Hey Going Bald (and everyone)! I think you helped me a while back on my build. This may be useful to some of you.
I have the
GA-X58A-UD3R (v 2.0) with 12GB of RAM and an SSD hooked up to a PCIe SATA 3 card that I just revived since I got my new rig last year. I have been able to
install and
run Catalina on it. This is what I did to get it to clean install and run and some of the issues I faced.
#1 Issue – The first issue I faced right off the bat is a
bios issue with booting Catalina and my SATA 3 interfaces.
This board goes up to
FH version bios and that is the source of my problem. On this bios version, Catalina disk created with latest
UniBeast will simply not boot into the clover boot menu. Instead, it dies before the clover boot menu appears with random pink numbers and letters all over the screen. I have
Marvell 9230 chipset on both my internal SATA 3 ports and my PCIE SATA 3 card. Tried another card with Marvell 9230 chipset and even tried flashing the Marvell chips to later firmware versions. Didn't have another card with a different chipset to test with so I don't know if this problem is with just Marvell 9230 or with any SATA 3. I even tried removing everything else connected to the motherboard but the drive inside of the machine and it fails to get to the boot loader screen every time.
#2 Issue– I have a PowerColor Radeon RX 560 4GB in this machine. After the default UniBeast installer boots past clover, the installer goes to a
black screen although it is running because I can hear sounds when I press certain keys.
#3 Issue – After installation is complete,
no acceleration on the RX 560 even though the system says it is installed and supported.
#4 Issue –
DSDT (from database here) seemed to cause some instability with the machine, especially with restarts and shutdowns, especially when overclocking.
How Issues were solved:
#1 – Solved only by
reverting the bios back to FF. Even tried FG1 (beta) and it does the exact same thing as FH bios. With FF the machine acts (relatively) normal. Same SATA3 interfaces boot fine! Only problem with the FF bios is that it seems to be a bit unstable for overclocking, but if I don't overclock the machine, it runs fine. FH bios is more stable for overclocking, but FF is more stable for installation and running the machine in Catalina.
#2 – Solved by adding
Lilu and
Whatevergreen (latest versions from Github) to the UniBeast Catalina install flash drive. Once I add that, I could see the screen over my HDMI and DP connections on that GPU driving my 55" LG TV (that's my default display).
#3 – Solved by removing "
Inject ATI" flag from config.plist and by
switching SMBIOS to MacPro 7,1 from the installer's iMac 14,2. Machine runs faster and acceleration works. Checked in video proc as well as playing several large movies, 1080p and 2160p. Using this SMBIOS causes a message to display that your memory is misconfigured on booting, but seems to be only cosmetic.
#4 – Solved by
removing DSDT. It's amazing how well the latest clover produces a picture of your hardware now! No DSDT needed in my case. Machine is booting with Clover_v2.5k_r5104. Beware of r5105 as it seems to stope config for it to boot after it's menu is displayed.