OSX Yosemite Hackintosh install on DH61AG

A friend of mine has been a huge fan of PC hardware used to build inexpensive Mac OSX systems, and suggested I should as well, by handing me an Intel motherboard installed in a heavily modified Sun IPX case. It looks odd, but is geekily satisfying.

In any case, for a while, I have run OSX Mavericks (10.9) with varying (and diminishing) degrees of success. Every time I applied updates to 10.9, something would either stop working (like sound), or would work less well.(like video performance or any use of Flash). Months after the release of Yosemite, I decided it was time to start with a clean slate, so I bought a 240GB Crucial SSD mSATA drive and went through the steps here.

Of course, not everything went to plan - otherwise, this would not be a very interesting article!

Motherboard: Intel DH61AG, 8GB RAM
Disk: Crucial M500 240GB mSATA internal SSD
External USB Bluetooth adapter: IOGear GBU521
External USB Audio adapter: Sabrent AU-MMSA
Apple TrackPad


In MultiBeast, I started with a minimal group of items:
EasyBeast
ALC892 audio (on-board audio chipset)
TRIM patch (because I am not using an Apple SSD)
AppleIntelE1000e v3.1.0 (Network driver)
1080p Display Mode (because I have a 1080p monitor - might not be needed)
Verbose Boot (to see any issues that pop up as the system boots)

There were a few challenges that came up - most I could fix (kernel panics, due to my own error), and another I simply punted and worked around (no audio).

This board is small, and is pretty simple. It has Realtek ALC892 audio and Intel's HD3000 video, and is mostly compatible with the general installation steps. There are a few items that will be necessary if you are doing the same thing.
USB Boot issues: The USB3.0 ports don't work properly with OSX when booting the USB stick, so use the USB 2.0 ports.

Boot failure after install (Boot0 issue): The instructions here were exactly what I needed. I chose a Crucial M500 240GB mSATA SSD drive, and it has the "problem" configuration. I ran into kernel panics when I did this the first time, but it was because I didn't run the "dd" command properly - I wrote to disk0s1, when the instructions say to write to disk0s2.

Audio: The on-board audio was problematic with the original Mavericks install, and before the installation of Yosemite was not working at all - I had retreated to the less-elegant Sabrent AU-MMSA, a simple but reliable solution to the issue. Following the instructions did not yield working audio, so I tried an alternate solution in this thread that had helped others - to no avail. I went back to the Sabrent USB audio adapter, and audio is working fine with that.

The system seems reliable - power save is working fine (this is a desktop, and it comes in and out of standby just fine). I'm happy with the result thus far!