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As usual, I was deferring upgrading my hackintosh for a very long while (since 10.6.4), as there are always scary issues to deal with. But as the new Xcode required Snow Leopard 10.6.6, I had no choice.

Bottom line: It works, and it was not very hard. Here is how.

Backup to a fully working partition

I consider this a must-have for any serious tinkerer. I always go for the complete, workable partition with a duplicate version of the entire OS. Having a live ‘original’ version of the entire OS on the same machine / HD (as opposed to an image, time machine, etc.) allows fast iteration in case of a broken install (which is almost a certainty for the first boot): When the unavoidable kernel panic hits the screen, reboot into the backup OS, research the issue, and then immediately change and replace files in the broken OS from the working one. Reboot, repeat.

In order to create a fully functional backup partition, you need to do the following:

• Startup from the OS X Snow Leopard boot CD. On Hackintoshes this actually means that you need to start from the Chameleon boot disk, replace the disk with the SL install disk, hit F5 and select the SL Install disk.
• When the installer shows the first dialog, select Utilities->Disk Util.
• Select the current (working) OS X partition, and click ‘New Image’. Save it to a reasonable place. As the cute girls from French Maid TV say: “This might take a while”. (Warning: NSFW).
• The most important step now is to select the newly formed image file and select Images->Scan Image for Restore. (I never fully understood the need to separate the two actions, but whatever). As before, this might take a while.
• Still in Disk Utility, create some place on the same HD you have your original partition, with exact size as the original, and Restore the new image to this new partition. You don’t have to have it on the same HD, but if its on a different disk you will need to create a fully working Chameleon boot on the other HD – which is a hassle all by itself, so you might want to avoid this if not really required.
• Must do: Boot into your backup partition. Check that it works. Turn off Time Machine there – you don’t want backups from this snapshot anymore.
• Must do: Boot into your original OS and rename the new partition – when you restore to the new partition it has the same name as the old. Under the hood they have different file names, but you can’t see them, which can lead to utter confusion.

OK – ready for upgrade!

Scary first boot

The first boot immediately crashed with the following:

panic (cpi 0 caller 0x2ab7a2): “Version mis-match between Kernel and CPU PM”@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1504.9.37/osfmk/i386/pmCPI.c:707

Don’t panic. This is usually caused by the SleepEnabler.kext which was built for the previous kernel version. Once removed from the Chameleon /Extra/Extensions directory the update proceeded to a running OS.

Sound Not Working

The upgrade replaces the AppleHDA.kext in /System/Library/Extensions, and causes sound to stop working. To fix, replace the new AppleHDA.kext by the old one from the previous version of the OS (now isn’t it handy to have a file-level access from one OS to the other?). This assumes, of course, that you had a working sound before.

Other issues

I had a (seemingly random) system freeze, which is not very healthy. If this persists I would need to figure this out.

Enjoy!