Installing OS-X Mountain Lion on HP Envy TouchSmart 15t-j000 Quadcore Notebook

By Akbar • October 13th, 2013

I recently got the HP-Envy TouchSmart 15t-J001 notebook for my work. The first few days were spent on  on installations and learning Windows 8. I must admit that Windows 8 experience was not different from my previous Windows use i.e. all the new features and layout confused me a lot, and I found this more annoying than useful.  However, the more I use it, the better I’m feeling about it UI changes, and starting to love this new user interface and functions (obviously this was not a love on first sight thing).

However, once the installations were done, my next goal (due to years of using MacBook Pro) was to try to set-up OS X on this. This setup is famous by name of “Hackintosh” in the PC community. I have a past experience of setting this up, and have even run the OS-X in past on Virtual Environment (in PearPC), so though I was expecting it to be tricky to setup and install, it turned out to be more far complex and frustrating. The main reason was that, at the time of the writing, the new Intel Haswell CPU is not yet supported by OS-X natively. Plus as the other hardware (GPU, Intel Chipset, etc) are new relatively too, so there was very little success and support available in community.

The simplest option to setup Hackintosh (OS-X on PC) is probably by using UniBeast and MultiBeast. There are probably dozens of the guide available on the web for setting up OS-X using UniBeast, and I read, and recommend for old hardware, the following: http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/07/install-mountain-lion-unibeast.html

However, as I was afraid in start, this didn’t work for my machine. The installation was restarting just after loading of the kext (you can verify this by running in verbose mode). After trying various techniques and searching the web, I found following great thread for setting up Mountain Lion on HP Envy 17t-J0000 (the hardware is very similar to my model, though mine is only 15″):
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290687-wip-hp-envy-17t-j000-quad-on-mlmavericks/

The Author of the above thread has been working and configuring his machine for few months now, and he has been updating the thread with all the progress and update. He has very generously shared all his research files, and custom kext files. These have helped me a lot, and will do same to many others. Thank you gygabyte666.

Now coming to setting up Mountain Lion, the process is complex and involves lots of reading and research, especially when you get stuck at some point. First thing is setting up Installation USB. Though you can easily do this via UniBeast and some other free utilities, if you want to do this manually (if you want to see what’s going on behind automatic installer), here is some very good guide: http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/03/install-mountain-lion-on-your.html

However, for the bootloader (Step#4 in above installation), I decided to go with Clover EFI. This was mainly because my motherboard natively supports EFI, plus I think its GUI and options are much better than Chameleon too. However, I must admit that its installation options are more complex, and requires reading a lot of content on their WiKi. For the track, and to keep story short, I used the following options (recommended by mnfseq in above InsanelyMac forum):

Clover Settings

Once that’s is done,  the next step was installing the modified Kernal (with Haswell) support, updating the config.plist for the boot options, SMBIOS, and other device properties. Again, gygabyte666 has shared all his custom files on his thread, so you can refer to that for latest update and tweaks. If you have any issues, you most probably didn’t followed some of the actions correctly and you have slightly different hardware, so need different customization. Also, remember about fixing the correct permissions when moving the Kernel and Kext files. And when you move the Kext files to System/Library/Extensions (also known as S/L/E), please sure to rebuild the cache. There are many threads on web on how to do this.

Here are few troubleshooting tips depending on my personal experience:

1) OS-X Installer Restart after loading kexts This is most probably due to the reason that either something is wrong with Install media, or kernel doesn’t support your CPU (my case). Also, if you have copied custom kernel from some other place, make sure its permissions are correct.

2) Kernel Panics during boot process (before Installation screen appears) This could literally  be due to hundred of reasons. The best answer can be found once the kernal panic screen/details are shared. In my case, the issues were related to following reasons: – FakeSMC.kext was either not installed or its permissions were not correct.
– The stock AppleACPIPlatform.kext file was not working with my patched kernel.  I have to downgrade (to 10.8.4 version)

Also, to avoid any kernel cache issues, I would recommend to boot with Clover “No Cache and with Kext Injection” option (press space bar to get the list while on OS-X install media) in boot screen.

3) Stuck after “DSMOS has arrived” If this happens, then most probably OS-X is having problem working with you graphics card. You can play with GraphicsInjector “yes” or “no” values, or provide details of your Device, or use patched DSDT. My issue was fixed by using the config.plist as provided by gygabyte666.

Once all the boot issues are resolved, the Installation screen should appear. You can install the OS-X and configure it as you do on your MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Note: Please be very careful if you plan to install the OS-X on a disk which have Windows partition as well. You can easily dual boot the OS-X and Windows from the same disk, and it’s even more easy if you are using GPT disk, but you must be very careful when selecting the partition on which to install OS-X. If you do something wrong here, you will lose not only Windows, but you personal files as well.

Once the installation is done, your machine will restart. You should boot again from USB, but instead of going and loading OS X installer, select the partition which on which OS-X was installed. At this point you may get same issues as during installation i.e. restart during boot, kernel panics, etc. For these fixes, I have to boot again from the USB, and then copy the kernel and kext to the installed OS-X on disk and then fix permissions.

Once that’s done, you should be able to boot with your OS-X. There are good chances that few of the devices are still not working on your OS-X. This involves going through many other threads on the web with similar hardware, trying and updating DSDT and trying the custom patched kext. With good research, and some effort, you can make most of your notebook hardware work.

If you want to go with this process, Good luck!

Here is screen of “About this Mac” of my HP Envy 15t-J0001 on OS-X Mountain Lion:

About Mac

 

 

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 13th, 2013 at 5:59 am and is filed under OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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