Install Lion On Lenovo Laptop Without Snow Leopard Using Unibeast

01/31/2018 We no longer support or recommend Tonymac86’s programs: Unibeast, Chimera…

July 21, 2012 Sleepenabler.kext – put in the extra folder for the lid to close and wake up when opens, wake up from sleep… etc.

sleepenabler.kext

And always use portable drive to install before internal hard drive. For Realtek id 0139 card reader isn’t supported, a USB SD card reader is handy.


2012-04-19 Another procedure on Lenovo laptop with hard drive has no OS installed by Miller (a reader) : Dual boot windows 7 and lion.

2012-03-17 For those who has Snow Leopard 10.6.3, follow Tom’s steps to get Lion working…

I only installed SL 10.6.3 to be able to create the UniBeast USB key! I installed Lion on an external hard drive. Once I got MulitBeast installed and all the mods you suggest in your video done, I used UniBeast to restore the Lion partition to an empty partition I created on the internal HDD. I then managed to get dual working by using EasyBCD. I had to assign a letter to the MBR partition using disk management in Windows 7 so that EasyBCD could access the BCD file. Adding an entry under the Mac tab using MBR mode instead of EFI mode enabled dual-boot successfully!

2012-03-14 Re-installed Lion and updated to 10.7.3 to my Lenovo G770 i5 and update to dual boot using Chameleon MBR partition-Easy and painless. Now Facetime works.

Thanks to Unibeast, we can now install Lion OS X easily without the need to have 10.6.3 Snow Leopard. This installation is much easier and less work than the Snow Leopard 10.6.8. Here is the video, the pictures and details will come soon.

Before we start, check to see if all the components inside the Laptop are compatible with Lion 10.7.3. Google to see if these devices have kexts. If yours are the same as my Lenovo G77o, you will have fully functional Lion 10.7.3 without the SD card reader.

This procedure should work with all Sandy Bridge i5-i7 laptop. Just like in the video, we should have 1-8GB USB flash drive with unibeast and lion installed, 1-512MB USB flash for important files needed for the installation (idogusbboot). If we don’t have a Snow Leopard installation done, we need to find a mac os x machine for about 1 hour to create all these USB flash drives. If we don’t know much about Hackintosh, we must get an external USB hard drive (either 2.5″ or 3.5″ drive with correct adaptor), experiment with it first then when everything works as desired, restore it to the hard drive.

usb drive     sata usb adaptor

Here are the steps needed to get the installation successfully without any problem.

1. Create Unibeast Lion USB drive (we should have the Lion application downloaded from Apple website $29.) + download Multibeast 4.2.1 and put inside  idoglionunibeast folder then put idoglionunibeast folder inside Unibeast Lion USB flash drive.

Most of us will have the screen resolution problem, I solved mine by choosing the correct USB port for the USB unibeast lion installation disk. Make sure boot with -x.

boot with -x flag     bad resolution

2. Create idogusbboot for emergency and in case screen resolution doesn’t come up (we don’t need this if we can work with half of the display and guess where the next buttons are while initialize the Lion).

need usb mouse     need keyboard

next screen     next

3. Install Lion from Unibeast Lion USB.

4. Restore working external usb LION partition to created internal Lion partition.

BACK UP THE HARD DRIVE IMAGE BEFORE INSTALLING LION. Make sure all partitions including the MBR 200MB

Create a partition inside the hard drive by Shrinking it in Windows 7

Using restoring procedure like the video below to restore the USB partition to Hard drive Partition. Lion OS doesn’t allow to restore from the source, therefore, we have to use the USB unibeast to boot to installation, but we only use the diskutilities to restore the external usb lion partition to the internal drive partition.

boot with unibeast     use disk utility

erase the internal     select usb lion

Drag lion1073 to destination    click restore

Wait for about 20 minutes on this process. Now we should be able to boot with unibeast usb drive and select the internal drive LION partition to boot. The next one is to dual boot the laptop with current Windows 7 and Lion10.7.3.

5. Create dual booting windows 7 and Lion : Chameleon or EasyBCD.

On my Lenovo Sandy Bridge i5, dual boot with EasyBCD is not possible, but if install chameleon boot loader over the mbr partition, it will boot faster than the original windows MBR. So, make sure booting internal hard drive Lion partition with unibeast is working. Download the idogusblion zip file with all folders and files needed. 

Go to applications folder and execute “showallfiles”, then go to Disk Utility to erase and format the MBR (200Mb) partition for chameleon boot.


Click ShowAllFiles icon     erase and format chameleon MBR partition

Copy 4 folders and 2 files from idogusbboot to chameleon partition

idogusbboot folder     Copy all content of idogusbboot

Now we can install chimera 1.5.4 (this will work with everything) on to this chameleon boot partition.

Install Chimera 1.5.4      done

Now, we can boot straight from the hard drive, but it will by pass windows and just start lion partition. We need to put menu into the com.plist file in our internal partition extra folder so we can see windows partition.


edit org.chameleon.Boot.plist     add 4 lines

Run Kext Utility when done. Now we will have a boot screen with 2 icon, windows and lion1073.

Final Screen Menu

Install Voodoo HDA 2.7.3 after remove AppleHDA.kext and REBOOT (without reboot, system will hang and re-installation is a must)

25 Comments

  • iDog,

    I used UnitBeast to create a USB Lion (10.7.4) Install, however after Unibeast creation via S.L. the root directory of my USB only had the Lion Install package and a few other directories. It did not appear to have nearly as many directories as yours did in at the end of the UniBeast creation video. (BTW. I used UniBeast 1.1.0)

    Since I tried the above a few times and kept getting the same few files/dirs on the Unibeast USB, I decided to give the USB drive a try anyway. What happened was that I was able to boot off the USB (though the UnitBeast GUI looked a little weird like it was mirroring/overlapping itself). I did not see any command line but when I press a key I got a “boot:” prompt in the center of the UniBeast GUI window. So I entered -x and hit enter. While I tried several times with different external drives, each time I would use the -x boot param I would get an Apple logo screen for a while and then a small icon with a circle and a slash thru it. However, if I did not enter the -x boot param I would get to the beginning of the Lion instal where is asks for country. (I aborted and rebooted at that point since I assume that would have tried to install to the internal drive).

    So I guess my questions are:
    1) Is the lack of files on the USB normal or did I mess up the UniBeast creation? (I did add the dogmonkey w/Multibeast files afterwards into the root directory… BTW, should they be right in the root or in a directory in the root)
    2) Am I supposed to get a Unibeast GUI at boot or a simple boot command line?
    3) Did I miss some step in prepping the external drive since I get the circle (with a slash thru it)… I did not do anything special to the external drive at all. One poster mentioned somethig about making the external GUID… I jsut saw that and I am wondering if maybe that is the step I missed?

    Sorry for all the noob questions, but I’m kinda confused on where I went wrong.

    On the plus side, I did locate the right USB port to get the full and correct resolution (score one for the total noob :)) although I’m not sure why the boot UniBeast GUI seems all mirrored/tiled looking.

    • Did you put the Lion apps in the applications folder of the SL? There must be something different about lion apps 10.7 and lion 10.7.4. Why don’t you try the myhack 3.1 to create the lion usb boot. BTW, always use an external USB drive and make it work before restoring it to the internal hard drive.

      • iDog,

        Thanks for the reply.

        I read your recent post regarding Lion 10.7.4 and it looks like that version is a no go for now. I did get further into the process but without wifi it’s kinda of a pointless for me to continue trying with that version.

        On another note, a few weeks ago (back when I was considering going with Snow Leopard), I recall seeing that someone had listed a thumbdrive (full retail version) of Lion 10.7.3 for sale (on CL, IIRC) and I was wondering if the Unibeast process can be done with a full version or if it has to be a MacStore app? If so, are there any additional steps required to go that route?

      • Hello Eh,
        Lion Apps is also a full version, the thumb drive is just for you to boot easily, but not for hackintosh anyhow as I understand. All you need is the InstallESD.dmg out of the Lion Apps to boot with MyHack 3.1 instead of Unibeast (requires Lion Apps).

  • Thanks for you awesome tutorials! I got my G770 up and running on 10.7.3. I was wondering if you have run into any battery drain issues? My laptop will use the battery incredibly fast when using it on the battery alone. Thanks!

    • Josh, thanks for your nice comments, my battery is going out also, it only last less than an hour now. The best is to slide the brightness to the low level to save battery on the Lion 10.7.3.

      Cheers,

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