No Audio Devices in El Capitan on Series 5 motherboards Fix [Guide]

[MrPopman]

This guide is intended as a step-by step fix of a superseded DSDT edit that creates the "No Audio Devices" issue in OS X 10.11 on Series 5 motherboards when El Capitan is installed following the basic tonymac Installation Guide. This guide is only relevant if you have (or intend to) installed El Capitan, are using Clover as the boot loader, installed a DSDT file in the EFI partition of your boot drive (presumably a DSDT from the tonymac library), have used Toleda’s Realtek ALC AppleHDA Install (either via Multi-beast or stand-alone), and have an otherwise working system. As a reference, I have built exactly one hackintosh following Tony's guide, and have kept its OS relatively current, so I am not the person to ask for general help. Big props to Toleda for creating the Realtek ALC AppleHDA Install which works in El Capitan and the support of it since then via the No Audio Devices - Realtek ALC AppleHDA [Guide]. I wrote this because of the number of “Help me” posts involving this issue, such as No Sound ALC 889 El Capitan.

The edit to make to the DSDT file is very simple, we are changing the layout-id from a number that represents the ALC codec to one that represents the “Audio ID” to use. This will be a ‘1’ for almost everyone. See Toledo’s Realtek ALC AppleHDA Install on if it should be a 2 or 3.

You will need 2 tools:

Clover Configurator to mount the EFI partition
MaciASL to edit the DSDT​

Mount the EFI partition
Run Clover Configurator. If your EFI partition is not mounted, you will get an alert. Click the ‘Mount EFI’ button. Then click the ‘Check Partition’ button to get a list of ‘disk’ drives and partitions on them. Identify the drive you have El Capitan installed on. The "TYPE NAME" column shows the format of the partition and the name associated with it. Then click ‘Mount EFI partition’ and select the disk number from the list that El Capitan is installed on. A new disk EFI should now be available in Finder.

Edit the DSDT file
If you are editing the installed DSDT file in your boot EFI partition, I suggest you make a backup copy of it first. The file is located in EFI -> CLOVER -> ACPI -> patched directory.

Run MaciASL. It may open a DSDT file it finds somewhere. Close the file it opened. Use ‘File -> Open …’ and navigate to the DSDT file to edit. If you are editing the one on your Clover boot disk this is: EFI -> CLOVER -> ACPI -> patched -> DSDT. If you are editing a file prior to installing it, locate that file and open it.

Navigate to the section to edit. The easiest way is to find the text "Device (HDEF)" which should occur one time. This controls the audio definition information and contains what we need to edit. Within the HDEF block is something like:

                    Store (Package (0x04)
                        {
                            "layout-id",
                            Buffer (0x04)
                            {
                                0x78, 0x03, 0x00, 0x00
                            },

                            "PinConfigurations",
                            Buffer (Zero) {}
                        }, Local0)

All we need to do is change the 4 bytes in the "layout-id" to be:

                            "layout-id",
                            Buffer (0x04)
                            {
                                0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00
                            },

The 0x01 indicates “Audio ID” to use. If your setup needs 2 or 3, then change the 1 to that number. The initial values of the 4 bytes will differ depending on the motherboard and prior audio patch method.

In MaciASL click the “Compile” button. If a warning or 2 is produced this is probably ok. Error are not, and you must stop (do not save) and resolve them. After compiling, save the file.

If you edited your live DSDT file, you need to reboot for it to take effect. If you are editing a DSDT file prior to install, you are ready to proceed.

History
The old values of the “layout-id” were put in place to work with the old way that AppleHDA.kext was patched. This is per
MacMan's Gigabyte Award 1155/1156/1366 DSDT Patches which were the basis for most of the files in the tonymac DSDT database. Per the blog entry, "All that is required is to inject layout-id and PinConfigurations. Here is an example of what needs to be added for a board using and an ALC889 codec and using our Legacy889HDA.kext:” indicating that the layout-id information is to be paired with a patched .kext file, which is no longer used. This is why we are replacing that information with the Audio ID now being used.

Addenda (July 24, 2016)
Be very cautious in your use of MaciASL. Sometime after I wrote this guide, I managed to overwrite the entirety of the DSDT.aml file I was using for my El Capitan testing with completely incorrect information. My testing with this incorrect DSDT always resulted in a failed boot of El Capitan and resulted in many many wasted hours trying to figure out what I had done wrong with Clover.

 

[NightWolf]

You, sir, are my new favorite.