Mac OS X 10.5 from Power Mac to PC – on APM: possible?

resucam · #1 03-30-2011, 01:36 PM

Hello InfiniteMac OSx86!

This is my first posting here so I' like to give an overview of my computer history:
I'm a hobby computer geek with a lot of old computers around in my cellar and my home office. I previously owned an Apple Power Mac G5 “Late 2005” 2.0 Dual-Core G5 970MP that rocked! I legally own Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 upgrade and 10.5 family. I've also got Microsoft Office 2004 which I liked a lot, especially on older hardware like the Apple Power Mac G4 “Quicksilver” Dual-800 MHz I also use occasionally. OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice is also very nice, but a lot slower than Office:Mac 2004.

To cut a long story short: my G5 broke down a year ago: faulty PSU. I got a new machine, but this time a regular PC.

Here are the specs:
Mainboard: MSI 890FXA-GD70 (AMD 890FX/SB850 chipset)
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition 3.2 GHz (Turbo Core: 3.6 GHz)
Memory: 4GB PC3-10667U
Graphics card: MSI Radeon X1800 GTO 256 MB PCIe

It runs Gentoo Linux (like the Power Mac G5 did) and Windows XP Professional, now removed in favour of Windows Vista Home Premium, OEM license from a broken laptop.

In the meantime I got the PSU of my G5 repaired. Shortly after that it had a flaw with the upgraded AMD Radeon X1900 PCIe Mac Edition graphics card. It's probably faulty as well. I just recently found the time to lay hand on this G5: I removed the X1900 to put the original nVidia GeForce 6600LE back in place. So, the G5 is working! But since I haven't been working with the G5 for a year and I've got a faster PC now, I've decided to leave it to my sister who is happy to have a faster Power Mac than her Mirrored Drive Doors G4 Dual-1.42 GHz.

What remains is the APM formated 2 TB SATA-II disk drive containing all my personal files and a complete installation of Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (aside from Gentoo Linux, ARCH="ppc64" with 64-bit kernel and 64-bit userland!).

Code:

# mac-fdisk -l /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb
        #                    type name                length   base    ( size )  system
/dev/sdb1     Apple_partition_map Apple                   63 @ 1       ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/sdb2         Apple_Bootstrap bootstrap             1600 @ 320173040 (800.0k)  NewWorld bootblock
/dev/sdb3              Apple_Boot eXternal booter     262144 @ 64      (128.0M)  Unknown
/dev/sdb4              Apple_HFSX Apple_HFSX_Untitled_2 319910832 @ 262208  (152.5G)  Unknown
/dev/sdb5         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap               34603008 @ 320174640 ( 16.5G)  Linux swap
/dev/sdb6         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root               4194304 @ 354777648 (  2.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb7         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 boot               2097152 @ 358971952 (  1.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb8         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 usr                18874368 @ 361069104 (  9.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb9         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 usr_local          41943040 @ 379943472 ( 20.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb10        Apple_UNIX_SVR2 var                41943040 @ 421886512 ( 20.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb11        Apple_UNIX_SVR2 portage            20971520 @ 463829552 ( 10.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb12        Apple_UNIX_SVR2 home               3418033792 @ 484801072 (1629.8G)  Linux native
/dev/sdb13        Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap               4194304 @ 3902834864 (  2.0G)  Linux swap

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=3907029168
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

On my PC (Phenom II X6), I use this APM formated drive in Linux. No problem at all, since linux can handle APM disks quite well (as data disk – not bootable).

A few days ago I upgraded GRUB Legacy (0.97) to GRUB2 (1.99-rc1) and it automatically created boot menu entries for Mac OS X 10.5.8 that still resides on the APM disk.

I was surprised but thought: Okay! Let's give it a try! It doesn't boot though, which is not really a surprise.

So here are my questions:

Is it possible to make Mac OS X 10.5 boot from an APM volume (on a PC aka Hackintosh)?
Which boot loader should I use? GRUB2? PC-EFI? Chameleon? (I've googled a bit, but no hint to APM volumes, only MBR, GPT or hybrid MBR/GPT…)
About the hardware: do I need to patch the kernel to work on a Phenom II X6?
Do I need to modify some kexts for the AMD chipset to work?
Is the X1800 supported by Mac OS X out-of-the-box, or will I need special kexts again?

I'm aware, if the answer to the first question is no, I don't really need to bother about the others…

I could transfer the installation onto a GPT drive though. But this should really be the last thing to try, because I'd have to backup/restore a 1.6 TB data partition first!

Thanks very much in advance!
Resucam