<< Solved >> No booting after post installation

Hi All,

I have carefully completed all of the steps in installing Mojave on my Mackintosh box, and before I ran Multicast, I could boot from the install USB Clover menu, and see Mojave running very well. Now that I have completed the post install process, and theoretically made my macOS bootable, I can't boot at all. I get a message:

" Reboot and select proper boot device" for every option except the USB, and on the USB I get a new clover menu that just appears to offer housekeeping tasks and setting, but no way to boot into Mojave.

What did I do wrong?

• Motherboard: - Clover UEFI Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H
• CPU: . i5-8700 3 GHz.
• Graphics: GTX 650Ti
• Other Hardware: 8GB DDR3-1600, 500GB SSD, display Dell 22" 1680 x 1050, network connection Ethernet

Alanthemallows said:

Hi All,

I have carefully completed all of the steps in installing Mojave on my Mackintosh box, and before I ran Multicast, I could boot from the install USB Clover menu, and see Mojave running very well. Now that I have completed the post install process, and theoretically made my macOS bootable, I can't boot at all. I get a message:

" Reboot and select proper boot device" for every option except the USB, and on the USB I get a new clover menu that just appears to offer housekeeping tasks and setting, but no way to boot into Mojave.

What did I do wrong?

• Motherboard: - Clover UEFI Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H
• CPU: . i5-8700 3 GHz.
• Graphics: GTX 650Ti
• Other Hardware: 8GB DDR3-1600, 500GB SSD, display Dell 22" 1680 x 1050, network connection Ethernet

Click to expand...

Hello there.

First thing that struck me with this one - is your hardware spec correct? i5-8700? Z77 ?

Okay, the problem sounds like you can boot using your UniBeast flash-drive but not from your main installation?

Run Terminal and then use "diskutil list" to get the layout of your drives. Ignoring the EFI on your USB drive, do you have another MS-DOS format EFI on your main HDD/SSD?

Hi,

First of all I will check the processor details as soon as I can boot up. What is the issue there?

Secondly, no I can't boot at all, even with the Clover USB, even though I could before I ran Multibeast.The clover menu is not offering booting now.

Thirdly, thanks for the hint on using terminal to investigate the layout of the drives. I suspect that this is what is wrong. There is only the SSD in this machine. It is brand new. I had installed win 8.1 on it to test It's speed, but I thought that I had completely erased it as part of the macOS installation procedure. Perhaps that is not true.

I have some disquiet about my BIOS/UEFI, as when I rested it, it does not lose references to HDDs that are no loner there, and also, if I choose optimised defaults it chooses wrong answers. For example not AHCI.

And lastly, now that I cannot boot at all, what is the best thing to do next?

Aussie

Alanthemallows said:

Hi,

First of all I will check the processor details as soon as I can boot up. What is the issue there?

Secondly, no I can't boot at all, even with the Clover USB, even though I could before I ran Multibeast.The clover menu is not offering booting now.

Thirdly, thanks for the hint on using terminal to investigate the layout of the drives. I suspect that this is what is wrong. There is only the SSD in this machine. It is brand new. I had installed win 8.1 on it to test It's speed, but I thought that I had completely erased it as part of the macOS installation procedure. Perhaps that is not true.

I have some disquiet about my BIOS/UEFI, as when I rested it, it does not lose references to HDDs that are no loner there, and also, if I choose optimised defaults it chooses wrong answers. For example not AHCI.

And lastly, now that I cannot boot at all, what is the best thing to do next?

Aussie

Click to expand...

Well your motherboard is a socket 1155 "Ivy Lake" one so will take i5-3*** series CPUs and i5-2*** as well, the fastest was a 3570k. Any 8*** series CPUs would be Coffee Lake, socket 1151 - and there isn't an i5-8700.

The fact you can't boot at all now, suggests you might need to re-flash your BIOS - if you can get to the POST screen and can press either "End" or "F8". To do this download the latest BIOS file from Gigabyte and put it on a bare, FAT32 formatted USB flash drive and plug it in before starting your PC.

Yes, sometimes installing Windows first leaves a boot-strap loader that is hard to remove. The easiest way to properly clean a drive is to change the Partition scheme between GUID and MBR and GUID again. This still may not work and if so using the Terminal version of diskutil offers much more powerful options to do the job. Even Window's DISKPART Command will do it. Not too difficult but a little reading-up is required on the syntax.

So for your last question, I would re-flash the BIOS to get something, at least, to boot...

Thanks for the advice.

I re-flashed my BIOS and achieved nothing, except that the list of boot override options has been updated. Interesting that Gigabyte download a file that is an .exe and one that needs to be extracted before use. Fortunately my iMac can still do that.

I can boot into Clover on my USB and I get the menu that does nothing for me at this stage. I think I need to learn more about that.

I suspect tha you are right and that Windows 8.1 has put a partition on my new SSD that is tripping up everything. The challenge is how to get a utility running to examine the SSD and fix it while booting is impossible. I think I need to learn more about that, too.

So, almost no progress, but more reading and perhaps understanding to get into.

Aussie

I have confirmed that win 8.1 put an extra partition on my SSD, and so I deleted it with Diskpart, but that didn't help, so now I'm creating a new boot mojave USB to see if I can succeed with a perfectly clean SSD.

Interesting how simple things like a quick install of windows to check out the drive speed can have enormous repercussions. I am documenting this process, although it looks more like a maze.

Aussie

Alanthemallows said:

I have confirmed that win 8.1 put an extra partition on my SSD, and so I deleted it with Diskpart, but that didn't help, so now I'm creating a new boot mojave USB to see if I can succeed with a perfectly clean SSD.

Interesting how simple things like a quick install of windows to check out the drive speed can have enormous repercussions. I am documenting this process, although it looks more like a maze.

Aussie

Click to expand...

Good work on the progress made

Right back in your first paragraph you said you installed Mojave fine and were able to boot from the UniBeast Clover menu. This is a good sign.

When you chose to make the main SSD bootable from MultiBeast which options did you choose?

The fact that you can no-longer boot using UniBeast either is why I suggested the re-flash. It could also mean the UniBeast flash drive was corrupted. So a clean SSD and new Mojave UniBeast stick is a good idea

One further thought - your Nvidia GTX650ti GPU is, I believe, a Kepler GK106-based card and from my understanding native support got broken with High Sierra. In which case it would need the Nvidia web-drivers to run and they are not available for Mojave. This might cause a black-screen or stuck progress-bar. To try and get beyond this you could add the "-x" command-line boot option. But only if you get as far as Clover and a drive selection.

There are many great threads here concerning Mojave and your GS-Z77X-UD3H - this one in particular is probably worth a read.

Another step down the long road to success. I remade my Mojave installation USB.

It worked.

Now I have a working Mojave on the Mackintosh box. So a simple step by Windows to create an additional partition trips over the entire process.

Now I am exploring Mojave and finding out what works and what doesn't. So far Sound doesn't find any hardware and Preview freezes and needs to be force quitted. Other than that I am seeing good results.

BTW My motherboard is a GA Z77-D3H and I haven't yet discovered references to It's compatibility,
My Geforce 650Ti is indeed Kepler based, so more mileage there before I'm finished. It's getting old so I may replace it.
macOS doesn't appear to reveal the processor model, so I will have to wait until I open the case again.

It's a bit odd operating in macOS on a big black box that has a clunky keyboard and noisy fans, but I should get over that. I'll just play with this for a while before I investigating the dual booting part of this project.

Aussie

Well done

Yes the Preview/QuickLook freeze when viewing certain files like JPEGs is a known problem. There are a couple of different ways around it but my favourite so far is to install a kext by @vulgo called NoVPAJpeg.kext which is a plug-in for Lilu.kext.

For audio you have two "easy" options for your VIA codec:

1) install AppleALC and Lilu kexts (the latter may already be installed because of above).

OR

2) the Voodoo audio driver set.

Both from MultiBeast.

Well I've had a nice rest and took out my nice new macOS SSD and replaced it with my old windows Seagate HDD. I then veered off into discovering why my win 8.1 utilises 100% disk for the first 5 minutes after boot. I think I've narrowed it down to some "Services" but not yet fixed it.

Now I am ready to further explore my Mojave, and the first thing is that Multibeast no longer finds my SSD to install drivers on. I didn't think that I would need to do the entire process again, so I just chose some audio drivers and tried to set it off installing, but no Drives in the "select drive" box. Why is that?

Aussie