Ways to install mountain lion 10.8 on unsupported macs

[Tejaa]

I have gone through the system requirement of mountain lion 10.8 and I am disappointed as my mac is not qualifying for the same. I am having a mid-2007 MacBook, anyways I wanted to know if there is a way by which I can to install mountain lion 10.8 even though my mac is not supported, Any ideas?

[jaykant]

You can get mountain lion 10.8 working on your unsupported mac as well but you will have to pay for the same, anyways I have come across one mentioning that he has installed mountain lion 10.8 on his MacPro1,1 so if you want then you can follow the same steps for installing it on your mid-2007 MacBook as well:

• First download the DMG file from here by paying for a Mac Developer account and mount the downloaded DMG. After mounting You will see a file called “Install OS X Mountain Lion Preview 1.app” inside the DMG. So just Right click on it and select show Package Contents. After that check out for “SharedSupport” folders and copy the file InstallESD.dmg from there to your Desktop and close the window.
• Now open terminal by going in to Application/Utilities/Terminal) type “cd desktop” without the quotes and hit enter, then type”hdiutil convert InstallESD.dmg -format UDRW -o InstallESDedited.dmg” and hit enter again. When you do so, a new “InstallESDedited.dmg” file will be created on your desktop. So just Double click on that file and it will get mounted in a drive called “Mac OS X Install ESD”.
• Once the drive is ready you will have to replace the System Folder in the Drive. System Folder will be containing EFI64 boot.efi and compatible boot files. So you can get other EFI32 boot.efi and the compatible files from here which is from Lion 10.7 System Folder.
• After downloading and extracting the file drag the System File on the drive into the recycle bin and the new files you have downloaded onto the root of the drive. When you are done with the same then open “Packages” folder from the root and check out for OSInstall.mpkg file, make sure that you are not checking out other file named OSInstall.pkg BE. After being sure that you have found OSInstall.mpkg file drag it in to the trash folder and download this patched versions OSInstall.mpkg & EFI32.pkg files.
• Now move OSInstall.mpkg & EFI32.pkg file Packages Directory burn a DVD using Disk Utility, if you want then you can create a bootable USB Flash Drive having DMG as well. If you are burning it in to a dvd then simply run DiskUtility click on “InstallESDedited.dmg file” and Click Burn.

Once the dvd is ready then you can Load into your Mac Pro and install mountain lion 10.8. I also wanted to add that the installation process might take more time, so wait for the same and do not interrupt the task. Just try it out and feel free to ask if you face any issue with it.

[Evoldo]

You can try out the below simple solution as well if you are able to download OS X Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store. Once you get it then create OS X Mountain Lion Bootable USB Flash Drive following the solution below:

Creating OS X Mountain Lion Bootable USB Flash Drive:

• After downloading OS X Mountain Lion go in to Applications folder and look out for the copy of Mountain Lion you have installed. When you get it then Right click on it and select “Show Package Contents”. Now Go in to Contents>SharedSupport folder and look out for InstallESD.dmg file.
• When you get it then copy it to your desktop, connect a USB flash drive having of minimum 4GB, open Disk Utility and drag InstallESD.dmg in sidebar and select your USB flash drive and then click on “Partition” tab. After that Select 1 Partition from the dropdown menu and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
• Once you are done until here then click on Option and Select GUID Partition Table and click on ok followed by apply. When the drive gets formatted then select InstallESD.dmg file as Source and USB flash drive as Destination and click on restore. After the process gets over you will be having a Mountain Lion bootable USB flash drive.

Now after creating a bootable USB flash drive of Mountain Lion just download and install this installer and point it to Mountain Lion Bootable Disk.After that leave your usb flash drive plugged and restart your Mac , upon booting Hold “Option” key when you get the startup chime and you should now be able to boot into Flash drive and continue installing Mountain Lion on other partition.

Important:

• After the installation process first boot to Snow Leopard or Lion that you might be having installed, just install download this installer and install it on Mountain Lion Partition. Now you can Reboot your mac and boot over Mountain Lion partition for reaching the desktop.
• You should also install the below kexts accordingly from Lion 10.7.3 using Kext Wizard for Repairing permissions and rebuilding cache for System/Library/Extensions.
  MacBook2,1 – AppleIntelGMA950.kext, AppleIntelGMA950VADriver.bundle, AppleIntelGMA950VLDriver.bundle
  MacBook3,1 – AppleIntelGMAX3100.kext, AppleIntelGMAX3100VADriver.bundle, AppleIntelGMAX3100FB.kext, AppleIntelGMAX3100VLDriver.bundle

You can get Kext Wizard by searching on the net and download the same and install it.