Coffee Lake High Sierra will only boot in safe mode

[asleb]

I have a Coffee Lake i7 build that has been working fine but suddenly it will not boot.

- i7 8700k 3.7Ghz (no OC)
- 32GB RAM 2666Mhz
- ASRock Fatal1ty Z370 Professional Gaming i7
- Dell 1820A WIFI/BT
- Samsung 960 500GB M2 ssd for OS X
- 1TB M2 for Windows 10

Windows 10 is working fine! No Problems. Bluetooth and WIFI and everything was working fine in OS X 10.13.6 before the problems. The crash happened a week after 10.13.6 upgrade so I do not suspect the upgrade is the problem (?).

The problem:
- OS X will only boot with "-v -x" (safe mode)
- I can not mount EFI so I can not see or change EFI. Mount fails with no error in Clover Config and with EFI Mounter V3 it fails with:
AppleEvent handler failed.
Finder got an error: AppleEvent handler failed. (-10000) -> Does this has something to do with booting into safe mode?

- Can not boot from USB install OS X High Sierra, crashes after some display. Made a clean install with UniBeast High Sierra
- Can not boot from OS X rescue partition

I have attached screen dumps where 1 is first and 5 is last before the machine reboots.

I am sorry I can not provide the Clover config since I am not able to get it out of EFI which will not mount!

 

[asleb]

I finally got into the EFI partition from Windows10 with Explorer+++ and saw that I had the same files in EFI->CLOVER->kexts->other that I also had in /Library/Extensions. I nailed it down to removing IntelMausiEthernet.kext. I was not able to remove anything in /L/E but removed it from CLOVER. So everything is up and running again. Only thing is booting takes 2 minutes to OS X.

I am a bit confused as to where kexts should reside. They work fine now in /Library/Extensions. Is there one place to put them that is preferred?

 

[Feartech]

I finally got into the EFI partition from Windows10 with Explorer+++ and saw that I had the same files in EFI->CLOVER->kexts->other that I also had in /Library/Extensions. I nailed it down to removing IntelMausiEthernet.kext. I was not able to remove anything in /L/E but removed it from CLOVER. So everything is up and running again. Only thing is booting takes 2 minutes to OS X.

I am a bit confused as to where kexts should reside. They work fine now in /Library/Extensions. Is there one place to put them that is preferred?

essential kexts belong in clover/kexts/other
ie Fakesmc.kext is considered an essential kext to make the mac work, network kext can be considered an essential kext

audio kext would not be considered an essential kext as you don't need audio to get to the installer

"all kexts" are then installed to /Library/Extensions (including the ones from clover/kexts/other)

and in config.plist, InjextKexts->Detect