Yet another Lenovo G50-70 install Mavericks thread

[cutterjohn]

Should be in my .sig but:
Lenovo G50-70 Intel Core i7-4510U
Intel HD 4400 (1366x768)
LGA1168 chipset(or that's all cpuz or hwinfo will pull)
conexant audio hd
1TB mech hdd(using shipped drive ATM see below)
Attempting a clover instal(1st time, did a unibeast/chimera desktop early in the year).

So, combining some franken attempt between the Clover Install Mavericks Guide(geared towards HP notebooks) and this:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/laptop-co...just-little-bit-help-needed-7.html#post739947

BIOS set to legacy/legacy first, booting EFI USB stick (prepped on my mbpro mid 2010).
I've left WiFi enabled for now even though it is incompatible as it doesn't appear to be interfering with the install attempts. I'll details blocks later.

Using "novo" button -> boot menu -> EFI (USB Mass Storage device or my clover partitioned usb "stick") will boot me straight through to the installer, provided that one remembers to remove the HPfan hack. From experience it just stalls out if left in(oops). Clover is defaulting to a mbpro 11,2 which seems to be mostly/kind of(?) working so I didn't monkey with that. (I downloaded the clover files from the dropbox link reffed in the HP Mavericks/clover install thread.)

(Just to be clear this is ALL with the stock shipped 1TB mechanical hdd.)

1st attempt: we won't talk about this(see above sentence)

2nd attempt(after more reading): partially follow the g500 guide, removing the additional lenovo_os(d partition(backed up to a network drive first) -> remove that partition, shrink the win8(OS) drive by 450GB(as much as it would allow under windows).
Booted clover based installer -> OS X installer -> Disk Utility fails to partition/format the unused space on the drive. It looks like it's going to work but never seems to actually do anything. (I gave up on this after waiting c. 20m)

3rd attempt: Same as above, but formatted the unused space to "exfat", which Disk Utility happily reformats as MacOS extended, and will proceed to install. (or Phase I by the HP clover/mavericks guide)

Going through the reboot in an attempt to do phase "2" is where I get stuck, and what I am suspecting is that it has to do with the EFI partition(no space probably? right? or maybe back to Disk Utility apparently not being able to partition the drive to begin with?). I let this run for about an 1h and it would proceed through phase "2" "install" about 1/3 of the progress bar and bebop between 20m and 17m until finished, hdd LED was lit up but I couldn't tell if it was actually doing anything.

This is where I'm at ATM, i.e. not very far, so my questions are:
(a) any suggested partitioning to try out with the stock drive and the c. 500GB of free space, i.e. create an unused partition of a few hundred meg or so for EFI? and another exfat for the remaining space so that all Disk utility has to do is format it to allow phase "1" to go and then hope that phase '2" finds and uses the "unused" space for EFI? (I'm just pulling at straws on this, so any help is appreciated...)

or

(b) I think that I've got a 750GB(WD caviar black even maybe 7500k) laying around, so just try swapping out the hdds and start out with a complete blank drive?

The problem with (b) was that I was hoping to "easily" preserve win8 while being able to dual boot clover/OS X Mavericks.

Additionally would 10.10(Yosemite) be a better option to try with this at this point? i.e. is it known if it would supply any "better" support?

Anyways, between having to resetup the clover USB stick several times(seems like the OS X mavericks install partition got corrupted on a couple of early attempts in that it would hang early in booting to installer, not even showing the cycling round segment of lines thing...)

I'm not worried about WiFi yet, but a few years ago I did buy a Zyxel AC1200 adapter which has the same chipset as the edimax AC1200 adapter(might even be identical hw in all respects as even the exteriors other than color are also identical) and so am hoping that the RTL88<whatever it was, I'll look later when we're there> are just generic and will work with either, but I also have a crappier 802.11n adapter that I could also try, but I'm just HOPING to get that far tomorrow, let alone sound, PM(sleep/etc.).

Advice? Ideas? (I also kind of looked at the U430 thread partially, but I can already see that it uses realtek audio instead of conexant so the mobos might not be as close as I had originally hoped, OTOH I think that the G500 mobo is also quite a bit different as well so I'm back to those only being useful as general references...)

[EDIT=12/2/14]
What works so far:
ClovergrowerPro 3033-7(self built, had a problem w/3029 IIRC(FIXME)

Boot native UEFI/safe boot off/wireless left on/"Other OS"/everything else DEFAULT (latest BIOS, # not handy but ends w/28 my original ended w/26 and had almost no options whatsoever and was not playing nice at all)

Aptiofix and uefivarfix worked, plus genericUSB, voodoops2, and whatever one I mention below<FIXME> Rehabs 4400/4600/5000 config.plist

Install OS X 10.10.1, but I see no reason that 10.9.3+ shouldn't work also with the new BIOS and ability to defeat "secure" booting, installed to a BLANK drive. Installing to OEM drive WITH win81 installed will require some extra work. EFI part should already be >100MB so that should be OK, but M$ Reserved part seems to need to be removed o.w. Disk Utility will look like it can format a NTFS/exfat partition but in reality will do NOTHING. (Time, etc. permitting I'll try this later)

ClovergrowerPro 3037(self built) install to install drive

Boot some version of linux and dump dsdt and ssdt tables(7 ssdt tables in my case w/graphics defined in ssdt4), I used acpidump and acpiextract with an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS bootable USB stick(same one that I used to install OS X, just repartitioned and installed Ubuntu, might want to back up your clover config(the clover dir) to make your life easier.

rename dsdt and ssdt[1-7] to dsdt.aml and ssdt[1-7].aml, iasl -da -dl *.aml

open dsdt with MacIasl(using 1.2 ATM) add rehab man's laptop repo<FIXME>, patch whichever store that was<FIXME> with hish patch(just comments them out, nested store 2 locations in DSDT), comment out the other error<FIXME> Compile should be no errors, but some warnings/remarks

Apply GFX0->IGPU patch from rehab's laptop repo to DSDT.dsl, compile should be no errors. Save as .aml

open ssdt4.dsl, apply GFX0-IGPU patch again, and the Brightness fix(haswell), compile, should be no errors. Save as .aml

mount EFI part however you want to.

Copy the patched dsdt.aml and ssdt.aml to /EFI/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/ eg. (probably best naming as follows)
cp dsdt.aml /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patch/DSDT.aml
cp ssdt.aml /Volumes//EFI/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patch/SSDT-4.aml
NOTE: dsdt.aml/ssdt.aml will be whatever you named them when you saved as "compiled binary aml"

Edit /EFI/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist and set DropOEM to <true>

Install ACPIbacklightfix(rehabman repo) kext however works for you

probably best to unmount EFI just in case but should work just doing a shutdown or restart...

reboot, brightness slider under sys prefs/disp should now work...

...and well that's it for the moment, working on a batt patch and sleep next, sound later as it's less important...
[/EDIT]

 

[RehabMan]

Should be in my .sig but:
Lenovo G50-70 Intel Core i7-4510U
Intel HD 4400 (1366x768)
LGA1168 chipset(or that's all cpuz or hwinfo will pull)
conexant audio hd
1TB mech hdd(using shipped drive ATM see below)
Attempting a clover instal(1st time, did a unibeast/chimera desktop early in the year).

So, combining some franken attempt between the Clover Install Mavericks Guide(geared towards HP notebooks) and this:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/laptop-co...just-little-bit-help-needed-7.html#post739947

BIOS set to legacy/legacy first, booting EFI USB stick (prepped on my mbpro mid 2010).
I've left WiFi enabled for now even though it is incompatible as it doesn't appear to be interfering with the install attempts. I'll details blocks later.

Using "novo" button -> boot menu -> EFI (USB Mass Storage device or my clover partitioned usb "stick") will boot me straight through to the installer, provided that one remembers to remove the HPfan hack. From experience it just stalls out if left in(oops). Clover is defaulting to a mbpro 11,2 which seems to be mostly/kind of(?) working so I didn't monkey with that. (I downloaded the clover files from the dropbox link reffed in the HP Mavericks/clover install thread.)

(Just to be clear this is ALL with the stock shipped 1TB mechanical hdd.)

1st attempt: we won't talk about this(see above sentence)

2nd attempt(after more reading): partially follow the g500 guide, removing the additional lenovo_os(d partition(backed up to a network drive first) -> remove that partition, shrink the win8(OS) drive by 450GB(as much as it would allow under windows).
Booted clover based installer -> OS X installer -> Disk Utility fails to partition/format the unused space on the drive. It looks like it's going to work but never seems to actually do anything. (I gave up on this after waiting c. 20m)

3rd attempt: Same as above, but formatted the unused space to "exfat", which Disk Utility happily reformats as MacOS extended, and will proceed to install. (or Phase I by the HP clover/mavericks guide)

Going through the reboot in an attempt to do phase "2" is where I get stuck, and what I am suspecting is that it has to do with the EFI partition(no space probably? right? or maybe back to Disk Utility apparently not being able to partition the drive to begin with?). I let this run for about an 1h and it would proceed through phase "2" "install" about 1/3 of the progress bar and bebop between 20m and 17m until finished, hdd LED was lit up but I couldn't tell if it was actually doing anything.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-...oting-os-x-installer-laptops-clover-uefi.html

 

[cutterjohn]

http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-...oting-os-x-installer-laptops-clover-uefi.html

Thanks rehabman for reminding me of this thread however:

(a) attempting to build from sources as you weakly imply results in: [EDIT] ignore the -f trying flags to get something more useful but scripts too stupid[/EDIT]

macbook-pro:CloverPackage moylan$ ./makepkg -f

========= Translating Resources ========
Updating 'en' strings file for CloverUpdater... done
Updating 'en' strings file for Clover Preference Panel... done
Updating strings file for Clover Preference Panel... done
Unknown format type: prop.
List of valid formats:
- asciidoc: AsciiDoc format.
- dia: uncompressed Dia diagrams.
- docbook: DocBook XML.
- guide: Gentoo Linux's XML documentation format.
- ini: INI format.
- kernelhelp: Help messages of each kernel compilation option.
- latex: LaTeX format.
- man: Good old manual page format.
- pod: Perl Online Documentation format.
- sgml: either DebianDoc or DocBook DTD.
- texinfo: The info page format.
- tex: generic TeX documents (see also latex).
- text: simple text document.
- wml: WML documents.
- xhtml: XHTML documents.
- xml: generic XML documents (see also docbook).

I've got fink installed and haven't trawled through the labrythine build scripts yet so that may be contributing to the problem...

...and since ATM let's say that I'm a trifle less than 100% and tried the "easier" way ATM...

later on I'll eliminate the linkages to fink stuff and see if that helps out building from source... I'm just not at all familiar with gettext or po4a so I'm grasping at straws just trying to at a minimum get a q&d boot going.

All of that said, what kind of idiot "designed" the overgrown chromebook that is the g50-70? the thing is noticeably larger than my sager np-8265 and SLIGHTLY smaller than my old 17" MSI GT725. It's lighter, but for what it is, it's size is utterly RIDICULOUS, especially given the paucity of the batt cap. (I'm going to take it that this is a design that preys on punters thinking that bigger is teh bettar somehow as that's the only reason I can think of for it being so egregiously GINORMOUS. Build quality is pretty crap too, especially compared to the cheaper Acer C720 i3 that I bought a few months ago for a few hundred less... but I digress just annoys me to no end...)

 

[RehabMan]

Thanks rehabman for reminding me of this thread however:

(a) attempting to build from sources as you weakly imply results in: [EDIT] ignore the -f trying flags to get something more useful but scripts too stupid[/EDIT]

I use Clover Grower Pro, but have to admit I have not built since v2999. There's been crazy churn lately, so I'm waiting for the dust to settle.

 

[cutterjohn]

I use Clover Grower Pro, but have to admit I have not built since v2999. There's been crazy churn lately, so I'm waiting for the dust to settle.

Thanks for the resp. I spent a little bit of time trawling through the build scripts yesterday, but without being experienced with the packages(and the mess) I haven't made any progress yet as where I THINK the problem might lie builds fine(which I already kind of knew).

I didn't get around to trying building again with the fink paths removed, just in case something there is interfering. Not sure when I'll have time to do that, maybe next weekend.

All of this reminds me why I was SO HAPPY to get away from building from source. Eventually you run into something that suddenly starts failing to build and it's usually something so trivial, but not being familiar with the project it takes time to track down and then you(well I usually did) end up sticking in a tiny hack to just get things to work.

Anyways, ATM I'm trying the other pre-built sf cloverefiboot package, but unfortunately I'm fighting with that as I can boot into the installer(usually) but that one seems to be hanging at some poitn and when I can get the log window to popup it's not very useful. Trying something ATM so waiting for it to finish under iwn8 on the g50, which is where I'm posting from.

I also did a brief search looking for clovergrowerpro problems, but in the q&d search it sounded like 3021(IIRC) was supposed to have fixed them, so I might just give up and try a bit older revision.

No need for a reply. I'll do a double post later once I've had a chance to try my q&d tonight and then after something more thorough if q&d doesn't work, but so far I was having better luck with the hpprobook clover setup removing the the hp spec stuff until phase 2. Right now I'm not even getting to phase 2, so I might looka t that as well.

Thanks again.

 

[RehabMan]

Thanks for the resp. I spent a little bit of time trawling through the build scripts yesterday, but without being experienced with the packages(and the mess) I haven't made any progress yet as where I THINK the problem might lie builds fine(which I already kind of knew).

I believe there is a thread on projectosx (where the Clover devs hang out) that describes how to build Clover. Not sure if it is kept up-to-date with the changes.

Clover Grower Pro seems to still work too...

 

[cutterjohn]

I believe there is a thread on projectosx (where the Clover devs hang out) that describes how to build Clover. Not sure if it is kept up-to-date with the changes.

Clover Grower Pro seems to still work too...

Yep. I suspect a conflict with some fink built binaries installed. I'm attempting a clean rebuild with fink "disabled" ATM.

Thanks for the projectosx link. I probably overlooked that site as the versions referenced are quite old(OSX) but it looks like the clover threads are still alive, and probably have good info in them(somewhere). I'm working my way through them ATM too trying to figure things out. Debug logging is something that I'm pretty sure that I'll be wanting to turn on.

Might also try swapping out that OEM drive for that WDD 750GB that I have laying around to see if it'll work on a blank drive, as I also ended up re-installing clover this morning comparing what I had from colverefiboot(sf) v. what the hp clover package had. The drivers and kexts were the same, but I'll admit to not snooping through the config.plist although the display works better with the one that you ref in your clover guide(4400_4600 config IIRC).

Well if I get this working I'll probably switch to clover for everything and never look back which would be a plus(I hope)... but I can see why it's not used as the recommended bootloader here ATM...

[EDIT]
Yep. It built fine this time, but I notice that the current pull was bumped from 3028 to 3032.

I'm going to try another rebuild later with fink paths available again.
[/EDIT]

 

[RehabMan]

Yep. I suspect a conflict with some fink built binaries installed. I'm attempting a clean rebuild with fink "disabled" ATM.

CGP works...

Well if I get this working I'll probably switch to clover for everything and never look back which would be a plus(I hope)... but I can see why it's not used as the recommended bootloader here ATM...

+1. Clover is a bit complex, but worth it.

 

[cutterjohn]

CGP? Ports?

Anyways, as mentioned above that worked, but the version had gone from 3028 -> 3033, and then to make things easier on myself(mbpro batt is on it's last legs. I've a replacement but not gotten around to installing it or that "spare" drive...) I moved my big hackintosh to where I'm working on the Lenovo.

clovergrowerpro had jumped another version number by the time I did this(needed some updating) from 3032 -> 3033. Still building for me, so I'm inclined to still blame fink builds as I haven't bothered to try another rebuild on the pro with fink "enabled" and the newer versions that I KNOW to build correctly.

Does your U430 have a pretty gimped down BIOS(settings)? I've really only got very basic settings to play with, e.g. Legacy Support(which I enabled), USB legacy support(enabled), and "Other OS" support v. win8(I'm guessing that this turns off secure boot maybe, their dox are useless and as usual the "help in BIOS is pretty pointless. Amazingly they managed Engrish for sentence fragments.) and that's it.

Also it seems like the BIOS is changing settings on it own/behaving onconsistently, which reminds me that I should go check for a BIOS update(v3.7 ATM).

So rebuilding the clover, and the entire boot stick on the hackintosh ATM and have decided to switch to trying from 10.9.3 install "app". I still can't figure out why using the HP notebook clover package was getting me farther v. pre-built cloverefiboot or my own built clovergrowerpro. I did get the console up when it started to install last time and was noticing packagekit installer errors 22 and 24 mainly, which reminds me that I need to go try to find info on that.

Well next attempt is cooked, so off we go...

 

[RehabMan]

CGP? Ports?

Clover Grower Pro: https://github.com/JrCs/CloverGrowerPro

Does your U430 have a pretty gimped down BIOS(settings)? I've really only got very basic settings to play with, e.g. Legacy Support(which I enabled), USB legacy support(enabled), and "Other OS" support v. win8(I'm guessing that this turns off secure boot maybe, their dox are useless and as usual the "help in BIOS is pretty pointless. Amazingly they managed Engrish for sentence fragments.) and that's it.

My u430 settings are probably similar to yours and are typical of the average laptop out there.

Also it seems like the BIOS is changing settings on it own/behaving onconsistently, which reminds me that I should go check for a BIOS update(v3.7 ATM).

If you're getting CMOS resets, make sure you're using config.plist/KernelAndKextPatches/AppleRTC=true