Hackintosh Weekend - Issues I've had

So the final parts of my hackintosh arrived Friday so I started putting this beast together. Here is a run down of the parts.

core i7 2.6Ghz processor. 4 cores and hyper threading means 8 addressable cores
12gigs of DDR3 ram.
620gig hard drive
the cheapest graphics card I could find that would do 2 monitors (Nvidia 9800GT)
an aftermarket heat sink for the processor
a gigantic antec case with 3 fans, and all sorts of bells and whistles
a 550watt power supply

so anyway, to start, I'm getting there, after spending all weekend with it, it still has issues, but I believe them to be hardware related. So I'll get there... here are the problems I had.

Friday -
assembled all the hardware went then went to the movies. (I love you man.. not that good) I then came home, got the htpc out of the closet and used that to install the operating system with drews Leopard disc. unfortunately his disc is an upgrade and not a retail disc so I had to go ahead and get a retail disc online. So that was pretty much friday, just needing to get the software ready so I can spend all saturday working on it.

Saturday -
woke up and leopard was done downloading so I installed it on the new harddrive. To do this, you need to put the harddrive in another computer because OSX doesn't know what to do with bios, so you need to do it from another leopard computer.

Issue #1: So once the software was installed and the script was ran, I put in the hard drive into the new computer, and nothing happens. The board won't even boot. Looking around at the lights on the board, I'm noticing the processor is overheating. So I take the cooler off, and I notice it's not even making contact with the processor. Figuring it's broke, I disassemble it from the board, and put the stock cooler on the processor. Now I can get it to post.

Issue #2: Keep getting an error that it can't find the boot drive. I have to plug it in to a bunch of different ports till finally the computer can find the hard drive and boot. So I finally get OSX to show up on one monitor.

I run the program that I got when I made the HTPC to get the graphics card recognized and now I have dual monitors. Pretty sweet everything seems to be great. I start downloading the stuff from the macheist bundle that I bought, start loading music into itunes, ect. I downloaded istat menus so I can keep tabs on everything going on in the system. istat is only reporting 4 cores, but I figure it's set up to only address physical cores so I don't think anything of it.

Issue #3: Kernal Panic (this is the first time I've ever seen one of these, it's pretty much a blue screen of death only on a mac.. you don't see them when running legit macs, but I've seen plenty of them this weekend) So while trying to recreate the KP I realize that it happened when the program finished downloading and the dmg mounted. I notice that I missed a crucial step in the process when re-reading the guide, and I forgot to run the EFI script. (Basically this takes all the tweaks that you make to the OS and places them in their own partition on the hard drive so that when you install updates to the OS or whatever, they aren't written over.) So I run this, and now I'm not getting a KP when I mount dmg files. I also have 8 cores showing in istat However...

Issue #4: Now I have no audio. I notice it because I'm trying to play some music over itunes and nothing is happening, I go into the audio preferences, and it doesn't even find any output or input devices. I also notice that I don't have access to the DVD burner I bought. I am still getting KPs and it's happening usually with stuff having to do with the ethernet port. I'm getting them constantly when trying to move the Adobe package over the network. I try it from computer to computer, and from shared hard drive to computer... I keep getting KP's. I'm also getting KP's when trying to move my music library to itunes all at once, so I split that process up into a few pulls and it works.

I go online, and find out that there was another folder in the install download that had some updated kexts that would fix the audio issue. I try installing them manually a few times and nothing seems to be taking, then I go to bed for the night.

Sunday -

Issue #5: I can't even get the computer to boot anymore. I must have screwed something up. So I bring the HTPC back upstairs, and put this hard drive into the HTPC and boot to the HTPC. I rerun the scripts and rewrite whatever I did wrong. Now I'm able to boot again but no audio, and I'm on one monitor again. I run the program to get dual monitors (when OSX doesn't know what graphics card you have, not only is it 1024x800 but everything runs slow because the OS is so graphics intensive.)

So now I start scouring the web for audio fixes... it seems weird that I'm not getting audio running the same scripts that other people ran and have audio. I find another set of audio kexts. I think that I moved the wrong ones in there, they are dated Aug 08 and I have Jan 09 kexts (obviously newer). So I take out the hard drive and put it back in the HTPC so I can get these installed instead and....

Issue #6: The HTPC won't boot. I guess when I was running all those scripts on it, I accidentally ran something that screwed it up. So now I have to backtrack..

Issue #7: I put the both hard drives back in the new pc, and boot, and it can't find the second hard drive. So I start guessing and putting in a bunch of different sata ports and rebooting until I finally find the drive. Now that it finds that drive, I go online and find the scripts I ran to get the HTPC to work, and I run those. I take it out put it in the HTPC computer and it's working.

So now I bring the new hard drive to the htpc computer and run the scripts again, being extra careful with them, and viola I have audio. I remember when OSX found the other harddrive so I plug the dvd burner in there and

Issue #8 KP. Apparently OSX has certain places it looks for hard drives and certain places it looks for dvd burners. So I just start rebooting and guessing where to plug the burner in until I have that showing up.

So now everything seems to be working. I have two monitors running gigantic resolution, I have audio, I have 8 cores showing up, the HTPC is working again. I'm able to mount dmg files and install stuff. So I start scouring the web for stuff that I need to install. Safari 4, Firefox, Dropbox ect. Everything is going well, but I'm still struggling to get adobe installed. I was able to finally get it across the network,

Issue #9: but I keep getting KPs during installation. I think it's a memory issue so I take out two sticks and try. By this time, I'd already installed a good portion of the programs, so it only had a few left to install and no more KP. This could have just been coincidence and not a memory issue.

I notice that I keep dropping connection while listening to music which is on a shared drive. When I go into the network preferences I notice that the entire network card isn't discovered anymore. The motherboard has 2 ethernet ports, which are labeled (en0) and (en1) by the mac. I've tried switching the cable to the different port when I lose signal, and I've even tried plugging a cable in both ports. I'm now noticing that when I switch cables to the other port, mac is picking it up as a different network card, not 0 or 1, but now I have 3 and 5....

Issue #10: it's at the point now, where I get KP just plugging a cable into the port. I'm thinking the motherboard is faulty and that's what is causing a majority of the KPs. When installing adobe, I was also listening to music over the network, so while I thought it was a memory issue it could also be a network thing.

I ran memtest for 10hours last night (recommended at least 8) with all 12 gigs installed, and it threw zero errors, so the memory is in good shape. I'm also thinking the mother board has faulty sata ports too which is why I'm having trouble with finding a place to plug in a hard drive. I am going to go to best buy and buy a cheap NIC card to plug in and see if I'm able to connect to the net that way.. if so, then I know it's the mother board and I'll ship it back. another option would be to install XP on another harddrive and see if it can find everything in different sata ports and if the network works with that. So I have two tests to make sure it's hardware related.

When the computer is running, it's ridiculously fast. the only time I've seen a spinning beach ball is when I'm connecting to the shared drive to start listening to music. Photoshop loads in like 2 seconds. it's nuts. I can't wait till it's stable.