If you’ve ever wanted to install Mac OS X onto your PC (aka hackintosh), then now’s a great time to do so. Never before has hackintoshing been easier, and compatibility for hardware is growing all the time.

This post will guide you through the process of creating a hackintosh-ready USB drive with Mac OS X Lion 10.7 on it that you can use to bootup just about any PC into the Lion installer so that you can then install Lion.

Also in this post is a video how-to just in case you’d like to follow along with the written guide.

This guide was based off of THIS guide by MaLd0n on InsanelyMac. Some of it seemed slightly messy and not detailed, so I made this guide exclusively for TheMacMob readers.

Requirements

1. A computer with Mac OS X already on it – The reason for this is that we need to prepare the USB drive, and the only way to do this is within Mac OS X. So, you’re going to need to use somebody’s Mac for a while. You can also use Mac OS X inside of VMware Workstation (Windows or Linux), OR on your current hackintosh (if you have one). The bottom line is that you’re going to need some machine (again, it doesn’t need to be a Mac) to do this.
2. An 8GB (or larger) USB flash drive – I tried this on a 4GB flash drive, and it barely fails to meet the space requirements.
3. THIS file - Inside of that ZIP file are 3 other ZIP files that will be used.
4. Mac OS X Lion 10.7 DMG – You can download this from the Mac App Store. The DMG itself is located in Install Mac OS X Lion.app/Contents/SharedSupport. It’ll be best to move this file to your desktop.
5. About 20-30 minutes of time - Most of the time will be used up when copying files over to your flash drive. Using a USB 3.0 flash drive will speed things up quite a bit.
6. An already ready hard drive (or SSD) – You obviously need to install Lion to, so you’re going to need a hard drive or a solid-state drive that’s already partitioned and ready to go. You’ll be formatting the drive or partition in Disk Utility from the Lion installer, so you don’t need to specifically choose the filesystem just yet.

Instructions

1. Open Disk Utility (Spotlight, or /Applications/Utilities).
2. Select your USB drive’s partition in the left sidebar (the one that you’d like to put Lion on).
3. Go to the “Erase” tab.
4. For the format, set it to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, give it a label, and click on the erase button.
5. Open Terminal.
6. Mount “InstallESD.dmg”, which can be found by looking at requirement 4 above.
7. Run the following command: open /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/BaseSystem.dmg
8. Go back to Disk Utility.
9. Click on the “Restore” tab.
10. For the source, drag “Mac OS X Base System” from your desktop into the source box.
11. For the destination, drag your USB drive into the destination box.
12. Click on the restore button. This process will take anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes, depending on the speed of your USB flash drive. At the end of the process, the label of your flash drive’s partition will change to “Mac OS X Base System”. Keep track of which is which, as there are now 2 “drives” labeled that.
13. Go to your USB drive in Finder, navigating to /System/Installation.
14. There should be a “Packages” symlink (which are basically shortcuts/links to another file or directory), so delete it.
15. Create a folder named “Packages”.
16. Go back to Terminal.
17. Run the following command: open /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/Packages
18. Copy all of the files in the new Finder window over to the empty Packages folder that you created in step 15 above.
19. Extract all of the files from requirement 3 above to your desktop.
20. Open Extra Lion DP4 GM.pkg.zip, which will add Extra Lion DP4 GM.pkg to your desktop.
21. Open Extra Lion DP4 GM.pkg, installing the software to your USB drive.
22. Open Chameleon_2.0_RC5_r1083.pkg.zip, which will add Chameleon_2.0_RC5_r1083.pkg to your desktop.
23. Open Chameleon_2.0_RC5_r1083.pkg, installing the software to your USB drive. Ignore the available packages (in other words, install only “Chameleon”).
24. Open Lion_OSInstall_GM.tar.bz2, which adds a “System” folder to your desktop.
25. On your USB drive, navigate to /System/Installation/Packages.
26. In the extracted “System” folder, navigate to /System/Installation/Packages.
27. Copy the “OSInstall.mpkg” file from the extracted folder on your desktop over to the Packages folder on your USB drive, overwriting the one that’s already there.
28. On your USB drive, navigate to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Frameworks/OSInstall.framework/Versions/A.
29. In the extracted “System” folder, navigate to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Frameworks/OSInstall.framework/Versions/A.
30. Copy the “OSInstall” file from the extracted folder on your desktop over to the “A” folder on your USB drive, overwriting the one that’s already there.

Your USB drive is now prepared for installation on nearly any PC! All you have to do now is boot directly from it (you may need to change your settings in your BIOS, or at least bring up a boot menu), go to the installer, choose the drive/partition that you want to install Lion to, install Lion, and you’re done!

Now comes the part that you’ll have to do some research on yourself: Getting your hardware work properly.

What I mean by that, is getting various pieces of hardware working properly, such as your audio, video card, Ethernet, WiFi, and possibly more. Below are a few good resources for these things:

• tonymacx86.com
• InsanelyMac.com
• Kexts.com

If you have any questions or comments regarding this (or anything else), please leave them in the comments area below.

Via [TheMacMob]