OSX86 on T60
As you know I am a thinkpad fan. I really think they have a very good build/price(with discounts I get)/performance/reliability ratio. My T42p is getting old and I will surely change this early next year…
A model like the 200762U can handle OSX86 pretty well and for your eyes only here are some instructions…(stolen from uneji.net) You would surely find a lot more info here: http://www.osx86project.org
Also if you plan on playing with your T60 and OSX, you MUST read this. A T60 running OSX can run faster than the lastest powerbook but has no camera…
As far as OSX on the t60p goes, here’s a more detailed list of instructions (these may not be perfect…also, read through them to figure out what you need before you start):
1. Backup your machine. (duh, you are playing with partitions here) I suggest making the recover disks too from the thinkpad “create recovery media” app.
2. Get Partition Magic and resize your IBM_PRELOAD partition. You’ll need to create at least 6 gigs on un partitioned free space on the drive for OSX.
3. Partition Magic will ask to restart to make the changes.
4. Upon restarting, select “Run…” from the start menu and type “diskpart” and press return.
5. In the terminal that pops up, type these items (press return after each line):
list disk
select disk 0
create partition primary id=af
6. Close the terminal window.
7. Now get a patched copy of OSX x86 10.4.4 / 5 DVD. This is a legal grey area at best right now. Do a search over at http://www.osx86project.org/ for more information. Let me put it you like this way, you will likely get it BIT-by-BIT. (please don’t PM me with questions about this).
8. Start up Partition Magic again and make the empty partition active (right click on it in the Partition Magic interface).
9. Restart the machine. You’ll get the Lenovo logo and then a prompt saying “missing operating system”. Put the OSX x86 DVD in the drive and restart the machine. The OSX installer should start up.
10. When you get to the area that asks you to select a disk to install OSX on, mine came up empty. I went to the disk utility (found in the utilities menu) and reformatted the partition. When that was done, it popped up just fine and I was able to install without any issues.
11. Once the install was finished, I restarted the machine…but the missing operating system came up again. This is likely because a boot loader (like grub or Acronic OS selector) has not been installed. Putting the OSX disk back in the drive but not installing again got me back into OSX.
12. OSX is very fast, but to increase the speed even more, RaysMD on this board showed us how to get your v5200 card recognized by the OS. Basically, you need to edit two files to have the system recognize the card and use the correct resolution. You can find his instructions here:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=18575&start=30 (fourth from the last post on this page). Worked great for me!
13. Next, you need to install a dual boot loader. I went with Acronic OS Selector. But first, you will need to set the XP partition as active so you can install the boot loader. I used The Ultimate Boot Disk to do this. You can download it for free here: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
14. Throw that disc in the machine and restart. Use spfdisk to make the xp partition active again.
15. Once you are back in XP, install the Acronis OS Selector and follow the prompts to set it up (very easy).
That should be it. For those wondering, I managed to keep the IBM invisible partition safely while doing all this stuff.
