In a quagmire with my El Capitan install.

Hey,

Sorry for the lack of expertise here, but I was hoping someone could guide me out of update hell...

So I started with my system of a GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 running Yosemite and had not switched over to Clover yet and was running a fairly old BIOS of F11. Everything was running well except the typical iMessage not working.

Trying to update to El Capitan, it looked like I had to update my boot loader to Clover, and I was led to believe that this would be easier if I updated my bios to UEFI. Well after a day of trials and failures getting the UEFI to install I finally got it. So then trying to boot my drive with Yosemite (not having updated to Clover yet), it almost immediately gives me a kernel panic. So I had already created a USB drive with Clover and El Capitan installer (as described in the El Capitan Install guide) so I tried booting off that and I successfully get into Clover, but then I have four choices:

1. "External" - Boot Mac OS X from USB
This option gets about 1/3 through the startup and freezes
2. "HFS" - Boot Mac OS X from ProServer SSD
This would be my Yosemite boot drive - it gets about 1/3 through the startup then gives me a circle with a line through it.
3. "HFS" - Boot Mac OS X Install from ProServer SSD
I guess this would be the El Capitan Install on my Yosemite drive, this option gets about 2/3 through then gives me a circle with a line though it.
4. "Recovery" - Boot Recovery from Recovery HD
?? I didn't think I had a recovery HD. - gets about 1/2 through startup and gives me a circle with a line though it.

To get past the circle with the line through it I tried plugging my USB stick into one of the on-board USB because those should be USB 2.0 and I saw that there were problems with USB 3.0 dropping out sometimes and causing the circle with a line though it because the drive basically disappears.

If anyone has any guidance on where to go from here I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks!!!

I'm not sure whether UEFI will work well on a 6-series board. I would recommend trying a Legacy install first.

If you have USB3 on your board, you should disable it in BIOS. You can try it again if you get the system running, but I think I've heard that these boards work better with it disabled.

If you want to try booting to your existing Yosemite install and you don't have Clover installed to the system drive yet, make sure BIOS is set to boot legacy only or boot legacy and UEFI and then use your BIOS hotkey to select a boot device and select the non-UEFI entry for the drive that the Yosemite install is on and see if that gets you in.

To troubleshoot the prohibited sign, you should boot verbose (space bar from the Clover menu) and see if the last text on the screen when you get the prohibited sign says "Still waiting for root device". If so, you need to keep trying different USB ports until you find one that works.

When convert to the UEFI BIOS, you need to remove your DSDT that you used when using the F11 Award BIOS. (The DSDT.aml file is located in the /Extra/ folder on the Yosemite installed disk.)

Thanks for all your replies, I have tried all these and so far no change. When I boot with verbose mode on, it finally gave me the prohibited sign all the characters on the screen went garbled, so the last line looked like "Still waiting for..." but I can't make out what exactly it's waiting for. Maybe this is a strong sign I need to try other USB ports. I have turned off USB 3.0, but I haven't seen a change and I have never had an issue with USB3 before.

I will keep trying and post if I figure something out...in the meantime any suggestions or thoughts would be great to hear!

Thanks!

I have tried all sorts of things and continue to get the same results, except for one unreproducible time...

One time I tried removing my Toshiba SSD that was my original boot disk with Yosemite, and put on a regular hard drive instead. When I booted off the usb stick I successfully was able to get all the way into the welcome screen of the installer (loading it from the usb stick with clover. I thought that I had figured out the issue, so I didn't actually run the installer and rebooted to refine the solution I had found. The problem is that I have NEVER been able to reproduce this again!

So after all my work, and reading what others have posted about the U1E bios, I have come to the conclusion that upgrading the bios was a HUGE mistake and it's bugginess is what is causing all my issues.

Apparently you cannot revert backwards to F13 or F11 bios, so I have two choices:

1. I found some sketchy Russian utility that forces the bios to a previous version, but if it doesn't work the motherboard can get bricked!
2. I could upgrade my machine to a different motherboard (maybe one that has UEFI that works), but I can't afford a whole new computer so keeping as many pieces from my existing computer would be important...ANY SUGGESTIONS??? I will update my profile with all the components I have now to help with any suggestions.

Thanks again!