MY HACKINTOSH (Part 1)

My Path Towards Building a Hackintosh

This post is about my path towards building a Hackintosh computer and my journey with Clover Bootloader and MacOS updates.

Computer Hardware

ASUS Maximus XI, 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
AMD Radeon RX 580 8 GB
32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
DELL P2715Q Display
4 Internal hard drives

Background History

Firstly, I must stress I am no expert when it comes to building Hackintosh computers and making a boot drive. My background is graphic design, art and photography. I have decided to write about my experiences in order to maybe help other people with similar skills and knowledge.

So, why go down the route of using a Hackintosh computer? Quite simply, money! I could not afford a new Mac and slowly I was moving away from the extortionate expense of Adobe's subscription charges. I was quite lucky that I managed to buy Adobe's last Creative Suite 6 before they changed to their rediculous subscription pricing plans — £56.98 per month! Who can afford this? Certainly not individual freelancers such as myself. In 2017 I took the plunge and started making my Hackintosh. The main resource I followed was from the website, www.tonymacx86.com. I based my hardware on Stork's MyHero Build.

From the beginning I just wanted to install the operating system on one drive, separate from my documents, photos and videos. I was completely in the dark when it came to creating a boot disc. Everything was very confusing and sometimes the drives were either not visible or I did not know which drive to install the operating system on. Eventually with a lot of perseverance and patience I managed to install MacOS High Sierra with Clover Bootloader. It was a complete mystery how I did this and to this day I do not understand the process at all, however, I was very happy with my achievement. From this I was very scared to fool around with anything, especially when it came to upgrading the operating system.

So, I was stuck with High Sierra! Time went by when I was forced to upgrade. I completely forgot the process of Clover and like an idiot I did not backup the hard drive and I decided to do a direct upgrade. Yep, you guest it! The whole system blew up and could not boot up. Thank goodness all my files was on the other drives. So, I had to start again with a clean install. This time around it seemed a little clearer and decided to install MacOS Catalina with Clover again. Everything went smoothly but again I was not confident when it came to upgrading the operating system. I found Clover to be very cumbersome.

Changing to Opencore Bootloader

Everything was all hunky dory with Catalina until I found myself again forced to upgrade the operating system. I could not update On1 Photo Raw and DaVinci Resolve could only be installed on MacOS Big Sur upwards. This was so frustrating, continuously upgrading the operating system! I was undecided if I could upgrade to Big Sur on my system hardware and I was looking into buying a refurbished Mac and be done with Hackintosh. However, I finally decided to have a go and I found with some research another software called Opencore. This looked a bit more straight forward and it gave me hope that I could do this and have the capacity to upgrade in the future with not much hassle.