iATKOS | X Clone

After the changes made upgrading my P35-DS3R/Q6600 hackintosh to 10.6.8, I expected downloading Mac OS 10.7 to be a breeze. It appears that the App store application has some built in checks that block the purchase/download on unsupported hardware. My first response was to try some different smbios.plist files, including the widely suggested MacPro 3,1 type, then try editing these. None of those attempts gave any success, so the next step was a search for suggestions from the many excellent Hackintosh forums.

One method I found was to install the latest version of Tonymac86′s Chimera bootloader, V1.4.1. This is available from the Tonymac86 site as either a standalone installer or part of the MultiBeast package. The Lion purchase/download then worked perfectly. I had some unexpected side effects as well, such as losing my VPN configuration and being unable to get it working again. I searched for reasons for this and suspect it was something to do with changes to the Ethernet port en0 setup. The easiest and fastest fix was to copy the Lion installer to my server and restore the disk to the backup I had made just before installing Chimera, finally copying the Lion Installer back again. I always repeat how important it is to make a backup before any big changes to a hackintosh installation, and once again it saved me a lot of time and effort.

This ended up being a lot of effort to buy and download Lion. I’ve always felt it’s important to buy the software even if I’m not within the terms of the EULA by running it on generic hardware. At £20.99/$29.99 it’s very cheap compared to the cost up upgrading a Windows system, and rampant piracy within the hackintosh community will not encourage Apple to continue to ignore us as it has done so far. Also, I already save a huge amount running Mac OS on generic hardware, saving £21 more seems as petty.

basshead