El Capitan USB Boot Stick not recognized Dell 960

[NewbHackintosh]

Hey all,

Making my first attempt at a Unibeast Hackintosh.

1. Got El Capitan from the Apple Store
2. Ran Unibeast selected legacy boot mode
3. Got all the Files copied over successfully
4. Went into the 960 bios selected "USB Device" to boot from and tried the stick in every port (there are 8) and Clover doesn't ever come up, just get a "Device Not Bootable F1 to try again."

Are all my files in the right place? How come I can't get Clover to run or be discovered so I can start the install process?

Has anyone got El Capitan running on a 960?

 

[NewbHackintosh]

Okay got past that issue...sees the stick, boots into clover, then I pick MacOS and install starts until:

"Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI"\"

com.apple.xbs/
xnu-3248.40.184/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1665

I had boot args of dart=0, do I need the nvidia one as well?

 

[linuxrox]

attach your config.plist from USB

 

[NewbHackintosh]

Okay, tried to make a new stick not using Legacy boot mode, and machine doesn't even see that one, just sits at the black boot screen.

Here is my legacy mode config.plist that causes the "ACPI" kernel panic.

Also tried the boot flags of -x -f acpi=off and it still happens.

 

[NewbHackintosh]

UPDATE:

Did this <key>FixHPET_0010</key> <false/> from this thread

http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/optiplex-960-install-issue.192422/

and had the same results - made it through the kernel panic, but now does not see the installed drive to install onto.

 

[linuxrox]

i would try under ACPI to clear everything (i use Clover Configurator to manage config.plist changes)

 

[NewbHackintosh]

I was able to do that, and got past the kernel panic!

However, now the internal (and only) drive is not recognized anymore. So there is not a destination drive to install onto.

The drive is fine, if I reboot it sees it and will startup from it, but the OS installer wont see it.

 

[linuxrox]

in the bios did you switch to AHCI ?

 

[NewbHackintosh]

IT WORKS!

I am posting this from Safari on El Capitan on a Dell 960 I paid $79.00 for. Thanks Tonymac!!

But...

It took a lot of weird things to get this to work, and I don't know if I can reproduce it or not.

I had to disable FixHPET_0010 every time to get it past the kernel panic, but doing that made the internal drive disappear.

So I used an external USB drive, but I had to hot swap it in during the Clover boot so that the BIOS would not try to boot from the external USB drive.

Then I ran Multiboot and after rebooting a few times, my internal drive is now visible, and I deleted the contents and now I have to try a new install on that drive from scratch to see if I can get el capitan on that drive too.

But the 960 apparently works, I have no audio at all, no wifi, the card reader was never recognized, and I am on ethernet without having to do anything.

Guess all I can say is keep trying if you are taking this on and get creative. It took me about 2 days to get this working and trying things.

I used the instructions here for the most part, using Unibeast, Multibeast, with a few boot flags, and used Clover's interface to turn things on and off and did not manually edit any ktexts or plist files.