<< Solved >> Boot Menu Loop with OpenCore 0.6.4 on Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 (Skylake)

[cdlight]

I’ve hit a dead end in transitioning from Clover to OpenCore 0.6.4 and I’d like to ask the community for some guidance. I’ve searched the forums and followed Dortania’s excellent OpenCore guide, tweaked my config.plist after running it through the Sanity Check and have attached my current OpenCore EFI folder with Xs in place of my MLB, SystemSerialNumber, and SystemUUID. I’ve disabled and enabled the BIOS settings recommended by the Guide that are available to me. My BIOS lacks CFG Lock, so my config.plist enables AppleCpuPmCfgLock and AppleXcpmCfgLock.

I'm booting OpenCore from a Patriot 16GB USB 2.0 stick (HFS+ with GUID partition map). My computer boots from the EFI, but when I select a drive from the OpenCore text menu, it displays many lines of messages and then loops back to the menu. My current hardware specs are in my profile, and I have disconnected all drives except an M.2 SATA boot drive running MacOS 10.13.6 High Sierra.

I’ve ruled out USB stick incompatibilities by trying two other USB 3.0 sticks, and by copying the OpenCore EFI to my boot drive’s EFI and trying to boot from there. I’ve also copied it to a SATA SSD with the same results. I’ve reset the NVRAM from the OpenCore boot menu and tried changing the AAPL,ig-platform-id values between 00001219 and 01001219 for the iGPU.

I’d be grateful if someone with more knowledge would review my EFI and give me your thoughts. My OpenCore logs show a number of possible errors, but I don’t know enough to tell which ones are inconsequential and which ones matter. Thanks very much for your time.

 

[cdlight]

Progress, and a lesson learned. I reinstalled High Sierra on my M.2 drive which changed the format from HFS+ to APFS and am now able to boot to the login screen, but neither my keyboard or mouse respond. Used USBMap to create a USBMap.kext in place of the my old SSDT-UIAC.aml from Clover and have been trying different combinations of enabling/disabling UHCI-200-series-injector.kext, XHCI-unsupported.kext, and XhciPortLimit, but so far have not been able to resolve this. I also removed NVMeFix.kext as it's for 10.14 and higher.

I also learned that each time I used Proper Tree to create a "Clean Snapshot," Default Folder X pointed it to the backup copy of my EFI folder on my Mac Desktop instead of the one on the EFI partition that I was working on. This led to a maddening series of trials where none of my configuration changes had any effect.

[Edited to remove EFI with my serial numbers] Most of the latest "opencore-2020-12-10-nnnnnn.txt" log files are blank, presumably because I successfully booted to the login screen but lacking any hints as to how to attack my USB port problem.

 

[odemolay]

hello i have the same motherboard, but a skylake processor, i run bigSur 11.1 without problem under Clover 5127. juste had to update the kexts and make the same selection for the quirks for opencore dortania way.

 

[odemolay]

i dont know why but you have some kext zipped in your EFI?

 

[cdlight]

Hello. I finally got things going and posted a follow-up message, but I guess the moderators decided not to approve it. I'm attaching my working OpenCore 0.6.4 EFI folder in case it helps someone (with "x"s in place of my actual MLB, SystemSerialNumber, and SystemUUID). As for the zipped kexts, I found this to be a simple way of keeping Clover & OpenCore from "seeing" these kexts as I swap them in & out during testing. Sometimes, the kexts are specific to a version of MacOS, for example, BrcmPatchRAM2.kext and BrcmPatchRAM3.kext, so I'll swap them out and make the appropriate change to config.plist if I boot between High Sierra and Mojave, for example.

My attached EFI uses OpenCanopy, which should probably be removed for testing as Dortania's guide suggests. It also uses the release versions of OpenCore instead of the debug versions that are necessary for most testing.

On my system running Mojave (10.14.6), iMovie (10.1.14) will crash on startup unless I disable my Intel iGPU in BIOS. But in Mojave, Quick Look and Preview require the iGPU to be enabled. I've chosen to keep the iGPU enabled in BIOS as I use Quick Look and Preview all the time. If/when I need to use iMovie, I'll need to remember to disable the iGPU and reboot, and then enable it again when I'm through. I've seen some threads suggesting a specialized kext to work around this, but I understand that the kext is very OS specific and might break when a new OS is released. For my purposes, it's easier to remember to flip the BIOS setting.

 

[odemolay]

hey good to know that it's working, i see RealtekRTL8111.kext, it's a surprise this Z170x needs intelMausiEthernet.kext and maybe atherosE2200Ethernet.kext (dont know if it still necessary) i think.
with OC 0.6.4 i had an issue with the internal sound, dont you ? i had to change the usually picRoots in (HDEF@1F,3 = PicRoot(0x0)/Pic(0x1F,0x3)) to run ALC 1150 realtek.

 

[cdlight]

To be honest, I didn't try any other Ethernet kext combinations once I confirmed that the Realtek kext was working with my system. Maybe this is due to a difference between our motherboards (my Z170 and your Z170X).

Fortunately, my sound kept working when I switched from OC 0.6.3 -> 0.6.4.

I'm happy to have transitioned from Clover to OpenCore. OpenCore's DEBUG versions make it much easier to troubleshoot, and upgrades to key components like Lilu et. al. are more straightforward now with ProperTree. My Hack boots more quickly and, importantly, picks the correct boot volume when I'm installing a MacOS update. In Clover, I always had to sit there and choose the correct "Install MacOS..." volume manually between reboots.