the blurriness you need to connect your monitor to a DVI or HDMI cable, VGA won’t do the trick.
Sound could be fixed by installing VoodooHDA kext.
Besides the problems noted OS X ran great on my system.
