Updating the Hackint0sh

It’s been two years since I put together my Hackint0sh. Since then, it has been my daily workhorse running OSX Lion all this time. Since updating a Hackint0sh can get complicated, I opted to stay on lion, as  I had experienced no problems… until now.

I was working last Saturday converting a video, listening to music, browsing the web and Retouching with Photoshop (the computer can handle several tasks and I do it all the time). Suddenly, the “Finder” got stuck on the “beach ball”, but Pandora was still streaming music and I could navigate the web. After a few minutes i decided to restart the machine. I was surprised to get after the restart a text message: “Searching for Operating System…” I was not amused, and after several restarts and unplugs I removed the hard drive, an OCZ Vertex 3, that I bought a little more than a year ago. I spend some time trying to mount it on my Laptop, Mini and at the end even through Parallels, with no avail. It was completely dead.

Looking online for solutions, I found out that a lot of people is havint trouble with OCZ. I had a good opinion of the brand, as my first SSD is an OCZ, in fact it’s being going strong for four years on my daughter’s laptop.

I had to calm my ire and take it on a positive way: now the SSD drives are cheaper and proven, so after a few reviews found out Intel and Samsung are more reliable, with Crucial, Kingston and OCZ as the ones giving most problems. I went to the store and bought a Samsung (they were out of Intels) SATA III which is pretty fast. I restrain myself of buying a bigger drive, as 120 is enough for the system and applications.
Thanks to past experiences and techie friends’ advice I have learned to use two hard drives (when hardware permits), a fast one for the OS and applications, and a bigger for data. This way and using an SSD the computer will start faster, load programs faster and keep important information separated.

At the same time I have get used to backup my data, in different media, the main one being my home server. This time although, I will take the opportunity to update both the system and the motherboard BIOS. I found out there’s a new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware update that adds new options and optimization to my system. This is the kind of things I did my research before buying the hardware, to be able to update and extend my hardware over time and stay up to date.

After following tonymacx86.com guide, I updated the BIOS in a very fast an easy way. It goes away from the old text and crummy graphics bringing a nice, modern interface with new optimized options. After modifying the options to work with OSX, I started to install Mavericks following the UniBeast and MultiBeast processes. I have to confess this sis not for the faint of heart: I had to reinstall at least three times since I didn’t remember how I did it two years ago, and got some “Kernel Panics”, you have to be patient and careful.

Finally I have a stable working Mavericks system with two monitors, perfect resolution, audio and networking without issues.I will take the opportunity and install my preferences to updated versions of Adobe, Apple Mozilla and other applications that use daily.