Yosemite and ATI Radeon HD 3870 - White screen after installation

Greetings all,

I have installed Yosemite on my Supermicro X9DAi system (1x 2.6GHz CPU, 16G RAM, 1x SSD, ATI Radeon HD 3870) and have run into a glitch. After installing Yosemite, I am unable to get 1920x1200 resolution from my video card. However, I *am* able to get that resolution during the installation process. Here is a quick recap:

• I used UniBeast to create the installation media (8G thumb drive) and MultiBeast to do post-installation work.

• I selected a minimal MultiBeast config (nullCPUManagement, etc) to keep the system as generic as possible.

• When booting from the installation USB, I use "GraphicsEnabler=Yes" and am able to get full resolution from my video card (1920x1200).

• If I use "GraphicsEnabler=Yes" when booting from the SSD after installation, I am greeted with a white screen and mouse pointer (no login screen). Oddly enough, the display has changed to 1920x1200 (as it should) but I never get the login screen.

For troubleshooting sake, I took the card out of the hackintosh, put it in my 2006 MacPro1,1, installed Yosemite, and was greeted with a 1920x1200 screen after installation. So, I am pretty sure Yosemite will support this card (as verified by the installation USB and on my real MacPro1,1).

Another oddity. During Yosemite installation, the System Information tool reports the card as "ATI Radeon HD 3690 Series with 512MB RAM (Vendor: ATI 0x1002, Device 0x9501). However, in normal run time mode, the System Information tool reports the card as a generic PCIe card with 3MB RAM. I tried to get a list of kernel modules loaded during the installation GUI but was unable to do so (no "kextstat" command available). And, from looking at the card and doing some online searches, I know this card is indeed the "ATI Radeon HD 3870" card made by Sapphire.

Any hints/clues/thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

[SOLVED] Yosemite and ATI Radeon HD 3870 - White screen after installation

After working with the system for a while, I identified the root cause. As a quick recap, I was able to get 1920x1200 resolution from my HD Radeon 3870 during Yosemite installation but not afterwards.

It turns out the following video drivers were added to the /System/Library/Extensions folder during installation:

AMDRadeonVADriver.bundle
AMDRadeonX3000.kext
AMDRadeonX3000GLDriver.bundle
AMDRadeonX4000.kext
AMDRadeonX4000GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX2000GA.plugin
ATIRadeonX2000GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX2000VADriver.bundle


My suspicion is Yosemite tried using the AMDRadeonX3000.kext driver without support for my card (thus the white screen).

To fix the problem, I booted from my USB installation media, created a folder named /System/Library/Extensions/Backup, and moved the above files into the Backup folder. After rebooting, I was able to get 1900x1200 resolution from my video card (and get both displays working!). Although my card is truly an HD 3870, Yosemite still reports it as "ATI Radeon HD 3690 Series 512 MB". And, the video performance is less than stellar (to be expected). But, this gives me more time to get a good deal on an ATI R9 290x card!

Hope this helps someone else!

-Ron

There're numerous reports on the web that cards of Radeon HD3xxx series, including HD3870 512MB, don't work with Hackintosh above Mac OS 10.5 . Do you use Mac version of HD3870 with special GPU BIOS, or generic Windows PC version of the card with original ATI BIOS?

Did you change anything else to make this card work apart from deleting above drivers?