Tag Archives: BIOS

[OSX86] Building a Hackintosh with ProQ’s AnyOS Motherboard

Prolegomena

With all those different Apple Computers available like Mac Mini’s, Mac Book Air’s, Mac Pro’s, why the hell should we consider setting up a hackintosh these days, since a Mac Mini comes at a price tag of only 600€ here in Europe?

Well the answer to this is quite simple. Hackintoshs aim at people who are basically interested in understanding and tweeking. If you just wanna use you Mac for Mails and a bit of internet-surfing a hackintosh is most likely the wrong thing for you.

But if you are artist for instance, dealing with audio- or video-editing a hackintosh definitely comes a lot more handy than an original Mac. The reason is simple: original Macs have become a lot less flexible when it comes to manual hardware upgrading during the last eight years. Let’s take the latest Mac Pro for instance. The design is still outstanding, but this design comes at the price that Apple entirely dropped the PCIe Bus architecture. What means, that we cannot use dedicated DSP, soundcards or videocards in that device anymore and need to switch to Firewire or Thunderbolt solutions. Which is an additional economical strain. Continue reading →

[Win] Oracle VirtualBox: Workaround For Initialization Issue Pt. II

Find our previously released workaround for initialization issues here.

CPU VT-X/AMD-V Issue

After configuring a dual core virtual machine and trying to start you may encounter a message box indicating:

Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or not enabled in BIOS.
Hyper-V launch failed; at least one of the processors in the system does not appear to provide a virtualization platform supported by Hyper-V.

This issue may occur no matter which host operating system you’re using. The reason for this might be:

you’re not using a CPU that supports hardware virtualization
your BIOS does not support hardware virtualization properly
hardware virtualization is disabled in your BIOS settings (check it!)
there is a bug in your current BIOS version
the trusted execution flag prevents booting properly

Known Workarounds

Try these settings in your BIOS:

Enable Execute Disable bit (depending on the motherboard manufacturer this can be called: XD-Bit, EDB, NX-Bit, AMD EVP)
Enable Virtualization bit (depending on the mobo manuf. this can be called: VT, IVT, AMD-V)
Enable VT for Direct I/O Access (depending on the mobo manuf. this can be called: VT-d based I/O)
Disable Trusted Execution Technology (depending on the mobo manuf. this can be called: Intel TXT, TET)

Of course, upgrading your BIOS to the latest version can also be of help, but flashing the BIOS is always a little risky.

Final Words

As we’re currently using VirtualBox only on the Windows XP platform we categorized this article under Win, anyway it is very likely that the same issue also occurs under Linux or Mac OS, as VirtualBox on all platforms derives from the same source code.

The above settings apply for example for installing MacOS SnowLeopard in a VM under Windows 7 on Gigabyte EP35-DS3 or Dell Optiplex 745/755.

[MacOS] Psystar Accounces OEM Licensing Program

As of yesterday the Miami based company Psystar, which is still in legal trouble with Apple, announced to license their virtualization technology to third party manufacturers.

Computers preloaded with Psystar’s DUBL (Darwin Universal Boot Loader) would allow to make

“systems Mac OS X compatible. Psystar’s virtualization technology, specifically engineered for Snow Leopard, allows for seamless operation of the Mac OS on generic Intel Hardware and would be offered on all Psystar Certified machines.”

Find more information about this step in Psystar’s official press statement.