I hope it's okay, I quoted this here from out of the other Hackintosh thread for fear it'll just get lost there.
Specifically, I'm curious how you prepare a USB bootloader for a desktop system. That's a great idea. I remember doing it a few years ago when it was the current method, and it always seemed like a good idea to keep the bootloader separate like that, but the method was quickly replaced and all I've seen since are the harddrive only methods.
Do you have any info on the exact way you set your USB boot drive up? Sounds like this will be great general info for Hackintosh enthusiasts to know, yet I haven't really seen anyone else advocating it despite the benefits.
Seems to me the only downside is dedicating a USB port -no biggie- and possibly a few seconds of boot time? I dunno.
Any chance for a Kaido guide on your setup method?
Sure, same method I've been doing for awhile now. Originally it was with Chameleon, but lately I've been doing it with the Tonymac Chimera branch due to modern support & easy installation procedure. The key concept is that
the bootloader doesn't need to be on the same drive (or partition) as the OSX install. This enables you to put the bootloader on a
different drive or partition. I originally did this for 2 reasons:
1. To keep the Mac install clean (no modded kexts, scripts, patches, etc.)
2. To circumvent the 1TB limit in Chameleon at the time
For example, my wife's computer has a 2TB boot drive running Snow Leopard. She didn't want a USB stick in her machine (UD3P), so I partitioned off a gig, installed Chameleon on it, and then installed OSX on the 2nd partition. So technically, the OSX partition is 100% clean Mac:
http://i.imgur.com/hLdLjVb.png
I personally prefer the USB stick method because I can physically unplug the drive and swap a new one in for testing, and if that breaks, swap in the old one and boot up just fine. To make it even more vanilla (stock), I also use natively-supported equipment for the "problem children" - Sound, Network, and GPU. Going back to my wife's machine, it has a Syba USB stereo sound card (~$10), an Encore PCI Gigabit card (~$10), and an 8800GTS video card. They don't require any modded kexts or patches, so the OSX install stays 100% clean & hack-free.
This is also handy if you work on real Macs, because your hard drive is 100% Mac-compatible and vice-versa. And it makes updates nice because you don't have to re-patch audio. The downside is that it's nice having everything on the board, like digital 5.1 audio, and you lose some ports (PCI, USB) and have to select specific video cards that have native support. The upshot is that it's super easy to maintain!
My next project is a D3P board with an i7, 32GB RAM, 1GB ATI 6870 GPU, USB Sound, PCI NIC, and USB bootloader. The goal is the same as before, but since it is an 1155-based board, you get native SpeedStep & Sleep: (unlike my current 1366-based X58 board)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128556
If you want to make things nice & clean, you can snag an internal USB header to external USB port adapter for under five bucks and just put your bootstick inside the case, if you don't do much tinkering: (saves an external USB port too)
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-Mothe.../dp/B000IV6S9S
This method is not for everyone, but I really like it due to the convenience - easy to manage the HDD, easy to manage the bootloader, easy to manage updates. All of the Hackintosh stuff exists outside the Mac boot drive, so you don't have to deal with any funny business down the road.
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