GA-Z77X-UD5H • i7-3770K • GTX560ti • 2 displays • El Capitan 10.11.3 • Clover

[cyberdogg]

It has taken a week, and large portion of my sanity... and at this stage I'm getting 80-90% successful boots... which is good enough. Hopefully that will improve. I feel it takes time for a Hackintosh to warm-up to it's new set up, it takes a bit of use for everything to settle down.

Previously my system was running Cameleon (Chimera?) with Mountain Lion. So this is how I upgraded to a Clover/El Capitan rig. No UniBeast, no MultiBeast, no Nvidia Web Drivers, no bootflags (apart from the occasional -v). This process seems pretty vanilla to me, and it works.

GUIDE

1. Download El Capitan 10.11.3
- From the app store using your Apple ID
2. Download Clover and El Capitan Post-Install Tools
- Get latest Clover from https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/ (for me it was Clover_v2.3k_r3346)
- Get El Capitan Post-Install Tools from http://www.tonymacx86.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=294
- You won't need the Clover Installers that come bundled with the Post-Install Tools so throw them away. You only need to keep the CustoMac Essentials package.
3. Prepare USB key
Open Disk Utility, select the USB drive, Erase, then set up the partition correctly with GUID Partition Map as per usual, name it "USB"
4. Use Terminal to make the USB into an OSX installer
Open terminal and type the following:

sudo "/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia"  --volume /Volumes/USB --applicationpath "/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app" --nointeraction

Then hit Enter. This will start the process of installing the El Capitan Install files to the USB. It will take a few minutes.
5. Install Clover and CustoMac Essentialson the USB
- Open the Clover_v2.3k_r3346.pkg and click continue until you get to the "Installation Type" pane. Here, click on "Change Install Location" and select your USB. (Don't click the "Customize" button, we only need the "Standard Install" which is the default.)
- Once Clover is installed on the USB, crate a new folder in the USB called "Files". In here, copy over both the Clover_v2.3k_r3346.pkg and the CustoMac Essentials.pkg
6. Install El Capitan from USB to internal SSD
- Restart your computer, hold down Del or F12 to go into the BIOS, you might want to set "Load Optimised Defaults" but most importantly, select your USB drive as the boot device. Save and exit BIOS.
- Select your "Install OS X El Capitan" USB from the Bootloader and procede to start the install on your internal SSD. (I was using a spare drive which I erased in Disk Utility before proceding with the installation)
- At this stage you may have trouble booting the USB. I recommend perseverence - meaning if you're getting Kernel Panics or the No Entry sign or other road blocks, just restart and make sure your selecting the USB from the BIOS and the boot loader. You may need to reboot many times, but you shouldn't need to resort to playing kexts or bootflags, apart from maybe the Verbiose bootflag. If it really looks like it's not gonna boot to the Installer, go back to step 1 and create a new USB.
7. Restart to finish installation
- Hit F12 as your computer restarts to make sure it's still using your USB drive as the boot device
- From the bootloader, this time select your SSD, this will take you to the language selection screen and all the options to finish your installation of OSX.
- This is another occasion where you may have trouble booting to the SSD. Again, perseverence, don't start messing with the settings, just reboot and make sure you've got the USB selected as boot device in BIOS and the SSD on the boot loader. Reboot your computer until it works, if it's definitely not working then go back to step 6 and restart the installation to the SSD. If starting again from step 6 didn't work after several attempts, then start from Step 1.
- Once the installation is complete, you should see the El Capitan desktop, unless you have to restart (i can't remember, but if you do have to restart, use the USB as the boot device again and select the SSD from the boot loader)
8. Install Clover to SSD
-From your USB, go to the "Files" folder you created earlier and open the Clover_v2.3k_r3346.pkg and click continue until you get to the "Installation Type" pane. Click on "Change Install Location" and select your SSD. (again, don't click the "Customize" button, we only need the "Standard Install" which is the default.)
9. Install Customac files
- From your USB open the CustoMac Essentials.pkg and go through the installation. this will add necessary kexts for Ethernet (and other things supposedly)


That's it.


EDIT: Clover Installer problems

I discovered that running the Clover installer doesn't always appear to place files in the designated EFI partition. And this correlates with the compter failing to boot when this is the case. The quick fix to this is to manually copy over EFI files from a working drive (most likely the USB). *likely you'll want to run the CustoMac Essential.pkg again as well.




This process I have found to be the simplest. I spent 7 days trying many different guides on how to this, I posted here on the forums for help, i got involved with UniBeast and MultiBeast, I tried everything... it lead all sorts of problems, especially regaring the graphics card it seems. I was downloading tons of kexts and drivers, putting them in various places, changing SMBIOS settings and saving various config.plist files to try out... rebooting hundreds of times... screens not working, no signal, wrong resolution... I even had to reset the battery on my motherboard a couple of times... it's been crazy, I've learnt alot though, and I could talk for days about all the common issues I've attempted to deal with, but in the end, the best solution was to not mess around with settings too much, and just count on the fact that repetition forces the system to cooperate

On ML i was geekbenching 14000, now it's down to 13100. So I plan on hopefully optimising things a bit and may keep a log on this thread. At least one of my USB ports is acting wierd. Sleep seems to work very well now though. Also I discovered the best Clover theme (green theme i think it's called).

Anyway, I just wanted to type this up for posterity and hopefully it helps others. I may come back to this thread soon and edit this post to provide more details if I think of any.

Peace out.

 

[cyberdogg]

Changing Clover Bootloader Themes and screen resolution

Trial 1

I tried to install a new Clover theme, downloaded the theme, placed it in the themes folder of my EFI, and then opened my config.plist in Clover Configurator to select the theme in GUI. Where you type the theme name i noticed i could change the resolution, which i did as it wasnt what it should be (it was shown as 1280x1024 whereas my screen is 1920x1080).

Anyway, after this I couldn't boot up, tried a dozen times. So I used my USB as a boot device, threw away the files in the SSD EFI partition and copied over my USB's EFI contents to the SSD's EFI. I then ran CustoMac Essentials.pkg again. After that I could boot up fine again.

Trial 2

Ok, so this time I decided to just change the resolution and leave the theme alone. I tried changing the resolution in Clover Configurator under GUI, when that didn't work I tried manually editing the config.plist in a text editor. Both methods caused the same failure, which is the same failure I had in Trial 1 previously, the "no entry" sign, in verbiose mode I get:

Error allocating 0x800 pages at 0x00000...0014000... alloc type 2
Error loading kernel cache (0x9)

Now I suspect that repairing permissions and rebuilding cache in Kext Wizzard or Kext Utility might fix this... but I'm worried that this will cause other problems. I don't understand bootloader well enough yet and as I've started moving files over and syncing things I don't want to have to reinstall everything again, I'm being cautious.

OK... tried a few more reboots of Trial 2 and it booted on like the 5th try or something. So this leads me to think, had I been more persistent with the reboots at Trial 1, it also would have worked, meaning I can have the theme i want However... inspite of me setting the resolution correctly in config.plist, I noticed no difference on the actual bootloader screen. So I'm going to research that and maybe talk about that after Trial 3.

Trial 3

This is essentially trial 1 again. I'm going to try manually changing the theme again in config.plist. I've added a few more themes to my EFI to test. I'll edit this post later with results.



*** EDIT ***
Trial 3 worked. Though I can't seem to get the resolution to fill my display for the bootloader. It's fine once OSX loads.

 

[HommerJr]

Whats your firmware version?

 

[cyberdogg]

Do you mean the BIOS? It's UEFI DualBios, the date is 2012, can't see a version number.

 

[cyberdogg]

So I've been running the system for a week or 2 and it basically it works.
However there are a couple of issues.


1. The resolution at BIOS and bootloader doesn't fill the screen. Minor issue. This might be that my screens are just a resolution which is problematic (1900x1080). i think i read that somewhere


2. Fails to boot from bootloader 50% of the time (i get the "no-entry" / prohibited sign). there might be a fix for that. i think i read that somewhere too but cant find the thread right now.


3. Geekbenching has really suffered. On Mountain Lion / Chameleon i was getting over 14000. Now I'm scoring about 11500. That's quite a significant drop.

EDIT: With all applications quit and having made some modifications to my BIOS (see the bios settings on this guide), i'm now geekbenching around 13300 using Geekbench 3. (on GeekBench 2 i get about 13600).

Not sure if the BIOS edits made that much difference really. If I run GeekBench immediately on boot, i get a much lower score (12000 or so). But if i leave it a few minutes i get in the mid 13000s. the reason appears to be my second hard drive. im guessing it takes a few minutes for the drive to be indexed or someting by OSX b4 the processes are freed up. If I only have one disk plugged in i get the mid 13000s straight away.

I'm wondering if I should install Nvidea Web Drivers to see if that makes a difference to my GeekBench scores.


4. I would really like to get FileVault working too. I believe this can work now with clover. But I tried it before and I had to reinstall everthing. So a bit nervous about trying again right now. Once I've finished transferring files I might give it a go on my other SSD with this as my guide: z77x-ud5h-i7-3770k-gt-640-x2-os-x-10-11

 

[cyberdogg]

Whats your firmware version?

ah i found it i think: F8.