If you have been following our Hackintoshing guides, you might know the basics, and how to install Snow Leopard on your custom built PC. In this guide, we will try to upgrade your Snow Leopard hackintosh to Mac OS X Lion, and also explain a thing or two regarding dual-booting your hackintosh with Windows.

We started with the basics & choosing the most compatible hardware, and then showed you the installation of Snow Leopard on it. So if Snow Leopard (v10.6.7) is working perfectly for you, you might consider upgrading to Mac OS X Lion. Now it is to be noted that upgrading to Lion is totally your own choice. If you are satisfied, enjoy your hackintosh the way it is. But if you want to upgrade, be sure to perform a backup first. You can image your working Snow Leopard drive using a backup/imaging program like “SuperDuper” or “CCC” (Carbon Copy Cloner). This is just a precautionary measure, so that if anything goes wrong and Lion cannot be installed on your hackintosh, you may easily revert to the previous working condition. You can also use the recently released rBoot rescue CD by Tonymacx86. Before you image your hackintosh, make sure you have everything working perfectly.

So before upgrading, you have to download the necessary stuff. Firstly, visit tonymacx86′s downloads section, and download xMove. You’re also going to need the most important download – Mac OS X Lion. It costs $29 from the Mac App Store, and once purchased, you can download it on any Mac computer from your Apple ID. Be aware of the size of the download, it’s a huge 3.5GB. So if you have a slow internet connection, you should have a lot of patience. If you cannot download it from the Mac App Store, you can use the Mac OS X Lion recovery USB drives that Apple is distributing now. It costs $65, and is almost the same thing as the Mac App Store download, except for the fact that it is on a thumb drive. tonymacx86 recommends that you use the Mac App Store download, a newer guide will be released for the USB thumb drive, and we will cover it when it comes out. Apart from that, you might need MultiBeast, for enabling the devices that may get disabled due to the OS upgrade. You might consider using the latest released MultiBeast 4.0 (made specifically for Lion).

You might have some questions regarding compatibility of Mac OS X Lion on your hackintosh. If Snow Leopard is working perfectly for you, Lion will probably work perfectly for you. But there’s always a rare chance that something won’t work, or the installation may not be successful. So before you make the move, have a look at the forums. See how people with similar hardware got it to work. Once you’re satisfied, gather all the required stuff and get started.

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