Hackintosh + MSI Wind?

March 7, 2009 2:20 PM

Anyone have any recent experience with Hackintosh or OSx86 on the MSI Wind netbook?

I'm preparing to try out OS X on an MSI Wind, which has recently released hardware drivers for OS X negating the wifi hardware swap required for it to work.

I'm looking for links, personal experience and information about pitfalls.

posted by loquacious to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Running beautifully here. I used the iDeneb distro.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 2:51 PM on March 7, 2009

I should add - here's the link to the wireless drivers. Use the 2869/2790 set.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 2:53 PM on March 7, 2009

Some more details (I had to trace my steps) I'll run a bogus install shortly to get you the initial driver selection:

There are a few issues currently:

You'll need to run the script found here to get the headphone jack working. Also, the onboard webcam doesn't work with Photo Booth.


First things first, update your bios to 1.09.

The easiest way is to install via usb hd. If you have a mac available, open up Disk utility, select the iDeneb (or other) image then Restore. Set the image as the source and your usb hd as the destination and hit Restore. 15-30 minutes later, you'll have a nice osx bootable usb drive/stick/card/whatever.

You'll want to grab a copy of UInstaller.

After the base install is done, and you've installed your wireless drives (and conformed a net connect - duh), run UINstaller (1.2 is latest) and download the latest plugins. MSI Wind DSDT BIOS 109 is the correct one.

Once downloaded, select the correct drive and select MSI Wind from Motherboard packages. Check apply kext package, DSDT patch, Install PC_EFI v9 Chameleon and select install. When complete, you may need to repair permissions. Reboot and you should have a near perfect working system.

I popped in a 320gb drive and an extra 1gb of ram, too. I love it so much that it's become my full time laptop.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 3:35 PM on March 7, 2009

iDeneb installer customization selections:

iDeneb Essential
Patches->Alternative Essential->ACPI, PS2Fix
Patches->Audio->AppleAzalia
Patches->Video->Intel->Intel GMA950
Applications - take your pick, but OSx86Tools is very useful (you can use it to enable Quartz Extreme).
Netbook->MSI Wind


I think this is a great little machine. I'm triple booting OSX, XP and Ubuntu. Apps that I'm running happily:
Quicksilver, Reason, Live, Songbird (iTunes sux0rs), World of Warcraft, OpenArena, Gimp, Openoffice and VirtualBox to name a few.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 3:49 PM on March 7, 2009

gah. In all of my rambling, I forgot to post the most helpful link:

The forums at msiwind.net as well as the wiki were very useful.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 3:53 PM on March 7, 2009

(I REALLY apologize for my disjointedness. I've got serious issues with linear thought.)

You'l need CHUD for some of the audio fixes, so you'll want to grab the latest Xcode.

Something else I remembered. If you plan on doing any gaming, grab GMABoosterX (Mac or Windows). The Wind (as well as many other systems Intel GMA950 graphics chipset) actually runs the gfx chip -underclocked- @166Mhz. GMABoosterX will let you notch up to 400Mhz!
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 4:32 PM on March 7, 2009

Just throwing out my experience. I used the WindOSX86 image and that worked very well. It was very easy to upgrade to 10.5.6.

I followed the instructions here and had no problems whatsoever. I was even able to keep the recovery partition with a little bit of command line hackery. PM me if you have questions.
posted by sciencemandan at 7:24 PM on March 8, 2009

I just realized that iDeneb is NOT MSI Wind specific. In that case, I would absolutely recommend the MSIWindOSX86.iso route. It already has most of the drivers and other things sorted out for you. The only driver I know that it doesn't have is the wireless driver, which was linked to further up on this page.
posted by sciencemandan at 7:26 PM on March 8, 2009

I have a copy of the iPortable USB image install - I think this might work for the Wind, and I'm hoping it has the Wind drivers already. If not I notice that there are linux drivers openly available on the MSI support pages - would those work?

For clarity and my own education (and for those following along at home) I have a few questions:

How do I partition and format the drive while retaining the MSI Wind default recovery partition, as well as the default OS partition? (In this case, XP Home OEM)

I need a multi-boot loader, yes? This is Chameleon?

If I need to install the MSI-released drivers in OS X, how do I do this? Is it something that happens before the install, during or after?

And finally, I see on the MSI wind forums there's a way to do this without a thumb drive or external USB drive or disc reader. (Link.) How do I do all of the above without an external drive. (My thumb drive is too small, and I'm trying to avoid buying a new one unless I have to.


I haven't had a chance to try any of the suggestions in this thread yet or in any of the linked guides, I'm still doing my homework, and I figure these would be good questions to ask for the record and utility of AskMe as a database.
posted by loquacious at 7:38 PM on March 8, 2009

Also, consider all of the above from Cat Pie Hurts and sciencemandan marked as best answers. I simply marked your first responses since both of you had multi-comment answers.
posted by loquacious at 1:52 PM on March 10, 2009