My 2nd Hackintosh is an Unmitigated Disaster.
I thought it would be cool to build a Hack for my office, to take some of the workload off of my aging laptop. My studio build from about this time last year went so well, I thought building a smaller, simpler machine would be a piece of cake.
So I ordered all the parts, sticking very closely to the Deluxe Mini model from the tonymacx86 site. Day by day, the parts slowly arrived. When I had all of them in hand, I assembled the basics (PSU, MS. CPU, RAM, and one SSD) and held my breath as I always do on first power up.
The CPU and systems fans started spinning. So far, so good. Then, they stopped spinning about 8 seconds later. Then they started again after about 3 seconds. No LEDS on this motherboard, so I have no idea if something is faulting. Nothing is appearing in the monitor either. No GigaByte splash screen, nothing.
So I turn it all off, unplug it to let the caps drain, check all the connections, and try again with the same result.
Something is wrong, and It can only be one of four things - the power supply (unlikely) the MB, the CPU, or the RAM. We didn't get far enough in the power up for the SSD to be an issue. The easy answer would have been the power supply, but I actually did swap it out and the situation remains unchanged.
So that leaves three other components, any one of which could be faulty. I ordered a new MB and shipped the old one back this morning, but now the word on tonymacx86 is that the MB might be okay, it just needs a BIOS update before it can work with a Haswell CPU. Ugh.
So if the new MB does not give me a successful boot-up, here are my follow-up steps:
First, test the RAM in my studio build (Hackintosh #1) to make sure it is not faulty. I haven't tried this yet, so don't know if this is a realistic idea, or even possible. Then, take the Ivy Bridge CPU out of the studio build (terrifying), and mount it on the new MB in Hack 2 so that it will boot to the point where I can update the BIOS from a flash drive, Then put the Ivy Bridge CPU back into the studio machine and put the Haswell CPU onto the new MB, which should theoretically now be able to handle it.
Nobody said building a Hackintosh would be a breeze.Nobody but me, anyway. I'm not saying that anymore.
7/9/14 9:00PM - It was the motherboard. The new one arrived yesterday afternoon, and the machine booted right up.