<< Solved >> Can't boot Catalina installer

[UtterDisbelief]

Because I'm trying to boot from USB I'm not surprised it is USB related contrarily to the problem I experienced with my internal NVMe SSD.

So I disabled both the kext and quirk, it does the same thing with and without the kext: I boot off the flash drive, then select the installer, at which point the PC restarts, I reselect the USB, it shows me a black screen instead of the picker then it boots in verbose mode then shows the Apple logo with a mostly empty progress bar with the mouse cursor for a second (which I can move), then the cursor disappears and it hangs indefinitely with the Apple logo and the still mostly empty progress bar.

Okay. If it helps, let's not make this issue into a monster. Your hardware - if as stated in your profile - is recognised as easily hackintoshable, so something simple is probably being missed.

Have you tried booting in Verbose mode? That will give us more information.

You can set this from the command-line in the NVRAM section of config.plist (the line beginning with a "7") by adding "-v" (no quotation marks) OR you can just press CMD+V at the OpenCore boot picker.

This will give us a scrolling screen of verbose data that will probably stop at a certain point before any reboot. So if you can, take a photo of that.

 

[moisemust]

As I said in the previous message, I'm already booting in verbose mode though I configured it differently than you describe it (I added -v to the boot-args section). Unfortunately it seems it crashes when the gui takes over from the boot process.

 

[moisemust]

Also yes this still is the hardware I stated.

 

[moisemust]

I have an idea: Could it be my BIOS settings that would be compatible with Monterey but not with Catalina? At the time I was running Catalina I used Clover to boot my hack but switched to OpenCore when upgrading to Big Sur. And I remember when I had a power outage and couldn't boot my hackintosh anymore I went crazy for a bit and realized my BIOS settings were put back to factory settings. When I set them back to be macOS friendly it worked like a charm again. Let me check.

 

[moisemust]

OK that was not it. I also tried a Clover installer for Catalina but it hangs at the loading of the Airport driver (according to verbose boot and google).

 

[Feartech]

OK that was not it. I also tried a Clover installer for Catalina but it hangs at the loading of the Airport driver (according to verbose boot and google).

will need to see a pic of your verbose screen where it hangs along with new EFI

 

[moisemust]

will need to see a pic of your verbose screen where it hangs along with new EFI

Here are the requested files.

 

[Feartech]

Here are the requested files.

you have both FakeSMC and VirtualSMC kexts

remove FakeSMC

 

[moisemust]

OK I removed FakeSMC but couldn't go much further

 

[Feartech]

OK I removed FakeSMC but couldn't go much further

have a search for apfs module start 1689