Build your own EFI-X Dongle with Rebel EFI

EFI-X is a USB Dongle that was manufactured to enable Macintosh OS on PC hardware without modifying the original OS. I will say it’s a transformer-enabler so that you can install Mac OS and update it with official Apple Software Update with peace of mind, as long as you have the latest firmware updated for your dongle.

For more information related to this product, you can visit their official website. I was actually so temped to order one and try it myself, yet the price really hold me off. To me, this is an USB device, with a bunch of encrypted content inside and help you boot your machine. Yes, just an USB. Is that worth more than $200 US after tax from me?

If we think more thoughtfully, why don’t we just build one ourselves with less than $10?

You might or might not hear of Psystar. It’s a company that located in the US and they sell non-Apple PC with Mac OS X installed; while they are still having the lawsuit with Apple, they released the Rebel EFI lately. To me, this is a stolen program that’s based on the script that’s available in the OSX86 community, such as boot-132, fakesmc.kext and so on, but I am not going to discuss the copyright stuffs today, but it’s good to use netkas’ PC EFI if you want. Now let’s get started and build your own EFI-X Dongle with this pirated product, Rebel EFI.

1. You will need to download the latest Rebel EFI from the official site (link provided above)

2. Mount the “rebelefi_latest.iso”, and plug in your USB flash drive; I will say, 1GB is more than enough, and they cost usually below $10; but for me, I will use a 8GB one instead.

3. Launch your Disk Utility (“Applications”–>”Utilities”–>”Disk Utility”), select your flash drive and partition it to HFS+ with Apple Partition Map as your Partition Scheme. If you don’t use this partition scheme, you will probably get Boot0 Error.

4. Then click on the “Restore” tab, you will see the interface as following:

5. Simply drag your flash drive partition (where I named it “EFI”) to the “Destination” field, and the “Rebel EFI” to the “Source” field. Then click “Restore”. The whole process should take less than 10 seconds because the files that are needed to be copied are quite few.

OK, now your own EFI-X Dongle is done. Just plug-in onto any of your available USB port and set your mother BIOS to have USB HDD as your first boot device.

For the first time of your boot up, you are require to install Leopard or Snow Leopard onto your hard drive with a retail copy of Mac OS X. There is a lengthy instruction available on Psystar’s Rebel EFI wiki page and I am not going to explain in detail here. Once you have your OS installed on your hard drive, you are now ready to boot up your Mac OS X.

Every time you boot up your machine, since you have already set your USB dongle to be the first boot device, your machine will first read the USB’s content and give you the boot menu. Just simply choose your OS-installed hard drive and hit the Enter key, your machine will load Mac OS X.

Basically, now your EFI partition will be on the USB drive while your system files are on your hard drive. You can go ahead and run your Apple Software Update, it will replace the mach_kernel and some other system files; however, if you have the modified files on your USB device, your system will simply ignore the original files and bring you no panics.

Tips: As the original EFI-X was built as an internal USB device, we can also get an USB PCI card with internal USB port and hide it inside of your PC case. Here is one for example:

[UPDATE] rEFIt will also works with this method to let you create your EFi-X dongle; you may also want to try PC EFI 10.5 from netkas (STRONGLY RECOMMEND).