Make a 700$ Hackintosh Build Using OpenCore Bootloader

Photo by Angelo Pantazis on Unsplash

What Should You Know Before Building?

Before you start, you may want to know more about What is Hackintosh and OpenCore. If you are new to this, don’t be worried, as 90% of the people in Hackintosh are new and learned throughout their first build by seeking help online and following the procedure. This guide is preferred for those who did build a Hackintosh before.

Make sure you are:

• Able to keep patience.
• Be very comfortable about changing stuff in your system BIOS/ UEFI menu.
• Prepared to read a lot of technical terms and documentation.
• Able to spend 2–3 days on this project — or maybe more.

If you are not comfortable with the points mentioned above, believe me, a Hackintosh is not for you. There is a fair chance that you’ll end up bricking your motherboard. So, just save a headache and buy a Mac from Apple.

If you don’t have a PC yet, read this budget build-guide for hardware recommendations to pick something other people have success within the Hackintosh community, as it gives a higher success rate because they can also help you.

Hardware used in this guide

• Intel i5 9400F
• 16GB Corsair RAM (2 x 8GB)
• Crucial MX500 500GB SSD
• Cooler Master 450W Power Supply
• MSI B360M-PRO-VDH.
• Sapphire RX580 8GB
• Corsair K95 Platinum RGB Keyboard
• Logitech G402 Mouse.
• Logitech G433 Headset.
• At least 2 2.0 USB pen drives.

Also, you need a working Hackintosh, macOS or Windows system for USB preparation. I’ll be using my MacBook Air for the installation process.

If you still want to go with Clover, follow this:

[GUIDE] The Budget Hackintosh Workstation with 9th Gen Processors | Kextcache

Some helpful tools to make the process much easier:

• PlistEdit Pro, for macOS. My pick.
• ProperTree
• MaciASL — For Managing ACPI Tables.
• IORegistryExplorer (for Mac) — to browse active ACPI setup.
• Hackintool to review active USB ports, PCI device list, and other info (although some of the stuff it displays is wrong on AMD systems).
• MountEFI, a command-line utility to reveal your EFI Partition.
• OC-Configurator — For Fine Tuning our Config.plist

I’ll attach an OpenCore-Starter-Pack software package for people who want to download all software at once.

Downloading macOS for installation

Give a star and download gibMacOS, and Double Click on gibMacOS.command:

Select 1 to download the latest version of macOS:

Write the OS to your USB drive:

Well, there are a lot of methods all over the Internet but we’ll start from a vanilla installation. A vanilla installation means nothing is pre-made and you have to make your config which will be most compatible with your system. So, let’s get started.

Recommended BIOS settings

The motherboard I’m using is from MSI, so I’m mentioning the steps which are on-point for MSI motherboards. If you have a different motherboard, the settings are the same but maybe on a different page on your BIOS GUI:

1. Settings > Advanced > Integrated Peripherals > Network Stack > Disabled
2. Settings > Advanced > Integrated Peripherals > Intel Serial IO > Disabled
3. Settings > Advanced > USB Configuration > XHCI Hands-Off > Enabled
4. Settings > Advanced > USB Configuration > Legacy USB Support > [AUTO]
5. Settings > Advanced > Windows OS Configuration > MSI FastBoot > [Disabled]
6. Settings > Advanced > Windows OS Configuration > FastBoot > [Disabled]
7. Overclocking > Extreme Memoery Profile (X.M.P) > [Enabled]
8. Overclocking > CPU Features > Intel Virtualization Tech > [Enabled]
9. Overclocking > CPU Features > Intel V-td Tech > [Disabled]
10. Settings > Boot > Boot Mode Select > [UEFI]

Configuring OpenCore EFI folder

In this step, we’ll configure OpenCore from top to bottom to boot our system for installing macOS. So let’s start with Downloading OpenCore. At the time of writing the Latest Release is 0.5.8 of OpenCore Bootloader.

Unzip the Downloaded Files and Reconstruct the Directory as Follows:

Let’s collect the files:

Let’s start by downloading the Kexts.

Drivers

Delete all the content of drivers folder except OpenRuntime.efi and download these two additional drivers for APFS and HFS Drives.

ACPI files

According to official documentation, we need 4 Files for Our 9th Generation CoffeeLake Refresh Processor.

It is recommended to download the Decompiled Version from here and compile it yourself but for temporary use Download it From Here.

For USB, there is one more method explained here:

Common Problems and Workarounds in Hackintosh - 2020 | Kextcache

Setting up CONFIG.PLIST

For this particular file grab the SampleConfig.plist and place it in your OC folder like this:

Download and Open ProperTree.command

You’ll be greeted by this screen:

Go to FILE > OPEN

Then select your config.plist file:

Then you’ll be greeted by this screen:

Press this button combination on your keyboard:

COMMAND + SHIFT + R

and choose your OC folder:

This command will clean your config.plist file and add the kexts, drivers and ACPI changes to your File.

Now download the OC Configurator.

You’ll be greeted by this screen:

Go to FILE> OPEN:

and open your config.plist:

Then go to PlatformInfo:

Go to the dropdown menu like in the screenShot above and select either iMac19,1 or iMacPro1,1:

Then Go to File> Save and Go to Tools > Mount EFI:

On your USB drive click Mount Partition:

The structure of the EFI drive will be like this:

Create a folder named EFI on a newly mounted partition. Copy Your BOOT AND OC FOLDER into the EFI Folder. Now restart and boot from the USB drive.

Installing macOS

Like in our Hackstation:

[GUIDE] The Budget Hackintosh Workstation with 9th Gen Processors | Kextcache

Do the normal macOS installation as you did in Clover, like formatting drives in APFS and installing macOS.

Post-installation

Congratulations on installing macOS via OpenCore Bootloader, now let’s complete our perfect hack with some here and there touches.

Booting macOS without the USB drive

Do the same thing, Download OC Configurator.

Go to Tools > Mount EFI:

On your internal SSD/HDD drive click Mount Partition:

Now copy all the contents of your USB’s EFI partition to the internal drive’s EFI partition. Reboot without USB drive.

Here is my EFI FOLDER for REFERENCE ONLY:

https://github.com/ayushere/9400F-RX580-OPENCORE

Now, test all other things like DRM, Audio, iMessage, FaceTime. Most probably it’ll be working.

For DualBooting or Multibooting, Checkout.

[GUIDE] MultiBoot/ DualBoot OpenCore with Windows, macOS & Linux | Kextcache

Originally published at https://kextcache.com on May 4, 2020.