Come home. Drink two generous vodka & cokes whilst washing up & chatting to Caroline. Decide to “fix” one or two minor issues with the hackintosh.
Use Kext Helper to attempt to re-install some kernel extensions that I suspected hadn’t been installed properly. Reboot said hackintosh.
Experience the “no smoking” / grey boot screen. Experience extreme fear/rage/wish-that-one-had-got-time-machine-working-on-the-eee.
Spend rest of night figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.
In the end I had to bootstrap off the install cd I used for the original install, then boot into an iDebeb install image I had on a DVD, then use the terminal to copy back an original Extensions folder taken from my MacBookPro. Arse!
On the plus side, I think I now have a better understanding of what’s going on under the hood. On the minus side, it’s 3.38 in the morning, and I’m now back to where I started.