Giving up on Catalina (for now)

[Tazling]

Sad to say, I'm reformatting the boot disk and restoring Mojave

After an initial successful Catalina install (but clearly with graphics issues) my attempts to update kexts to "improve" it turned into a death spiral. Never got past black-screen-with-pointer despite much googling and many, many boot cycles.

For some reason my appeals for help here got moderated out. Note to mods: if you don't approve someone's cry for help, it would be nice to let the author know what's wrong with their post, so they can make it better. For the clueless n00bish among us (that would be me), it's kind of discouraging to have your post just black-hole with no explanation.

If anyone with a similar system (Z390 mobo, RX580 GPU) has got their graphics working properly, I'd love to know how. I've tried just about everything I could find online and the result never changes: verbose boot continues up to a point, then hangs (thin purple dashes appear on screen), then all screens go black, but HDMI1 has a mouse pointer. The mouse pointer can be moved (but it stutters a lot). If I click, the pointer vanishes and that's it: brick city.

Meanwhile Mojave is working like a champ! The sleep/wake thing is annoying (graphics stutter and lag after wake), but it's the only glitch and a reboot fixes it every time. I would like to go to Catalina to try out my RX5700XT (still in box!) but maybe need to wait until the path forward is a little easier or better understood. Very discouraged... I had hoped Catalina would just be an "update" but it appears to be a big gnarly project and I need to do real work with the Hackintosh, so giving up for now.

 

[Tazling]

By the way, if you also are thinking about rolling back from Catalina... Catalina does weird things to your boot disk (creates two "ghost partitions" that overlap, one writable and one not). I found that I could not delete those partitions (Disk Util threw errors at me when I tried). So, to recover my boot disk and restore my Mojave clone, I had to reformat it entirely -- whole volume, GPT...

And that meant that I lost bootability -- turned out my external "rescue" disk was only booting because Clover was starting off the internal drive, ouch. Since I dual-boot and use a hard-coded UEFI entry for Clover, for a while I lost Clover entirely and could only boot using the Mojave install stick; without the stick, I could only boot into Win10! It felt like things were unravelling; but I recovered by getting into the UEFI shell again and recreating the boot entry with bcfg.

Moral of story: don't ever, ever lose that USB installer stick.

I sometimes think that my Hackintosh efforts are best described by despair.com:

 

[bmoag]

I have a Maximus Hero/i7 6700k with a Gigabyte 580. There is a mild overclock on the CPU.

I could not upgrade a cloned Mojave or install Catalina from a USB stick so I sort of cheated and installed Catalina to a new SSD using a Macbook Pro and a USB/SSD adapter. Its not installing the OS that is the ultimate problem its configuring the EFI, which is empty no matter how you install MacOS. I probably could have done the same thing from within the Mojave hack but it did not occur to me.

I was about to give up on Catalina because I could get it to boot but not work like it should, my OCD reached its reboot and fail saturation point, but I turned to the sample configp files several people have posted on this and other websites. Some have even posted entire EFI partitions if you want to compare drivers, kexts et al. With a bit of research--or blind copying like I did because there is nothing to lose--you can take what is in them and modify what you have.

From what I have seen there should not be a problem finding a sample EFI/configp that will work with the Maximus XI that you can adapt. It was a genuine learning experience researching the new to me Configp entries that got Catalina humming. I won't remember why they work but will keep them in the Configp as long as there is Clover and I still use the same computer.

As a result Catalina is now my boot drive, the Clover in its EFI boots my prior Mojave installation and runs it stably, and everything I need to work works. Catalina sleeps and wakes better than I do and upgraded to 15.3 sans hiccough. I hate to admit Catalina now works better than my original Mojave installation, which I kept, and I thought Mojave was working well.

Catalina still gave me the finger migrating to a larger hard drive but we moved past that unfortunate incident.

So if you have a spare SSD you might keep toying with Catalina.

 

[Tazling]

I was heading for that same conclusion, i.e. that I should try to install Catalina (I'm restraining myself from giving it a rude nickname) on a totally separate external SSD, if I can. Because it's a painful rollback once it has mogrified your boot disk.

Unf my 2nd internal SSD is dedicated to Win10. So I've been thinking about making a Catalina install boot stick and trying to make it install from scratch on one of those handy WD usb SSDs. Wish I had a whole spare Hackintosh so it didn't matter if I muck it up but I need this one for production work.

My original error was to imagine that it would be a simple upgrade. One or two folks here reported migrating from Mojave to Catalina via the App Store, quick and easy just like a real Mac. I now think they were very lucky!

Anyway thanks for the encouragement. I seem to learn a little more with each disaster. As Piet Hein wrote:

problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back

and this seems particularly and painfully true of Hackintosh installs!

 

[gonzolak]

By the way, if you also are thinking about rolling back from Catalina... Catalina does weird things to your boot disk (creates two "ghost partitions" that overlap, one writable and one not). I found that I could not delete those partitions (Disk Util threw errors at me when I tried). So, to recover my boot disk and restore my Mojave clone, I had to reformat it entirely -- whole volume, GPT...

And that meant that I lost bootability -- turned out my external "rescue" disk was only booting because Clover was starting off the internal drive, ouch. Since I dual-boot and use a hard-coded UEFI entry for Clover, for a while I lost Clover entirely and could only boot using the Mojave install stick; without the stick, I could only boot into Win10! It felt like things were unravelling; but I recovered by getting into the UEFI shell again and recreating the boot entry with bcfg.

Moral of story: don't ever, ever lose that USB installer stick.

There is easier way. All you have to do is to backup your EFI booting partition (usualy under 100mb so easy to store online) and guard it like your daughter virginity
When things go south, all you have to do is to install clover on usb stick (you can use Win10 for that or another Mac if you got one on hand) and copy EFI backup. Then you can always start with your usb stick and boot from backup drive with system. Saved me ass multiple times, I always lose my install usb

 

[Going Bald]

I was heading for that same conclusion, i.e. that I should try to install Catalina (I'm restraining myself from giving it a rude nickname) on a totally separate external SSD, if I can. Because it's a painful rollback once it has mogrified your boot disk.

Unf my 2nd internal SSD is dedicated to Win10. So I've been thinking about making a Catalina install boot stick and trying to make it install from scratch on one of those handy WD usb SSDs. Wish I had a whole spare Hackintosh so it didn't matter if I muck it up but I need this one for production work.

My original error was to imagine that it would be a simple upgrade. One or two folks here reported migrating from Mojave to Catalina via the App Store, quick and easy just like a real Mac. I now think they were very lucky!

Anyway thanks for the encouragement. I seem to learn a little more with each disaster. As Piet Hein wrote:

problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back

and this seems particularly and painfully true of Hackintosh installs!

What kind os case are you using? Does it have an empty optical drive bay? If it does, get a hotswap drive bay like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00475DQ6Y/?tag=tonymacx86com-20
When you want to play with a new OS, remove the OS drive you are using from the bay and insert a blank drive or the OS drive you are experimenting with. Makes it much easier to prevent messing up a perfectly good installation by removing the drive completely and you do not even have to open the case to do it!

 

[Tazling]

@bmoag I forgot to mention, "my OCD reached its reboot and fail saturation point" ... very well phrased, couldn't have said it better!

 

[Tazling]

@GB my optical drive bay is occupied... I do have 2 hotswap bays but I use them for data disks. I could, however, pull one of the data disks and throw a disposable volume in there for OS fun and games. Interesting idea. I suppose it's kind of a waste, that I use my hot swap bays for permanent disks (just because it's easy and cheap to get disks to fill them). I wonder if I could get a modest-sized SSD in the right adapter to slot into a SATA hotswap bay...?

Alternatively have been thinking of throwing a third SSD (SATA, laptop style) into the case, so I have 3 internal SSDs and could use the 3rd one for OS experiments. I could CCC my boot volume onto it, so I have two bootable Mojaves internally, then try to update Catalina on the spare one; when/if I ever get Catalina working, I could then switch to booting off that 3rd SSD and use the other one for, I dunno, Win10 storage volume or something.

Leaving my working Mojave boot disk strictly alone is looking better all the time. Particularly I dread mucking up its EFI which took a while to get right. With a new blank volume I could start out with Clover 2.5 which might help some?

Anyway, food for thought.

 

[Going Bald]

@GB my optical drive bay is occupied... I do have 2 hotswap bays but I use them for data disks. I could, however, pull one of the data disks and throw a disposable volume in there for OS fun and games. Interesting idea. I suppose it's kind of a waste, that I use my hot swap bays for permanent disks (just because it's easy and cheap to get disks to fill them). I wonder if I could get a modest-sized SSD in the right adapter to slot into a SATA hotswap bay...?

Alternatively have been thinking of throwing a third SSD (SATA, laptop style) into the case, so I have 3 internal SSDs and could use the 3rd one for OS experiments. I could CCC my boot volume onto it, so I have two bootable Mojaves internally, then try to update Catalina on the spare one; when/if I ever get Catalina working, I could then switch to booting off that 3rd SSD and use the other one for, I dunno, Win10 storage volume or something.

Leaving my working Mojave boot disk strictly alone is looking better all the time. Particularly I dread mucking up its EFI which took a while to get right. With a new blank volume I could start out with Clover 2.5 which might help some?

Anyway, food for thought.

The 2.5" hotswap bay takes a laptop SSD/HDD. I have my Mac OS SSDs from Catalina back to Sierra and laptop HDDs from El Cap back to Snow Leopard that I swap in and out of mine. Mine holds two 2.5" drives and I have another that holds a single 3.5" HDD.
You could get a combo 3.5/2.5 bay and replace one of your 3.5" drive bays with it. It is one of the configurations possible in the link I posted above in post #6

 

[Going Bald]

@Tazling
If you only have 3.5" internal drive bays, a WD icepack makes a. great heatsink for large laptop HDD / SSD drives:
WD Icepack