This guide helps to install Mac OS X 10.6.4 on your HP Pavilion DV7 laptop. Please verify your laptop hardware before making any changes. This guide does not work for AMD processor and Intel graphics cards. Intel processor and nVidia graphics card are required.
As we have in our household several real Apple Mac computers, this installation is experimental only. I'm curious about Mac as OS on PC. Actually all Apple computers are now PC-s, so there isn't any big difference between PC and Apple computer. The biggest difference is the BIOS, as Mac OS X requires special BIOS.So installation of Mac OS X on PC is just erasing the gap between your PC BIOS and Apple Mac OS X.
HP DV7 is powerful laptop, which is twice cheaper than same class MacBookPro. My HP DV7 model is one year old, so latest models are more powerful.
Step 1: Prepare Installation Media & Install
This is an important step. If yo fail here you never get a chance to see Mac OS X booting on your laptop. You have several options how to boot Mac OS X installation media.
- Boot from USB flash drive
- Boot from CD + DVD
- Boot from especially prepared hard disk
1. Boot from USB flash drive (no working solution yet)
I had serious issues booting installation media from USB disk. I got error "EHCI controller unable to take control from bios". This is common problem for certain laptops, when you are trying to boot Mac OS from USB flash drive, as it couldn't communicate with USB.
This option might work on your model, I couldn't use this option.
- Open Disk Utilities and recreate partitions on your flash drive. Use GUID partition table.
- Mount Mac installation media
- Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy content of Mac installation DVD to your USB flash drive
- Install Chamelon on your flash drive (be careful, choose correct drive)
- Add additional kexts into E/E folder on your flash drive
- Use mKext utility to create extensions cache
- Boot your laptop from flash drive
2. Boot from CD+DVD (if you don't have another Mac)
This solution is very helpful if you don't have any Mac available for making USB or hard disk installation.
You need USB keyboard and USB mouse, as built in keyboard and mouse doesn't work with this method at installation time.
Use MBCD to boot your laptop.
- Prepare a very big cup of coffee as installation might take a while.
- Burn MBCD to blank CD
- Boot your comp with MBCD
- Press F5
- Take MBCD out and put Mac Installation DVD into drive
- Press F5
- Wait, you might get some errors, wait a bit until DVD appears on boot drives list
- Select Mac Installation DVD and press Enter
- Wait until language options appears and choose your language, press arrow button
- Open from menu under Tools section Disk Utilities
- Create GUID partition on your hard disk and name it
- Close Disk Utility
- Choose install options, remove language which you don't want and choose another options
- Close options dialog
- Choose your new partition as installation location, press Continue
- Wait until installation completes (you might got yellow error sign when installation completes, don't worry, its ok)
- Reboot you laptop again from MBCD
- You will see boot options, choose your new drive, choose it and choose verbose boot option and press Enter.
Step 2: Post Installation Stepsdd
Useful files
- DSDT
dsdt.aml.zip ( 20.59K ) Number of downloads: 1108
- USB & Wecam Fix
HP Pavilion dv7 (Model dv7-1250en) is a powerful laptop computer. It works really fine with Apple Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard. But i have difficulties to install Snow Leopard 10.6 on this machine. It wouldn't boot up. If you have any success on installing Snow Leopard on HP Pavilion dv7, please let me know. I will going to update this post according my success.
I couldn't boot due the EHCI error:
EHCI controller unable to take control from bios
Update on March 7, 2010:
SUCCESS! Snow Leopard installed and working really well!
-------------------------------------------
Specification
2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T6400
4096 (2 x 2048 MB)
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
17” WXGA High-Definition AG with BrightView Infinity Display (1440 x 900)
Lightscribe Super Multi DVD Writer (+/-R +/-RW) with Double Layer support
Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
Intel WiFi Link 5100
5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader for Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, or xD Picture cards
4 USB 2.0
1 eSata connector
1 HDMI connector
1 IEEE 1394
Integrated finger print reader
HP Pavilion WebCam with Integrated Microphone
-------------------------------------------
DSDT files
dsdt_HP.Pavilion.dv7.1250en.zip ( 20.64K ) Number of downloads: 521
Updated on March 8, 2010
dsdt.aml.zip ( 20.59K ) Number of downloads: 1108
-------------------------------------------
Useful links
Useful link: Guide for DSDT patching by using Ubuntu Live CD
I couldn't boot due the EHCI error:
EHCI controller unable to take control from bios
Update on March 7, 2010:
SUCCESS! Snow Leopard installed and working really well!
-------------------------------------------
Specification
2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T6400
4096 (2 x 2048 MB)
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
17” WXGA High-Definition AG with BrightView Infinity Display (1440 x 900)
Lightscribe Super Multi DVD Writer (+/-R +/-RW) with Double Layer support
Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
Intel WiFi Link 5100
5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader for Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, or xD Picture cards
4 USB 2.0
1 eSata connector
1 HDMI connector
1 IEEE 1394
Integrated finger print reader
HP Pavilion WebCam with Integrated Microphone
-------------------------------------------
DSDT files
dsdt_HP.Pavilion.dv7.1250en.zip ( 20.64K ) Number of downloads: 521Updated on March 8, 2010
dsdt.aml.zip ( 20.59K ) Number of downloads: 1108-------------------------------------------
Useful links
Useful link: Guide for DSDT patching by using Ubuntu Live CD
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