<< Solved >> Catalina 10.15.4, ASUS mobo, hang before installer

[Tazling]

I thought I'd have another whack at Catalina, so I attached a spare USB SSD, then created a brand new USB boot stick using the very latest Unibeast to make a bootable stick with the 8GB (!!) latest Catalina from App Store. Thought I'd use the spare SSD for my target disk, so I don't mess up my very nicely working Mojave.

The stick booted OK and got all the way to 100 percent on the Apple-logo progress bar, but then... nothing. Never got to the installer. Starting again in verbose mode I get as far as

virtual IOReturn IONVMeController::CreateSubmissionQueue(uint 16_t, uint 8_t)::2861::SQ index=1 entrysize=64

and that's all she wrote. System hangs forever.

So I did some googling and found some references to this problem. However, I'm not clear on what the fixes really mean. One poster said it was fixed by "copying the USB EFI folders to the boot disk." Well, I really don't want to copy Catalina EFI folders to my Mojave boot disk! I was hoping to start up the Apple Installer and then select the external SSD for my test installation of Catalina. There were also mysterious references to updating the firmware on nVME drives (yikes!) -- again, I really don't want to break my Mojave installation. One poster said the problem was fixed by using a different USB drive for the Unibeast stick-build. I can certainly try that...

So right now, I'm going to dig out Yet Another USB Stick and see if that works any better. Meanwhile, if someone could give me a bit of a hint... is there some way to address this problem without reconfiguring anything about my working Mojave system --i.e. not messing with my mobo and not changing my working EFI partition for Mojave? Surely I can install Catalina on some other disk, while leaving my primary boot disks (WinDoze and Mojave) alone?

(I sure hope no one says "unplug your nVME disks" because one of them is buried on the mobo with heatsink goop and so on, a PITA to get at.)

 

[fgxr8]

in your installer, use my efi and see if you can get setup to complete, i have pretty similar build, once you get it booted then you can fine tune it.

 

[Tazling]

Let me make sure I am understanding you correctly, because believe me, if there is a way to get a Hackintosh install wrong I will find it! And I sweated blood to get Mojave working so I'm terrified of breaking it now.

You're suggesting I use your EFI folder on my USB boot stick's EFI partition, right? not on any of my working internal boot disks?

 

[fgxr8]

Let me make sure I am understanding you correctly, because believe me, if there is a way to get a Hackintosh install wrong I will find it! And I sweated blood to get Mojave working so I'm terrified of breaking it now.

You're suggesting I use your EFI folder on my USB boot stick's EFI partition, right? not on any of my working internal boot disks?

yeh just for your catalina install usb, use my efi
(make sure its actually in the usb's efi partition) and boot from it

 

[Tazling]

I tried a different USB stick and am getting further, even without replacing any EFI folder... we'll see what happens during the painfully slow install process. Thanks for the EFI though, I may need it yet. Why one USB stick works and another doesn't... well... who knows. I did try the repair option on it (Disk Utility) and it reported no problems, so I have no idea why the installer wouldn't run off it. Now I've got to the installer screen, selected language, formatted my target disk, selected it and off we go...

[hours later]

YIPPEE YI YAY! for some reason, my Catalina install worked! There were of course several boots, but we made it through all of 'em with no problems or hitches (amazing!) and I'm staring at a Catalina default desktop image (Catalina island, picturesque). I have no idea why the first USB installer attempt failed, but don't care much now that I've got success.

Next step: make the external SSD with Catalina on it bootable in its own right (EFI partition setup).
After that: test all the basic functions like audio, USB ports. Run Heaven benchmark.

If that all looks good, I'll be doing some careful updating to copy my Mojave non-Apple apps to Catalina.
OR
I could try copying the Catalina EFI to my Mojave boot disk, make sure that works, and then try an official Apple update procedure.

Not sure which is safer. Any opinions?

 

[fgxr8]

I could try copying the Catalina EFI to my Mojave boot disk, make sure that works, and then try an official Apple update procedure.

Not sure which is safer. Any opinions?

i find the apple update procedure tends to break more easily and harder to recover from

but congrtas on getting to the desktop, always feels good after spending hours of effort.

 

[Tazling]

The funny thing was, this one wasn't hours of effort! I almost can't believe it's working. I mean, to get Mojave working was days and nights of intense frustration, endless reboots, endless googling and begging for help and advice (so generously given on this forum, thanks everyone!). And the first Catalina attempt I made was a complete fail. But now, with 10.15.4, it's just like the instructions say -- make the stick with Unibeast, do the install (several hours and several reboots) and Boom, there's a Catalina desktop!

The only remaining mystery is that it still needs the USB stick to boot, even though I copied the EFI folder from the stick to the Catalina boot disk. If the USB stick is my UEFI boot device, everything works. If I try to boot off the SSD with Catalina on it, I get a partial boot and then a hang. I can also (for some reason!) boot Catalina successfully off the EFI/Clover for Mojave, which seems kind of wrong, but... it apparently works. Gonna do some more experiments this evening.

It can be very confusing at times, sometimes I'm not certain which EFI I really booted from, so I try to make sure that each bootable disk has a different Theme for Clover That way, the appearance of the Clover menu screen tells me which disk I'm currently using. It would be nice if I could customise that even further, with a text banner or something, but I'm not that clever with Clover and/or Themes.

Someday I'd like to find (is there such a thing?) a timeline that explains the event sequence of a Hackintosh boot; like, what happens at the BIOS level, what happens after a UEFI boot device is selected, when the EFI folder is accessed and which bits get read first and which later, that kind of stuff.

 

[Gigamaxx]

The funny thing was, this one wasn't hours of effort! I almost can't believe it's working. I mean, to get Mojave working was days and nights of intense frustration, endless reboots, endless googling and begging for help and advice (so generously given on this forum, thanks everyone!). And the first Catalina attempt I made was a complete fail. But now, with 10.15.4, it's just like the instructions say -- make the stick with Unibeast, do the install (several hours and several reboots) and Boom, there's a Catalina desktop!

The only remaining mystery is that it still needs the USB stick to boot, even though I copied the EFI folder from the stick to the Catalina boot disk. If the USB stick is my UEFI boot device, everything works. If I try to boot off the SSD with Catalina on it, I get a partial boot and then a hang. I can also (for some reason!) boot Catalina successfully off the EFI/Clover for Mojave, which seems kind of wrong, but... it apparently works. Gonna do some more experiments this evening.

It can be very confusing at times, sometimes I'm not certain which EFI I really booted from, so I try to make sure that each bootable disk has a different Theme for Clover That way, the appearance of the Clover menu screen tells me which disk I'm currently using. It would be nice if I could customise that even further, with a text banner or something, but I'm not that clever with Clover and/or Themes.

Someday I'd like to find (is there such a thing?) a timeline that explains the event sequence of a Hackintosh boot; like, what happens at the BIOS level, what happens after a UEFI boot device is selected, when the EFI folder is accessed and which bits get read first and which later, that kind of stuff.

Did you mount the EFI of the Catalina drive? Go to the top tool bar and select Finder then select Preferences then check the box next to hard disk. Now all you drives will appear on the desktop.

Use Clover Configurator app (here I downloads section community software) to mount EFi of the Catalina drive then mount the USB EFi and drag the USB EFi folder to the Catalina drive.

 

[Tazling]

@gigamax, yep, I know about EFI partitions and did put the usb stick EFI folder on the Catalina boot drive EFI partition. and I do use Clover Configurator to mount and unmount those EFI puppies. Thanks though.

There's something different going on here; I just had to reinstall Catalina (tried something that turned out to be a Very Bad Idea and messed up the Cata boot disk) and found that even with my new stick I can't get the Installer to boot unless I use my Mojave EFI partition to boot it, in which case it works fine. So that may have been what happened last time -- I hadn't yet forced different Themes on all the various EFI partitions, so I might have accidentally booted from my Mojave EFI instead of the stick EFI.

Interestingly this seems to be a winning strategy: I get a good Catalina install, despite using an older Clover etc. So I'll go on using my Mojave EFI folder until I discover something that doesn't work

The "thing that doesn't work" might well be the AMD Nitro 5700 XT -- the reason I'm upgrading to Cata in the first place. If so, I'll really have to figure out a more modern EFI. But using the existing Mojave one allows me to postpone that unpleasantness

UPDATE several days later... I have not yet found anything that doesn't work. There's some funny business with shells (zsh doesn't seem to work like it used to) but apart from that, the new GPU works flawlessly w/all three heads, USB audio adapter ditto, jpgs are previewed correctly, ethernet rock-solid, all USB ports working, and (wow) generic bluetooth USB dongle "just works" out of the box, which was not the case when I tried it a couple of years ago on an earlier Hackintosh. Catalina looks pretty good to me. The only downside is the loss of all my old moldy 32 bit apps, but I have a spare iMac that I'll upgrade to Mojave and leave it there, as the 32-bit museum.