<< Solved >> High Sierra not booting from primary or backup disk. Was working perfectly before.

[Edhawk]

You might need to create a new USB installation drive or at least a new Clover boot drive. Do you have access to a Mac or another Hack?

 

[cloin]

Attached the Clover folders compressed. N.B. this is from the EFI partition of a backup disk cloned daily from SSD1 using Carbon Copy (current version) so it should have the exact same content as ssd1.

 

[cloin]

You might need to create a new USB installation drive or at least a new Clover boot drive. Do you have access to a Mac or another Hack?

Yes indeed I do. I have a macbook pro (2011) running High Sierra. I have added clover to the boot drive used to install HS in the first instance and will try to get that to boot once I've completed the memtest - which is still running and showing no errors so far. The RAM modules are relatively new and I haven't had any crashes or other glitches prior to using this blasted ECOS bootstick.

 

[trs96]

but I did boot the Desktop using an ECOS secure bootstick a few times.

This is obviously what made your hack un-bootable. Whether it wrote something to your Clover bootloader or did something else IDK but it was a mistake to boot from this.

https://www.ecos.de/en/products/secure-os

I would also refrain from installing Clover bootloader on a real Mac. You may experience negative results with that. A bricked MBP that needs a firmware flash or the chip completely replaced.

 

[cloin]

This is obviously what made your hack un-bootable. Whether it wrote something to your Clover bootloader or did something else IDK but it was a mistake to boot from this.

https://www.ecos.de/en/products/secure-os

I would also refrain from installing Clover bootloader on a real Mac. You may experience negative results with that. A bricked MBP that needs a firmware flash or the chip completely replaced.

I have installed clover on a USB stick which has the High Sierra installer on it but the hackmac won't boot from it. I used the ECOS bootstick for a number of days and was able to boot the hackmac successfully at least three times, after that nothing worked. Especially annoying as I had to use the ECOS bootstick for work but my private hackmac was the only unit I had available that it worked with. Now I got the company to get me a windoze laptop so I won't have to use the stupid stick with it again once my beloved hackmac is fixed. I have no need to use clover for the macbooks. I guess my installer USB isn't set up properly, otherwise it should boot into that at least.

 

[Edhawk]

Here is a screenshot walk-through for installing Clover_r5119 on to a USB pen drive:

Format the USB pen drive using Disk Utility as shown in the screenshot below:

Erase USB drive, make sure to save any data on the drive first.

Open Clover_r5119 package

Select Continue Button

Enter password when requested, select OK

Select Continue Button

Select Continue Button

Select 'Change Install Location ...' button

Select the Clover USB, then the Continue button

Select the 'Customise' button

Select just the top two options, then the Install button.

The rest of the Clover options are already dealt with in the CLOVER folder attached below.

Enter password and 'Install Software' button

Close the Clover_r5119 installer once complete

You should now have two partition icons on your desktop, these are the partitions on the USB.
Open the EFI partition.

EFI partition contains a single EFI folder, open it.

EFI folder contains BOOT and CLOVER folders.

Replace the CLOVER folder currently in the EFI folder with the one attached below.

The Clover folder below is a revised folder, based on an Ivy Bridge setup I run. It contains a number of SSDT's, updated kexts and drivers, a new Clover boot theme, rename patches, fixes and common options that were missing from your setup.

Here is a visual comparison of your current CLOVER folder (on left) and the revised one I attached.


The fist thing you will notice is the reduced number of drivers in the UEFI folder. You have a number of duplicate drivers in your /drivers/UEFI folder.

You also have a specific apfs.efi driver, which would only work with a specific version of macOS. The ApfsDriverLoader.efi replaces the need for a specific APFS driver.

Give the attached CLOVER folder a try, see if you can boot with it.

 

[cloin]

Here is a screenshot walk-through for installing Clover_r5119 on to a USB pen drive:

Format the USB pen drive using Disk Utility as shown in the screenshot below:

View attachment 522826 Erase USB drive, make sure to save any data on the drive first.

View attachment 522827 Open Clover_r5119 package

View attachment 522815 Select Continue Button

View attachment 522816 Enter password when requested, select OK

View attachment 522817 Select Continue Button

View attachment 522818 Select Continue Button

View attachment 522819 Select 'Change Install Location ...' button

View attachment 522820 Select the Clover USB, then the Continue button

View attachment 522821 Select the 'Customise' button

View attachment 522825 Select just the top two options, then the Install button.

The rest of the Clover options are already dealt with in the CLOVER folder attached below.

View attachment 522822 Enter password and 'Install Software' button

View attachment 522823 Close the Clover_r5119 installer once complete

You should now have two partition icons on your desktop, these are the partitions on the USB.
View attachment 522828 Open the EFI partition.

View attachment 522829 EFI partition contains a single EFI folder, open it.

View attachment 522830 EFI folder contains BOOT and CLOVER folders.

Replace the CLOVER folder currently in the EFI folder with the one attached below.

The Clover folder below is a revised folder, based on an Ivy Bridge setup I run. It contains a number of SSDT's, updated kexts and drivers, a new Clover boot theme, rename patches, fixes and common options that were missing from your setup.

Here is a visual comparison of your current CLOVER folder (on left) and the revised one I attached.
View attachment 522831 View attachment 522832

The fist thing you will notice is the reduced number of drivers in the UEFI folder. You have a number of duplicate drivers in your /drivers/UEFI folder.

You also have a specific apfs.efi driver, which would only work with a specific version of macOS. The ApfsDriverLoader.efi replaces the need for a specific APFS driver.

Give the attached CLOVER folder a try, see if you can boot with it.

Hi Edhawk, thanks for the very easy to follow instructions. I created the USB as shown and booted from it. It shows me the SSD1 and recovery partitions to boot from and when I select SSD1 to boot from I get verbose output ending in "End random seed ++++++++++" and then it reboots. Exactly the same happens when trying to boot from the recovery partition. Attached is the preboot.log and the debug.log from a previous successful boot (20.12.2020). Maybe you can discern something from those. I am beginning to suspect a mainboard misfunction - SATA controller perhaps.

 

[Edhawk]

Other than some really long delays at specific stages in the boot process, the Bootlog (Preboot.log) seems to be OK. I saw nothing untoward/evident in either log. The rename and other patches in the config.plist are being applied successfully, the third-party kexts are being injected.

I have amended the previous CLOVER folder I provided, some small tweaks. Try this folder and let me know how you get on. Providing a screenshot of any kernel panic would be helpful.

I don't suppose you have a copy of your DSDT.aml to hand, as providing that would enable me to create a few custom SSDT's that are often the fix for the Kernel Panic you are encountering.

If you can boot in to windows you can extract the DSDT using Corpnewt's SSDTTime script (.bat) - https://github.com/corpnewt/SSDTTime

 

[cloin]

I have tried the modified clover but to no avail. I cannot get the system to make any screenshots or dump any logs once the verbose output has started. It gets to the random seed and stops, reboots immediately.

Which file contains the DSDT then? I have no idea where that os stored, could possibly be a copy on my cloned backup boot disk (which also won't boot btw).

 

[Edhawk]

You can obtain the ACPI tables from the Clover boot screen, by pressing the F4 key.

This will extract the ACPI tables and save them in the background (no notification is provided that anything is happening), so you need to wait 30-60 seconds after pressing the F4 key, while the tables are written to the /EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/origin folder on your USB.

You can then attach a copy of the origin folder here.