Installing OS X on Acer Aspire One: The Definitive Guide

Introduction

As many before me have done and many after will no doubt attempt, installing Mac OS X on a non-Apple piece of hardware is often a challenge where I suspect more fail then succeed.

I personally have successfully achieved this more than once and have sought to document the process that I succeeded with in as much detail as possible so that those attempting this can also succeed and hopefully contribute to this article by sharing their experiences.

This guide is all about getting Mac OS X onto your Acer Aspire One netbook (but could be used for many different netbooks potentially).  I’m using the A150L model which has 1GB RAM and a 120GB hard disk but any of the Aspire Ones should work perfectly without deviating from any steps in this guide.

In this guide I’m installing from an 8GB thumb drive but you could use an external DVD drive and boot from DVD instead.

I will document this guide with as many screenshots and as much detail as possible and perhaps even a screenshow or two for the really tricky parts.

If you run into problems, there’s a massive community out there willing to provide suggestions or alternatives so just leave a comment and see how it goes!

And finally before you get going, good luck and hopefully in and hour or so you’ll have a (practically) fully functional Hackintosh!

What You’ll Need/Required Downloads

OK, here’s your shopping list.

Hopefully you’ve already got most if not all of the hardware and just need to download the software.

• 1 x Acer Aspire One or your choice of Intel/AMD SSE2 hardware
  • You’re gonna wipe the drive on this baby so make sure there’s nothing you want to keep on it’s hard drive
  • We can however preserve the restore partition during this procedure so you can restore the AA1 to it’s original Windows or Linux preload if you like.
• 1 x USB Thumb Drive (minimum 8GB)
• 1 x working MAC to create the bootable thumb drive
  • It’s also possible to create the bootable thumb drive using Windows but I haven’t documented that yet!

  

• 1 x blank DVD (optional)
  • This is only required if:
    • you have problems creating the USB Thumb drive and receive errors when Restoring the iDeneb ISO file to the thumb drive or
    • you would prefer to boot the Acer netbook using a DVD and an external USB DVD drive
• 1 x DVD burner (optional)
  • If you need the blank DVD as above then I’m assuming you also have the DVD burner, right?
• 1 x ISO File
  • iDeneb v1.1 10.5.4 – Universal for Intel/AMD with support for SSE2
    • I cannot provide you with a download link for obvious reasons but you shouldn’t have much problem finding it.  (Googling would be a good start.)
    • When you’re downloading this save it to your Mac’s Desktop so we can get to it easily when required
• Chameleon Bootloader
  • Download here
• Diablo’s iDeneb 1.4 Tools
  • Download here
• Extra.zip
  • Download here
• PC_EFI V10.1 Bootloader
  • Download here
• ShutdownSound
  • This is used to fix a kernel panic when shutting down the AA1 when running on batteries
  • Download here
• IOSDHCIBlockDevice.kext
  • This is to enable the Card Reader (SD)
  • Download here
• Some patience, a little intelligence and a pinch of nerdiness