A hackintosh, though not susceptible to viruses just like real Macs (due to them running the same Operating System), has unique reasons why it should be the victim of a regular backup. The Hackintosh user constantly installs new kexts that damage his system and render it unbootable. The need to backup your Hackintosh’s data skyrockets because of this factor. I can think of 10 instances alone in the past month where, if I had not backed up my system before installing a new kext, I would be reinstalling OS X and starting completely fresh. And don’t take the word “system” lightly either as I don’t just mean all of my pictures, music, and documents; I mean copying those previously mentioned files, as well as the filesystem (the system that organize these files and allows you to access them), to an external hard drive. This includes copying every document, application, setting, etc. on your Hard Drive (HDD) to another location. However, there are countless backup methods, so I’ve outlined the three most common for you today. From this information, you will then be able to decide what works for you and what doesn’t. Be sure to post in the comments which method you decide to go with.

All three of these common methods are universal amongst Macs and PCs; however, the specific programs in the third option are OS specific. For the reader’s convenience, I have included programs compatible with both OS X and Windows. Sorry Linux guys, guess you’re left out on this one. You can use an online service, NAS (Network Attached Storage), or another physical Hard Drive to backup to. Each one has its own benefits and downfalls.

**Post updated with Chameleon RC4 files**

The most widely used and probably the best bootloader out for OSX86 systems, Chameleon, is out with yet another update. This latest version ditches that ugly, white text and black background junk from Chameleon 1 and upgrades to 100% sexy. But not only sexy was added to the latest version. Now, you will see a logo for the OS you select to boot from which only increases the sexy. Plus, non-bootable partitions are no longer displayed and Snow Leopard support has been added. Additionally, you have the option to hide partitions. RC4 mostly boasts behind the scenes updates, with the exception of the new hidden partition option.  You can see the official release notes here. To be honest, I’m still waiting for a final release as Chameleon is in its 4th Release Candidate!!!

So now that you know about the update, go ahead and download the file and then follow the instructions below. Pay close attention as these instructions have changed from previous versions of Chameleon.

1. Make sure the untarred folder is on your desktop.

2. Open Terminal and type “diskutil list” w/o the quotes

3. Find the partition with OS X installed on it and remember its identifier ie. rdisk0s1

4. Type cd /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Desktop/Chameleon-2.0-RC3-r658-bin/i386 but replacing YOURUSERNAME with, you guessed it, your username.

5. Copy and paste the following commands into terminal but replacing DISK_IDENTIFIER with the code you were supposed to remember before (Don’t forget the r in the front of the disk identifier)

sudo fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk0

sudo dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rDISK_IDENTIFIER

sudo cp boot /

6. Reboot

***For those of you that had any custom settings in com.apple.boot.plist – this file will remain untouched so any boot flags or other stuff you may have added will still be used at boot***

If you found this guide useful then feel free to make a donation by clicking the link at the end of the Authors Mini-Biography. Any amount truly does help.

One way to remedy this is to make a shared partition and format it with FAT-32. This way, both Windows and OS X can copy data onto this partition. Unfortunately, the 4gb limit on individual files is a real deal killer. Wouldn’t it have been easier (and made more sense) to write directly to that original NTFS partition? Thanks to some fantastic Open source software, you can do just that!

First off, you should probably back up your computer as these programs mess with the filesystem. Check out our backup guide to learn how without using the dreaded Time Machine.

Now that your data is all backed up, we can get started. To not only add the ability to read and write to NTFS partitions, but also format them, you’re going to need two programs. Follow along with these 3 simple steps to ensure everything gets done right:

1. Boot into Leopard/Snow Leopard.

2. Download and install Macfuse. Restart your computer when prompted.

3. Download NTFS-3G and install that as well. Once again restart your computer.

Upon rebooting, the transformation should be complete. You will now be able to write to NTFS partitions, and the erase menu in Disk Utility will be updated to include a “Windows “NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G)” option.

If you found this guide useful then please feel free to make a donation by clicking the link at the end of the Author’s Mini-Biography or in the sidebar. Any amount is truly appreciated and will help with hosting costs..

Just wanted to make a quick note and say that if you are going to be so kind and help out testing 10.5.7,  go to the download page on apple.com instead of through Software Update. Software Update and Apple.com use different servers and right now the Software Update ones are overloaded with download going at about 70kb/s as opposed to  the 10.5.7 update from apple.com going 2 mb/s (8 hours vs. 9 minutes). Also, backup backup backup!!!

***Instructions for installing 10.5.7 are up and can be found here***

If you found this guide useful then feel free to make a donation by clicking the link at the end of the Author’s Mini-Biography. Any amount truly does help.

To monitor the temperature in OS X, download temperature monitor. When you launch it for the first time, a window will pop up telling you that it needs to install special drivers for Intel processors or something to that extreme. Hit ok and then restart the program. When it relaunches it should tell you the correct temperature of your computer’s processor and and Hard Drive. A normal/safe temperature is around 40 – 55 degrees Celsius although even going up to 60 isn’t gonna fry your computer. Once it starts hitting 65 and above is when you close the lid, turn the computer upside down, and walk away for a couple minutes so it can cool off.

For Windows, i8kfangui is a great program that will read even more sensors and also allow you to control the speed of the fans.

While these program read the temperature of your computer, certain kexts within OS X will not allow the BIOS to properly control the fans, thus making the fans start when the computer is much hotter than the BIOS wants it to be. First step, Backup. Backup, backup, backup!!! And once more, backup. I cant stress this idea enough. So once you have backed up your data, go ahead and remove AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext and any other kext that comes up in a quick search in spotlight for “thermal” (there should anywhere from 0-2 of them). Then restart your computer and your computer should run a little cooler.

If you found this guide useful then feel free to make a donation by clicking the link at the end of the Author’s Mini-Biography. Any amount truly does help.

After searching the usual geek discount sites including TigerDirect, NewEgg and eBay, I settled on finding a great deal at a CompUSA retail store. It’s a silver aluminum 3.5″ IDE to USB hard drive enclosure. I know what you’re saying: “You have a SATA laptop, why slow things down with an IDE backup?” Well, it’s actually an EIDE (Like that makes a huge difference) but what I was doing before I bought this enclosure was backing up using the drive inside my Hackintosh — over the network. Ouch! I’m still using 10/100 Ethernet, so those backups were moving pretty slow even for IDE.

Now I’m hitting about 3X that speed through USB on the same Western Digital EIDE hard drive! Well worth the $19 I paid for it and it comes with a power adapter, USB cable, and the chip supports up to 750GB IDE drives. More than I’ll ever need since I have a smaller, older 160GB in it now and it’s doing great. I will warn you though, Time Machine gets picky with what drives you try to feed it via USB. Older drives, like my 120GB WD wouldn’t work correctly — kept erroring after only 50-100MB into the first backup. So play around with it, but once you find a drive that Time Machine “likes” in your external enclosure, you’re in business!