How to roll your own Mac for under 240$
MSI is a company known mostly for its PC components. They recently jumped into the netbook bandwagon with just about every other major pc manufacturer. Their Eee like machine, the MSI Wind, ended up being an extremely popular little laptop. Along with the laptop they made a not too well known desktop with roughly the same dimensions as a ream of printer paper.
The MSI Wind PC is a great computer; I have three of them. It comes with a 1.6GHz Intel atom CPU, two SATA connections for 3.5" and 5.25" bays and 6 USB ports. You can pick a barebones one, requiring ram, a hard drive and possibly DVD drive, for $140 or so..
What you need:
-
MSI Wind PC.This can be found on newegg for $140.
- Hard Drive. If you don't have a spare one laying around, the Wind has an internal CF card slot that may also be possible to use. I have not tried this myself and it would most like be ridiculously slow. I suggest Seagate, as they have yet to fail me.
You can pick one up at Newegg for about 50$ with shipping.
for 50$
- RAM. Again if you don't have it laying around, the Wind takes 200-pin DDR2 notebook memory, up to 2GB. You can get this at Newegg for about 20$.
- Optical Drive: I assume you already have a sata DVD drive or an usb one, the Wind does not have a pata/ide connection so you can't use an older drive. You can also get one of these at Newegg for about 20$, however it isn't required once you have the OS installed.
- Speaking of which, you need the OS. It can be found online in various places. You must use MSIWindosx86.iso (search for it on thepiratebay, as long as you don't have an irrational fear of eye patches). As a torrenting client I recommend uTorrent. If downloading it causes you to lose sleep you can always buy a retail copy of Leopard and pretend the copy you're installing is that copy.
- There are several other files mentioned here; all of which can be downloaded here. If your Wind's bios is version 1.50 or later (you can find out by mashing the delete button right when it boots) you do not need to flash the bios, so therefore you do not need the corresponding files. However the other two files are divers needed for the video card and the sound.
- At least one (maybe 5) blank DVDs.
- USB Flash drive to flash the bios.
- A PC or Mac capable of burning discs.
- USB keyboard/mouse.
I did all burning, downloading and anything else needed to install on a Windows 7 computer without any problems. There is no reason a XP or Vista machine won't work just as well.
Once you have all the required items, we can get started.
1. First burn the OS image on to a DVD, to do this I used isoburn to burn the image to the DVD. It took me about 3 or 4 bad discs to find that you should burn it at 2X speed; I got the best results with that.
2. While that is burning put the Wind together. Remove the two top screws
in the back of the case then slide off the top panel.
Then remove the face plate (undo the three tabs at the top and pull forward).
Then remove the two screws holding the drive rack on. Once you have done this put your drives
in.
If you are just using a temporary DVD drive leave it apart for now and
just make the internal connections,
otherwise screw the drive rack back on.
Now, plug in the sata and power connections for both drives, and clip the front
panel back on. Before you put the top cover back on install the ram (you have to
install at an angle then clip it upright).
Finally, replace the top cover.
You now have a fully constructed Wind!
3. You can skip this step if your BIOS is version 1.50 or later. If you
are like me and got your Wind with BIOS under 1.50 then this is for you.
Install the HP format utility from the downloads page (here). While this is
installing, find a flash drive. Once you have found the drive (probably in a
pair of pants) back up all needed files on the drive onto your computer. Extract the
Windows 98 boot files to a folder on your desktop or something (not the
flash drive). Now run the HP format utility, check the DOS boot files box
and browse to the win98 files. You can either format the drive as fat or
fat32, (didn't try ntfs) and apply. Once this is done extract the msi Wind
bios update to the drive root and eject.
Plug the drive into your Wind and mash the F9-F12 keys while booting to get
to the boot menu. Select your flash drive.
The Windows 98 DOS screen should
shortly follow when it does type in "flash.bat" and hit enter,
after it is done your Wind should restart, pull out the drive. Your Wind may come up
with a bad BIOS checksum error (mine did) ignore it (hit F2) and proceed.
4. Once you are done flashing, go into the BIOS (hit delete on boot),
go to the USB settings and change it from HIspeed(480mbps) to FULLspeed(12mbps).
Unfortunately it won't work unless you do this, also you can't change it back once it is installed either (won't go past grey screen). Hit F10 to save changes and
restart.
5. Now insert your scratch free, fresh sharpie-labeled disc into the DVD
drive and boot (you may have to mash the F9-F12 keys again to select the DVD
drive). An all text screen should pop up asking you hit any key to boot from
disc with a little timer counting down,
hit any key. Another screen should pop up with a
bunch of text, your screen may flash a couple times and it should take no
longer than 5 minutes.
6. After a short time a grey screen will come up, select your language.
Now at the top bar got to Utilities-> Disc Utility.
Now follow the steps to partition the drive 1 partition as Mac OS journaled (name it something
pretty like Leopard),
hit apply then tell it to apply again. When you get to
the license agreement *do not read it;* a small kitten may die if you do.
7. Follow the rest of the steps to install, selecting your new freshly
made partition.
*Before you install, hit customize.* Now expand the Patches
section until you see kernel and uncheck it.
Now install, which should take
about 30 minutes, give or take a few, and then restart.
8. The screen that asked you hit any key to boot from the disc should
come up again;
this time just let the timer run out. It will take a minute
but the OS X set up will come up, just follow the very easy steps.
Once it gets to the desktop restart the computer so the Ethernet will work.
9. After it has restarted, open and unarchive the other file that you
downloaded, install the GMA950 package, and restart a final time.
10. Congratulations! OSX is installed on the Wind, and you can remove the install disc as you won't need it again until your envious friend wants to make one for himself. I suggest you visit Lifehacker for a bunch of tips and tricks for OSX. Also, doing the non-program updates (system updates) will screw it up; they attempt to modify the modified kernel. For now just update iTunes and the like. If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to email us at guides@uselessninjas.com and don't forget to visit our blog for our latest exploits/hacks/spouts of boredom.
