<< Solved >> Catalina 10.15.2 installation woes

[klebba]

Hi there,

I'm working on a clean Catalina build using the following:

• i7-8700k
• Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA
• Radeon Pro W5700
• Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe

I have successfully completed several stable builds in the past. Most recently I have been running High Sierra for over a year as my primary machine. I recently decided to upgrade to Catalina, but this time I can't even get through the install phase!

After two nights of fiddling I have suffered through countless failed installation attempts ending in things like:

• Log output halts at "IOConsoleUsers: gIO ScreenLockState 3 ..."
• Log output disappears to a black screen / USB installer stops blinking
• Log output halts immediately at "Error allocating pages ..."
• Log output halts immediately at "AMF: No slide values are usable! ..."

I've done a ton of research on these various choke points but nothing feels like progress right now.

Rather than detail the ways in which my attempts have failed I'm hoping someone can help advise on whether or not this hardware should be compatible and what a good path forward would be if so. I'm using the Catalina Guide and I've tried upgrading the Lilu, WhateverGreen, AppleALC, and VirtualSMC kexts to their latest versions to no avail. The clean Unibeast 10.0.0 USB lands me on:

• Log output halts immediately at "AMF: No slide values are usable! ..."

Thanks in advance!

 

[P1LGRIM]

No slide values are usable

Try booting with slide=0.

 

[klebba]

Hi and thanks for helping — now it says:

• ERROR allocating 0x11ce8 pages at 0x000 ... alloc type

 

[esafeddie]

Copy this EFI Folder to a spare USB Drive and try booting off it, If it works copy it to the EFI Partition of the main Drive but you will have to inject your personal details in the config.plist such as S/N, ROM, SmUUID etc etc. With your specs, I chose Mac model iMac 19.1 in the config.plist but that is entirely up to you to stick with that Mac model or one of your own. Good luck.

 

[klebba]

Hi esafeddie — thanks for helping. I tried this EFI but landed at the same message:

• ERROR allocating 0x11ce8 pages at 0x000 ... alloc type

 

[aertonda]

Try to Clear CMOS on motherboard
My setup is z390 ud and i7-8700k. It worked for a while. Then I ran a testmem86 and started getting error allocating pages after that. Fought with it with osxaptiofix2drv-free2000 driver in clover. At least it would boot every other time.
Then cleared the cmos and seems to work fine now without this driver, with standard aptiomemfix
Looks like something can just reserve cmos ram and clearing cmos frees it.
I pretty much left the CMOS as is.

 

[klebba]

New progress with esafeddie's EFI & resetting bios, I'm in the installer!

• Optimized defaults
• XHCI Handoff — true
• VT-d — disabled
• CSM Support — disabled
• Windows 8/10 Features — Other OS
• SATA controllers — disabled
• DVMT Pre-Allocated — 256
• Disabled all NVMe drives except 1GB unpartitioned drive

Thank you! Can you please elaborate briefly on what you did? I would like to understand

 

[aertonda]

Ah, so resetting bios helped you too?
I assume by resetting you mean you Cleared CMOS by shorting the jumper on the motherboard. Right?

 

[klebba]

I did not clear the CMOS; what I meant by "resetting BIOS" is that I loaded "optimized defaults" and reconfigured from scratch

 

[aertonda]

Ah, well, if it worked then great
let us know if you succeed after all.
to answer your question: I ran a testmem86 program from its own USB stick. It boots and tests the RAM sticks.
And that broke my setup and started showing error pages... alloc 2.
Basically clearing CMOS solved this.
But it's a big problem with z390, as many people get this error.