hackintosh-full-installer

Repo for a script that can complete part of the task of creating a full macOS Catalina Hackintosh installer entirely from Linux.

This script is based on instructions in this YouTube video which is Part 1 of a two part series explaining how to create a full macOS Catalina installer created using tools in Windows.

However the create-installer script in this repo contains all of the commands needed to partition, format and add the macOS installation files entirely from Linux so none of these programs are needed: Boot Disk Utility or Paragon Partition Manager or Paragon HFS+ for Windows.

Required files

Create a folder in your linux distros home folder called install

This screenshot shows the required contents of that folder:

The Shared Support folder comes from downloading the macOS Catalina installation files using the gibMacOS tool. Click on the Green 'Code' button and download the .zip file to your home folder. Then right click on it and extract it to somewhere in your home folder.

# cd /home/flex/Documents/hackintosh/gibMacOS-master
# python3 gibMacOS.command

This gives a menu of macOS versions. Choose macOS Catalina 10.15.7 (19H15) When everything has downloaded copy the required files into your ..\install\SharedSupport folder Rename InstallESDDmg.pkg to InstallESD.dmg

In InstallInfo.plist change this...

<key>Payload Image Info</key>
  <dict>
  <key>URL</key>
  <string>InstallESDDmg.pkg</string>
  <key>chunklistURL</key>
  <string>InstallESDDmg.chunklist</string>
  <key>chunklistid</key>
  <string>com.apple.chunklist.InstallESDDmg</string>
  <key>id</key>
  <string>com.apple.pkg.InstallESDDmg</string>
  <key>sha1</key>
  <string></string>
  <key>version</key>
  <string>10.15.7.0.0.1604077749</string>
  </dict>

To this...

<key>Payload Image Info</key>
  <dict>
  <key>URL</key>
  <string>InstallESD.dmg</string>
  <key>id</key>
  <string>com.apple.dmg.InstallESD</string>
  <key>sha1</key>
  <string></string>
  <key>version</key>
  <string>10.15.7.0.0.1604077749</string>
  </dict>

Running the create-installer script

In order to run successfully the script will require at least these linux tools which may need to be installed first:

7z, sfdisk, hfsprogs, mount, rsync

From a terminal change directory to the "install" directory which contains the create-installer script and you run it like this:

sudo script -c ./create-installer /home/flex/macOS/install/create-installer-output.txt

The output will appear in the Terminal and also get logged to a file.

Notes

The script has only been tested on Manjaro and Ubuntu mate.

If running the script on an Arch distro ensure the unMountIfMounted() method is like this:

unMountIfMounted(){
    echo "Unmounting partitions on "$dev_block"..."
    ls ${dev_block}* | xargs -n1 umount -l
}

Else if running the script on an Ubuntu type distro ensure the unMountIfMounted() method is like this:

unMountIfMounted(){
    echo "Unmounting partitions on "$dev_block"..."
    ls ${dev_block}?* | xargs -n1 umount -l
}

The created macOS Catalina installer will not install macOS Catalina if the installer was created in Manjaro and you are using the OpenHfsPlus.efi driver in Opencore. The HfsPlus.efi driver (from Apple) is able to run the macOS installer if created in Manjaro or Ubuntu mate.

The macos-EFI.img file contains a backup of the EFI partition from a working Catalina USB Installer made to install and run macOS Catalina on my laptop. This .img file was made using a dd command like this:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/home/flex/macos/install/macos-EFI.img bs=64k iflag=fullblock status=progress

Unless you happen to have a backup of your Opencore EFI folder stored in this way then you should comment out the call to the copyEFIFolder() method. Instead you simply create a folder called EFI in the root of the fat32 partition on the macOS installer and add your Opencore files/folders in to that.

Acknowledgments

cvad the developer of Boot Disk Utility provided valuable help with commands to write the Apple Disk Image to a USB drive. The partition structure created by this script is also based on that of Boot Disk Utility

Igor Pavlov the developer of 7-Zip provided valuable help with commands to extract the Apple Disk Image (4.hfs from BaseSystem.dmg)