Well thanks solely to my tinkering with getting Netflix to work on my Hackintosh, I toasted the machine. Or at least I got it into a state that it wouldn’t boot. I got to the Apple symbol and that’s it.
I tried fixing my Netflix/Silverlight issue by attempting to fix my ‘About this Mac’ window – figuring that the installer in the Microsoft Silverlight was not seeing what it expected and not installing correctly. I download OSx86 Tools and started to mess with that program to see if that tool could change the appropriate settings. Well, it looks like I hit the wrong option/button, whatever. After the next reboot, my machine wouldn’t come back up.
To get it running again this is what I did:
Googled everything I could think of. I know the file system and the kernel was probably intact. The system just couldn’t get the GUI launched. I found this incredible website (that I forgot to bookmark!) that explained in detail the exact steps on how to diagnose and resolve boot issues with Macs. (It’s really killing me that I can’t find that site again – so very very useful) In any event, I was able to get the machine back up and running by removing all the hacked kexts out of the system – specifically the video and sound drivers.
Of course when I rebooted, I go the standard video driver and no sound. So instead of just copying the older kexts that I normally use whenever I upgrade my OS, I instead decided to patch my system the correct way.
If you haven’t seen it yet, MoDs has an excellent article on the netkas.org How To: EFI GFX+Audio Introduction & Tutorial. It truly is a great write up – especially the Introduction — sub titled For Noobs. Basically following this article, I was able to get my machine back and running and patched correctly for my hardware.
I think this is the last time I attempt to do an upgrade on the existing system. The next OS X update, I think I’m going to just back up my entire machine with SuperDuper! and start from scratch with a vanilla install.
-JT