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[Solved] Unable to boot, restore, do anything - help!

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Jan 6, 2015
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Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-z97x-UD3H
CPU
i5-4590
Graphics
RX 580
Mac
  1. iMac
  2. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. LC
  2. PowerBook
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
I’d like to ask for some help in bringing my hackintosh back to life. It’s gone, overnight, from working to near perfectly to unable to boot into any of the drives or backups, USBs and clones I have available.

At the Clover screen I can choose which drive to boot from but whatever option I try, the boot gets stuck at the black screen with Apple logo and the progress bar barely moving for an age, and then eventually it goes to black screen with a white ‘no entry’ sign (a circle with a diagonal line across it).

Sometimes it goes to the 'no entry' sign quite fast. I’m getting this with:

  • My SSD drive with Sierra installed, working fine yesterday
  • The 'restore' partition of the SSD drive
  • My external hard drive with two partitions: the first has a backup of various OS X and MacOS installers which are recognised at boot-up and offered as options within the Clover screen.
  • The second partition has a bootable clone of my hard drive’s state immediately before the upgrade to Sierra, so it has El Capitan.
  • A USB drive made using Unibeast for Sierra installation
  • A USB drive made using Unibeast for El Cap installation
  • A USB drive made using Unibeast for Yosemite installation

They all try to boot, start up the progress bar, and then ditch out to the ‘no entry’ sign.

First, some history. I recently upgraded from El Cap to Sierra (about a month ago). It went fine but I noticed some graphics glitches and crashes at first, and system prefs kept crashing if I went into trackpad or mouse settings. The logs showed it was a graphics issue, caused by a failure to play to help videos in those pref panes. As a possible solution I tried installing the NVIDIA drivers which I’ve never needed before with my setup. This didn’t help, so I turned them off in the pref pane.

Then I did something which, in retrospect, may have been stupid: I went into Clover Configurator and tried ‘inject NVIDIA’ as an option. This was a bad idea, as after this the system wouldn’t boot. I messed around in Clover and found the config file had become corrupted or lost, possibly, or simply wasn’t being recognised at boot time. So I managed to boot using a standard config configuration which was available in Clover at boot time (which was a download from this site). That worked, I found the right config.plist, duplicated it and restored it to the right position and then rebooted.

To cut a long story short, for a time there, about half a day, all the problems with graphics had gone. My system prefs crashing problem was solved, all seemed wonderful. I shut down as normal at the end of the day.

Next morning - no boot. No way to boot from anything.

What I’ve tried so far:

1. Unplugged all peripherals except USB keyboard and mouse

2. Disabling the graphics card
I removed power to the graphics card and tried to boot by connecting my monitor to the CPU’s graphics output. All I got was a blank screen on the monitor, and a message about ‘no signal’. So I had no choice but to plug the graphics card back in. Could this suggest that the CPU is borked? Or its graphics are borked? If so, how come it boots and loads BIOS etc?

(If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m not very technical and have little idea what I’m doing with all this…)

3. Checking BIOS settings
I loaded ‘optimized defaults’ for good measure and checked settings. VT-d was ‘enabled’ so I disabled it and tried everything all over again, but nothing had changed. I don’t seem to have any of the other options mentioned in step 3 of the installation guide dealing with BIOS settings. (https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...upported-intel-based-pc.200564/#uefi_settings)

I’m now stuck. I’ve resigned myself to a reinstalling of the OS, maybe a clean sweep, rebuild the system from scratch, but I can’t even do that, as I can’t get any of the installation drives to work. I have plenty of backups etc, and am in no danger of losing data. But I can’t get my hackintosh to do anything.

There clearly could be a major hardware failure, but I don’t know how to determine what has failed.

Does anyone know if ‘inject NVIDIA’ could damage the cpu or the intel graphics?

Below are some error codes I noticed during some of the failed attempts to boot. These might mean something to someone somewhere:


boot from original SSD drive


Sound assertion in AppleHDADriver at line 1098
co.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (org.ntp.sntp.157) <Warning>: Service exited with abnormal code: 1


BIOS

Boot from Sierra Unibeast USB

panic (cpu 0 caller )xfffffff8000337436): “zone init: kmem_suballoc failed”@Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-3789.60.24/osfmx/kern/zalloc.c:2141

Can’t perform kext scan: no kext summary


Thank you, thank you, to anyone who can help, or even just make suggestions as to what to try next.


EDIT: I enabled verbose mode and a photo is attached: the text is fairly scrambled and unreadable even on my screen.
 

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I've been trying all day to find a way past this roadblock, reading countless threads and getting nowhere. I'm attaching some pics of failures to boot because I think some of them may be informative to those in the know. The first two show me trying to boot to the Sierra Unibeast USB installer. The other pic shows trying to boot into the Recovery drive.
 

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I’d like to ask for some help in bringing my hackintosh back to life. It’s gone, overnight, from working to near perfectly to unable to boot into any of the drives or backups, USBs and clones I have available.

At the Clover screen I can choose which drive to boot from but whatever option I try, the boot gets stuck at the black screen with Apple logo and the progress bar barely moving for an age, and then eventually it goes to black screen with a white ‘no entry’ sign (a circle with a diagonal line across it).

Sometimes it goes to the 'no entry' sign quite fast. I’m getting this with:

  • My SSD drive with Sierra installed, working fine yesterday
  • The 'restore' partition of the SSD drive
  • My external hard drive with two partitions: the first has a backup of various OS X and MacOS installers which are recognised at boot-up and offered as options within the Clover screen.
  • The second partition has a bootable clone of my hard drive’s state immediately before the upgrade to Sierra, so it has El Capitan.
  • A USB drive made using Unibeast for Sierra installation
  • A USB drive made using Unibeast for El Cap installation
  • A USB drive made using Unibeast for Yosemite installation

They all try to boot, start up the progress bar, and then ditch out to the ‘no entry’ sign.

First, some history. I recently upgraded from El Cap to Sierra (about a month ago). It went fine but I noticed some graphics glitches and crashes at first, and system prefs kept crashing if I went into trackpad or mouse settings. The logs showed it was a graphics issue, caused by a failure to play to help videos in those pref panes. As a possible solution I tried installing the NVIDIA drivers which I’ve never needed before with my setup. This didn’t help, so I turned them off in the pref pane.

Then I did something which, in retrospect, may have been stupid: I went into Clover Configurator and tried ‘inject NVIDIA’ as an option. This was a bad idea, as after this the system wouldn’t boot. I messed around in Clover and found the config file had become corrupted or lost, possibly, or simply wasn’t being recognised at boot time. So I managed to boot using a standard config configuration which was available in Clover at boot time (which was a download from this site). That worked, I found the right config.plist, duplicated it and restored it to the right position and then rebooted.

To cut a long story short, for a time there, about half a day, all the problems with graphics had gone. My system prefs crashing problem was solved, all seemed wonderful. I shut down as normal at the end of the day.

Next morning - no boot. No way to boot from anything.

What I’ve tried so far:

1. Unplugged all peripherals except USB keyboard and mouse

2. Disabling the graphics card
I removed power to the graphics card and tried to boot by connecting my monitor to the CPU’s graphics output. All I got was a blank screen on the monitor, and a message about ‘no signal’. So I had no choice but to plug the graphics card back in. Could this suggest that the CPU is borked? Or its graphics are borked? If so, how come it boots and loads BIOS etc?

(If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m not very technical and have little idea what I’m doing with all this…)

3. Checking BIOS settings
I loaded ‘optimized defaults’ for good measure and checked settings. VT-d was ‘enabled’ so I disabled it and tried everything all over again, but nothing had changed. I don’t seem to have any of the other options mentioned in step 3 of the installation guide dealing with BIOS settings. (https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...upported-intel-based-pc.200564/#uefi_settings)

I’m now stuck. I’ve resigned myself to a reinstalling of the OS, maybe a clean sweep, rebuild the system from scratch, but I can’t even do that, as I can’t get any of the installation drives to work. I have plenty of backups etc, and am in no danger of losing data. But I can’t get my hackintosh to do anything.

There clearly could be a major hardware failure, but I don’t know how to determine what has failed.

Does anyone know if ‘inject NVIDIA’ could damage the cpu or the intel graphics?

Below are some error codes I noticed during some of the failed attempts to boot. These might mean something to someone somewhere:


boot from original SSD drive


Sound assertion in AppleHDADriver at line 1098
co.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (org.ntp.sntp.157) <Warning>: Service exited with abnormal code: 1


BIOS

Boot from Sierra Unibeast USB

panic (cpu 0 caller )xfffffff8000337436): “zone init: kmem_suballoc failed”@Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-3789.60.24/osfmx/kern/zalloc.c:2141

Can’t perform kext scan: no kext summary


Thank you, thank you, to anyone who can help, or even just make suggestions as to what to try next.


EDIT: I enabled verbose mode and a photo is attached: the text is fairly scrambled and unreadable even on my screen.

I've been trying all day to find a way past this roadblock, reading countless threads and getting nowhere. I'm attaching some pics of failures to boot because I think some of them may be informative to those in the know. The first two show me trying to boot to the Sierra Unibeast USB installer. The other pic shows trying to boot into the Recovery drive.

Attach Clover folder removing Themes ZIP attach.
 
I've been trying all day to find a way past this roadblock, reading countless threads and getting nowhere. I'm attaching some pics of failures to boot because I think some of them may be informative to those in the know. The first two show me trying to boot to the Sierra Unibeast USB installer. The other pic shows trying to boot into the Recovery drive.
Your images appear to show you attempting to boot in single user mode and the screen is paused waiting for input from you.
Type exit and press return.

You may well have more luck using safe mode instead.
 
Your images appear to show you attempting to boot in singe user mode and the screen is paused waiting for input from you.
Type exit and press return.

You may well have more luck using safe mode instead.

I think CsrActiveConfig is not set to 0x67 neither.
 
Thanks - how do I change CsrActiveConfig if I can't get to Clover configurator, can't access the config.plist to edit it, and can't access terminal? Is there any way to do this?

You can change it at Clover just for testing. Options -> rt variables -> CsrActiveConfig 0x67.
 
Your images appear to show you attempting to boot in single user mode and the screen is paused waiting for input from you.
Type exit and press return.

You may well have more luck using safe mode instead.

Thanks for the info and advice. I'm not used to using safe mode or single user mode, but was trying them out of desperation.
 
Thanks for the info and advice. I'm not used to using safe mode or single user mode, but was trying them out of desperation.

At Clover if you Press Spacebar you can boot with Safe mode. Or type -x in Boot args.
 
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