HackaShaq's "2018 Mac Pro Replacement" Build: 10.14.6 Mojave Update
Ok guys, OP here. I’m back. I have had this build running flawlessly on High Sierra ever since I built it, and I wasn’t planning on upgrading macOS for the life of the machine. However, I needed Mojave for certain software like Lightroom 10, so I did the deed and updated macOS on this machine.
Let me start by saying, as you may already know, I’m not an expert at Hackintoshing at all. In fact, that’s why I wrote this build guide in the most basic straightforward terms possible to help the even the most beginners see a step-by-step of how to build this build. I’ll do the same thing for this Mojave update guide for this machine, and show exactly what I did to help people who may want to upgrade. Let’s get started:
1. Create a Bootable backup.
Don’t skip this step. This should already be the norm, but it’s worth noting. These days
Samsung 500GB SSDs are only $65, so be sure to have a bootable backup ready in case something goes wrong. How exactly do you so this? It’s easy and here are the steps for beginners. Feel free to blaze past this if you know how:
A. Insert your brand new 500GB SSD into an external USB enclosure or connect directly inside your machine. (My boot drive is called “Mac Pro” and my backup drive is called “Mac Pro Backup”…original, I know.)
B. Use software like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to mirror your current bootable startup drive to your backup drive. (I personally use SuperDuper!)
C. After the hard drive data has been mirrored to your backup. Launch Clover Configurator. In the “Mount EFI” sidebar under “Tools” select your source boot drive from the list of EFI partitions in the bottom portion of the screen, then repeat the process for your backup drive.
D. You will now have two mounted EFI virtual drives on your desktop. You want to copy the complete EFI folder from your boot drive to your backup drive (this will make it bootable).
Please pay attention to this step to ensure you’re copying the correct EFI folder from your source drive.
This can be somewhat difficult to tell the difference between the two EFI “drives”. So to confirm which one is which, double click and open the drive named EFI and the hold down the command key and click on the drive icon. It will show you the exact drive you’re looking at. Also, the source drive will have a CLOVER folder inside the EFI folder where as the backup drive would not if this was a freshly formatted backup drive.
Drag the folder “
EFI” from the source drive to the backup drive and when the Finder asks, you want to Replace not merge. (i.e. you want to completely replace the EFI folder to make this new backup SSD bootable.
E. Play it safe and test your backup. Connect it to your external USB enclosure, reboot, and at the clover boot loader, select your backup to ensure it boots up and you have a viable backup.
2. Update macOS to Mojave.
Ok, I know you’re probably supposed to update Clover and all kexts
beforeupdating macOS, but I didn’t. I thought to myself, “What if I just update macOS to Mojave and it works fine?” so I felt like trying. It didn’t. I mean, it booted, but I lost audio functionality and other things like USB connectivity, so I had to re-examine things and do it right. So yeah, it’s best to do it right. Here’s how to update macOS.
A. Download macOS Mojave direct from Apple.
I went to this link:
Then, simply scroll down to the “Download macOS” section and click on the
macOS Mojave 10.14 link. This will pop up the download option for Mojave.
A nice thing about waiting this long to update to Mojave is that the download is the final combo OS installer which is 10.14.6.
B. Click to download and install. This will take time based on your internet connection, and it will reboot, etc. You will likely need to select the “mac OS Install” partition at the Clover boot loader after the first main reboot to allow Apple to continue to download the necessary files.
3. Update Clover Boot Loader.
Update your Clover Boot Load by launching Clover Configurator, selecting Install/Update Clover from the “Tools” left-hand sidebar, then clicking the “Update” bottom in the bottom right corner.
Once you click “Update” you will see a list of available bootloaders. Since Mojave came out in September of 2018, it’s 2 years old now and I figured I didn’t want the latest Clover boot loader just in case. So for my needs, I selected revision
5122 from the pull-down menu.
I took this screen shot
after already updating to Mojave. But my original version of Clover was
revision 4359 as per my original build for High Sierra.
Once selected, click the “
Update” button to download and install Clover.
NOTE: If you use
Little Snitch, you may see a malicious/suspicious warnings pop up that will prevent you from downloading/installing this package. I did. And it was an issue even when I clicked to proceed from the warning. (This is because the Little Snitch message doesn’t truly allow all when it detects something malicious.)
If you use Little Snitch, launch
Little Snitch Configuration.app and manually add the app “Clover Configurator.app” to Little Snitch and allow the app to “Allow Any Outgoing Connection” before even attempting to download the clover update within Clover Configurator.app:
Click the “+” to manually add Clover Configurator.app and then you will see Clover Configurator in the list highlighted above, and it will download the Clover update just fine after that.
4. First download the updated Kexts for this build.
There are very few kexts needed for this build. The three main Kexts needed to upload for this build are:
Should you use the latest versions of these kexts? Probably. Did I actually do that? No. I just grabbed versions 1.3.6 of AppleALC.kext and 1.3.9 of Lilu.kext.
Why? Well, they were released in 2019, and I figured they were new enough to be primed and ready for Mojave, yet old enough to hopefully not introduce any issues due to edits perhaps needed for Catalina or Big Sur. Is this the wise approach? No clue, but this is what I did and it worked.
For FakeSMC.kext I did use the latest version from that link which was from 9-15-2018.
5. Remove USBInjectAll.kext for Mojave.
You're not going to need USBInjectAll.kext anymore.
This is located on your
boot machine’s hard drive, not inside the EFI folder. If you remember from my original High Sierra build, I used “USBInjectAll.kext” and this kext was placed on the boot drive in the following folder:
Library > Extensions > USBInjectAll.kext
For Mojave, you will want to remove
USBInjectAll.kext. We’re not going to need it. Remove the kext above and send it to the trash.
6. Add AppleALC.kext for Mojave.
Add AppleALC.kext to this same directory for macOS Mojave:
Again, this is added to the computer's hard drive, not the EFI folder. Please see the screen shot above for the exact location inside
Library > Extensions
7. Reorganize the kext placement for Mojave.
Launch Clover Configurator.app, and mount the EFI partition for your boot drive:
On the previous High Sierra setup for this build, I had kexts in both the 10.13 folder and the “Other” folder. This was not ideal, but it worked, and if it ain’t broke, I didn’t fix it.
You will want to rearrange the placement of the kexts to be correct for Mojave
BEFORE (Old High Sierra Setup):
AFTER (Mojave 10.14.6 setup):
8. USB Fix for Mojave (Patch your Kexts).
With each version of macOS, there are tweaks needed to properly access/mount USB devices. Here is the tweak that I found online for updating the USB info correctly for macOS Mojave 10.14.6:
A. Mount your EFI partition with Clover Configurator
B. Navigate to /Volumes/EFI/EFI/Clover/
C. Right-click open config.plist with Clover Configurator (or drag your config.plist file onto the Clover icon in your dock.
D. Click Kernel and Kext Patchesunder SECTIONS left side bar of Clover Configurator
F. There are two patches here you are going to Disable. You need to disable these two entries as they are High Sierra patches which only apply to macOS 10.13.x High Sierra. We don’t need these for Mojave. Disable the following entries: com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBXHCIand com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBXHCIPCI.
Please see the two checkboxes above to disable the macOS 10.13.x patches. I couldn’t capture the entire lines without scrolling the window, so I just mocked up this screen cap to show all relevant info.
G. There are four patches you will make here to have USB working smoothly. You will want to ADD the kext patch by clicking the small “+” icon at the bottom left portion of the window, and then add the following information as per the screen cap above.
Mojave 10.14.6 Kext Patches: (4 Patches)
Patch #1:
Name*: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily
Find* [HEX]: 83FB0F0F
Replace* [HEX]: 83FB3F0F
Comment: USB Port Limit Patch 1 PMHeart/DalianSky
MatchOS: 10.14.x
Patch #2:
Name*: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily
Find* [HEX]: 83E30FD3
Replace* [HEX]: 83E33FD3
Comment: USB Port Limit Patch 2 PMHeart/DalianSky
MatchOS: 10.14.x
Patch #3:
Name*: com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBXHCI
Find* [HEX]: 83FB0F0F
Replace* [HEX]: 83FB3F0F
Comment: USB Port Limit Patch 3 PMHeart/DalianSky
MatchOS: 10.14.x
Patch #4:
Name*: com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBXHCI
Find* [HEX]: 83FF0F0F
Replace* [HEX]: 83FF3F0F
Comment: USB Port Limit Patch 4 PMHeart/DalianSky
MatchOS: 10.14.x
H. Be sure you
save you
config.plist file, and now all USB devices should work properly with Mojave.
USB is alive and well now.
9. Audio Fix for Mojave
Walk to your fridge, grab a drink, pause, smile and do nothing. You’re done!
The reason I brought this section to your attention is that I read many
many notes online that showed that new to Mojave, that you can no longer inject “11“ into the
devices area of Clover Configurator to get audio working. (This is Step Seven: Fix Audio in my main Guide post.)
From the High Sierra build guide I made, to setup audio, you just had to go to Clover Configurator, choose
Devices from the sidebar under SECTIONS, and then under the “Audio” section check “
ResetHDA” and then enter the magic number “
11” in the Inject pull-down menu. This was for High Sierra. However, I read many things saying this no longer works for Mojave, and how people needed to add PCI device IDs, guess the numbers to use from a range of numbers at the bottom and change properties, etc.
Well, thankfully this wasn’t the case for this build, and the previous High Sierra setup works great with audio. No changes need. Whew. All done.
10. I’m attaching my working EFI folder
It’s best to get this working on your own just to be safe, but what the heck, this build has been pretty popular so if people want or need to see my EFI folder, I’m attaching it to this post.
A. The only edit I made to this EFI folder is my computer’s serial number. You’ll want to open the config.plist file and enter your computer’s serial number. Look for the text on line 391:
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>CXXXXXXXXXXXX-PUT-YOUR-SERIAL-HERE</string>
Just update the text “CXXXXXXXXXXXX-PUT-YOUR-SERIAL-HERE” with your computer’s serial number by editing the text file in BBEdit, etc.
(You can find your serial number for your machine by just going under the Apple Menu and choosing About This Mac.)
B. My boot drive is called “Mac Pro” so you may also want to change line 162 of the config.plist file to the name of your computer to startup to this by default.
C. I actually added the “AtherosE2200Ethernet.kext” into the “Other” folder of my kexts as well. It’s not needed, but it didn’t mess anything up, so it’s there too. You probably don't need it.
D. I’m including this EFI for educational purposes only. Not responsible for anything that may happen to your system. YMMV. Operators are standing by. Not valid in Guam. You get the idea.
That’s all, folks.
Hope this Mojave update addendum helps someone, and if it does, please circle back and post here as it always makes me happy to hear that this guide build has helped people.
If things don’t work, I can do my best to assist, but there are people far smarter than me on this forum that are more likely to give you better info.