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[Guide] High Sierra 10.13 on Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4 / MSI GTX 970

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Jun 5, 2010
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Motherboard
Gigabyte Z490 AORUS Elite
CPU
i9-10850K
Graphics
RX 6900 XT
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
This guide is one I wrote and thought I had posted in January 2019 but did not. I have revised its download sources, file revisions, and improved the way kext patching is done, but it is basically as I wrote it back then. The guide is based on one I previously created for El Capitan on this board and video card. This board is one that I originally installed OS 10.6.3 Snow Leopard on and has remained very stable and usable with the prior OS installs. The High Sierra install and getting the OS to a stable state was very problematic, encountering many hard freezes and pinwheels of death, which these instructions should avoid. At this point (November 2019), I have gone most of the year without a freeze so this should be a good install guide.

The things that I have tested and are working are:
  • Dual monitors using the DVI ports
  • Wired USB Keyboard and Mouse
  • Bluetooth Magic Mouse (post installation)
  • Sleep / Wake
  • Network
  • Audio through the Analog front and rear panel
This install was done with the (at the time) latest versions of the software. The current versions (November 2019) of them are:
Mac OS X 10.13.6​
Security Update 2019-006 (High Sierra)​
Unibeast 8.3.2 - High Sierra​
MultiBeast 10.4.0 - High Sierra​
Nvidia WebDriver 387.10.10.10.40.132 for macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra (17G9016)​
Due to the video card, there are extra steps and configurations required during the install. They have all been noted as for the Nvidia.

There are configuration changes required to have the graphics drivers and sleep work correctly. Edits of the Tonymac DSDT file are required to prevent CMOS corruption on sleep and to make audio work. Instructions are in this guide.

This install done as an update install over an existing El Capitan / Clover install. I allowed the update to convert my main drive to an APFS drive, which these instructions will result in. (Nov 2019 note: The advantage of going to APFS is that it makes future macOS updates and installs nearly hands-free and painless.) In order to install High Sierra, the system definition needs to be changed from the (no longer supported by Apple) MacPro3,1 we have used for years. For this motherboard the MacPro5,1 results in a stable system, while the recommended iMac14,2 results in consistent freezes during low CPU utilization. (Getting this correct avoids most of the freeze issues.) This is probably due to macOS trying to perform power management actions when the system is set as iMac14,2 that the architecture of this MB/CPU does not support. The MacPro5,1 models shipped with CPUs with the same Nehalem architecture as the i5 and i7 CPUs for the P55 motherboards.

During POST, the install, and the initial configuration process only the DVI-D connector worked for me. I have 2 DVI monitors and did not test the Display Port nor HDMI connectors during the install.

This was a troublesome OS X install and a reminder of why I remained on El Capitan for as long as I did. (If I did not need High Sierra to run current versions of software, I would not have updated.) My brief suggestions to avoid issues with the OS install are:
  • If at all possible, test on a separate physical drive with your ‘main’ daily use drive unplugged. I now have a separate 128 GB SSD just for this purpose.
  • During the install, disconnect any drive with an OS installed on it you are not installing to. This is critical with current Clover boot loader, as it uses the first EFI partition in your physical configuration to read its config.plist and kext files from, not necessarily the one it is running from.
  • Always have one and preferably two backups before installing an OS. I ended up not needing one for this install.
  • Be very cautious about programs that auto start on boot. The instability caused by problems I had not yet identified and fixed was worsened by certain autostart applications. These worked fine once the issues were fully fixed.

These instructions have been written from memory, partial notes taken along the way, and some of a “I would have done it this way if I had known” retrospective. They are as complete as I can make them, but may contain some gaps in actions to take. They work around installer issues where “macOS could not be installed on your computer” with the message “An error occurred while loading the installer resources“ and another issue where all partitions are greyed out with a hover message “You may not install to this volume because it is missing a firmware partition” and also stabilize macOS (via a kext patch) as part of the install process.

Lets get started.
As an FYI, this requires downloading over 8 GB of data by the time you are done. The install will require over 8 GB free on the boot partition, so if you are doing both to the same drive, make sure you have enough available free space before your start. The items to download and links to their pages are:

Use the links to access downloads for all of the above. After the macOS install, the installer disappears from your Application folder, so if you want to reuse it, make a copy. The copy in the Application folder will be used by UniBeast to build the USB drive. I encountered the Mac OS X Installer is incomplete issue but never succeeded with the posted suggestions. My workaround was the use of a 3rd person program to complete the download. My one thought in hindsight, other than what has been written, would be to change the Clover SMBIOS configuration to MacPro 5,1 with El Capitan still installed, setting it up with correct Serial Numbers (as described below) before starting the High Sierra download.

DSDT Edits
There are two edits required, one to prevent CMOS corruption on sleep and one to enable Audio. (The former put my hackintosh into a startup loop that looked like a power supply issue, the machine would power on for a second or two then shutdown.) If you have a DSDT with the audio edit applied from El Capitan, you can start with that as the audio edit is unchanged in High Sierra, and only apply the sleep fix.

Start with a DSDT file, from either your EFI partition, a backup, or a fresh one from the Tonymac library. If you are starting with the copy on your EFI partition, the file is located in EFI -> CLOVER -> ACPI -> patched directory. Make a copy of the file, placing it somewhere other than on the EFI partition and open that file using MaciASL.

The CMOS corruption on sleep issue is fixed by editing the Device RTC section. This edit looks scary due to the amount of information being removed. However, what is being done is to remove code that picks 1 of 4 possible settings for this area, and hardcoding it to a single (correct) setting for this Gigabyte motherboard. This is from the post [Solved] High Sierra - need CMOS reset after sleep however, I have added a minor change to include a missing IRQNoFlags setting.

Search for “Device (RTC)”, starting with the line “Name (ATT0, ResourceTemplate ()“ remove it and its block of information and the following 3 “Name (ATTn, …)” blocks and the “Method (_CRS, 0, NotSerialized)” block that follow the first. You should end up with the following:
Code:
                Device (RTC)
                {
                    Name (_HID, EisaId ("PNP0B00"))
                }
                Device (SPKR)

Now update the Device RTC block so it has the following content:
Code:
                Device (RTC)
                {
                    Name (_HID, EisaId ("PNP0B00"))  // _HID: Hardware ID
                    Name (_CRS, ResourceTemplate ()  // _CRS: Current Resource Settings
                    {
                        IO (Decode16,
                            0x0070,             // Range Minimum
                            0x0070,             // Range Maximum
                            0x00,               // Alignment
                            0x02,               // Length
                            )
                        IRQNoFlags ()
                            {8}
                    })
                }

To enable audio, we apply the same Series 5 Audio edit from El Capitan No Audio Devices in El Capitan on Series 5 motherboards Fix [Guide] to the DSDT file. Navigate to the section to edit. The easiest way is to find the text "Device (HDEF)" which should occur one time. This controls the audio definition information and contains what we need to edit. Within the HDEF block is something like:
Code:
                Store (Package (0x04)
                        {
                            "layout-id",
                            Buffer (0x04)
                            {
                                0x78, 0x03, 0x00, 0x00
                            },

                            "PinConfigurations",
                            Buffer (Zero) {}
                        }, Local0)

All we need to do is change the 4 bytes in the "layout-id" to be:
Code:
                            "layout-id",
                            Buffer (0x04)
                            {
                                0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00
                            },

Save the DSDT file.

Pre-generate Serial Numbers
If you use iMessage and/or Apple services, you will want to pre-generate a Serial Number and matching Board Serial Number. Run Clover Configurator but do not open a config file. In the SECTIONS list click SMBIOS then use the wizard (click the up/down icon on the far right under the Model Lookup/Check Coverage buttons) to select MacPro 5,1 which will generate and fill-in the System Serial Number. Then click the “Check Coverage” button to see if the number is for a real machine, and if it is click the “Generate New” button until one that is not for real hardware is generated. Further information about serial numbers is in a forum post and this How to Get Hackintosh Messages to Work Consistently from the MacObserver. Bother these articles state to create a Board SN of 17 characters, which Clover does for iMacs but for MacPro’s it creates one of 13 characters. I went with the number Clover generated, but I do not use iMessage. Copy the Serial Number, Board Serial Number, and SmUUID to a TextEdit document and save it, then quit clover configurator without saving. If you have multiple boot loaders, using this as the source allows them to be consistent.

Create text file with kext patches
This part is retrospective based instructions, in that it took me two weeks to identify this as the final fix required to stabilize my system, so I applied this edit on my live system. In order to run High Sierra stably on a P55, two or three additional kext patches are required other than the ones Multibeast supplies. Because you will be editing a file without internet access to add the following information, it is best to copy it to a text file, then apply it using copy and paste. This edit is taken from Random freeze HDD led on along with other references I’ve found to the same patch. (See [Solved] ICH10R and High Sierra) Although they reference the ICH10 chipset, the P55 chipset contains an ICH10 built into it, so they apply to this machine (and all other P55s I would assume.)

The following should be copied into a text document (can be the same one with your serial numbers) and saved. It will be entered in Clover Configurator during post installation work. Each block of 4 lines represents 1 line to add in to the Kernel and Kext Patches section of Clover Configurator:
Code:
Name   :    AppleAHCIPort
Find   :    45787465 726E616C
Replace:    496E7465 726E616C
Comment:    External icons patch

Name   :    AppleAHCIPort
Find   :    4585F60F 95C289C8 83E0FE66 85C9780F 84D2750B
Replace:    89C883E0 FE6685C9 0F98C141 08CC9090 9090750B
Comment:    fix I/O error for ICH10

Name   :    AppleAHCIPort
Find   :    89C82540 6002003D 40200000 750C81E1 BF7FFFFF 898B5101 0000
Replace:    90909090 90909090 90909090 90909090 90909090 90909090 9090
Comment:    fix I/O error for ICH10

Build the USB drive and do the install
Use the tonymac guide as the principal instructions to create your bootable USB drive and perform the install. Notes on the install process:
  • Before you begin, do a full backup of your system
  • In Step 2 (Create a Bootable USB Drive)
    • item 11: select “High Sierra”
    • item 12: select “Legacy Boot Mode”
    • item 13: select the graphics appropriate for your video. For the GTX 970 no graphics option should be selected. For other graphics, read the information to determine if it applies to your setup.
  • The last item in Step 2 is to drag MultiBeast to your completed USB drive. The drive is renamed “Install macOS High Sierra” by Unibeast. Also drag your edited DSDT file, the apfs.efi file, Clover Configurator, the TextEdit document with your serial numbers and kext edit text, and any other files you need to your USB drive as well. The High Sierra Security Update 2019-006 and the Nvidia WebDriver installer can be placed on the drive as well, but in any case should be placed in an easy to find location.
  • After the USB is created, we need to place the apfs.efi file onto it so Clover can see the APFS drives once they are created and boot from them. Use Clover Configurator to mount the EFI drive on the “Install macOS High Sierra” drive. To mount the EFI partition, in Clover configurator’s lefthand column under “TOOLS” click “Mount EFI”. The display will change to show the list of EFI partitions. For the one with titled “EFI on Install macOS High Sierra”, click the “Mount Partition” button at the far right. In the finder, open the EFI drive and navigate to EFI -> CLOVER -> drivers64. Copy the apfs.efi file you downloaded to this directory. You can then unmount the EFI drive.
  • In Step 3 (Recommended BIOS Settings) Use the Gigabyte AWARD BIOS instructions to check your BIOS settings before starting the install.
  • In Step 4 (Install macOS High Sierra) item 4, I found I did not need to specify any boot options for my video card.
  • I used a wired USB mouse during the install.
  • Only the DVI-D video port was functional during the install. I did not test the Display Port nor HDMI connectors during the install.
  • When installing over El Capitan, I did not format the drive and allowed the installer to migrate the partition to APFS.
  • During the installation, the installer will reboot one or more times. Each time, you will need to F key (F12) to select USB-HDD as your boot device, then in the Clover boot screen select “Boot macOS Install from <drive>” where <drive> is the one you are installing on. Ignore any “Prebooter” drives that may be listed.
  • After the install completes, the installer will reboot your computer again and the “macOS Install” drive will no longer be listed. This starts step 5. Per tony’s guide use an F key (F12) to select USB-HDD as your boot device, then in the Clover boot screen select “Boot macOS from <drive>”.
  • Do not enter your Apple Id / Password when prompted in this reboot. Your computer is not setup correctly (specifically its serial number) for it to contact the mothership at this point.
  • Run MultiBeast (on USB). The selections I used were:
    • Quick Start > Legacy Boot Mode
    • Drivers > Audio > Realtek ALCxxx > ALC885/889a
    • Drivers > Misc > FakeSMC (selected by default)
    • Drivers > Misc > FakeSMC Plugins
    • Drivers > Network > Realtek > RealtekRTL8111 v2.2.2
    • Bootloaders > Clover Legacy Boot Mode (should be selected)
    • Customize > System Definitions > Mac Pro > Mac Pro 5,1 (This differs from the default for Legacy)
  • The FakeSMC Plugins is present to allow a software package I use to access the CPU info. All of the others are required for this motherboard. After MultiBeast completes we need to perform additional configurations and install the DSDT file before we can boot from the install drive.
  • Run Clover Configurator (on USB). If you have run MultiBeast the EFI partition of your boot disk should still be mounted. If not, to mount the EFI partition, in Clover configurator’s lefthand column under “TOOLS” click “Mount EFI”. The display will change to show the list of EFI partitions. For the one with the “APFS Container” listing your <drive> you installed macOS High Sierra on, click the “Mount Partition” button at the far right.
    Use File -> Open and navigate to the Clover config file on the ‘EFI’ disk at EFI -> CLOVER -> config.plist. When it opens you will be presented with a large display of many settings. Most are correct and we only need to change a couple:
    • In the Section (list on the left) ‘Boot’, in ‘Arguments’ right (or control) click to bring up the context menu and select the following:
      • ’darkwake=8’ from the drop down
      • ’nvda_drv=1’ for the GTX 970 WebDrivers
      • ‘dart=0’ should already be present and should be left as-is.
      • I also selected ‘kext-dev-mode=1’ as well.
    • Confirm that the “Default Boot Volume” text is the one you are installing to. If it is not, type the text name of the volume in. Setting this correctly allows future macOS updates and installs to be hands off.
    • In the Section Graphics: Clear Inject Intel, Inject ATI, and Inject NVidia if any of them are set. This is specific to the GTX 970, and other graphics cards will require different settings. (I found Inject Intel was set at some point.)
    • In the Section ‘Kernel and Kext Patches’ we will add 3 patches for AppleAHCIPort. Select ‘KextsToPatch’ and a list of patches should show up. At the bottom of the box are a minus and plus. To add a patch click the plus. In the line created, copy the each of the Name, Find, Replace, and Comment entries from the text file created earlier into the column entries of the same name. When one row is completed, click the plus again to create the second line, fill it in, and repeat for the third line. Note: The first patch in my list (External icons) may be present already, in which case leave it as is. (I have conflicting notes on this. :oops: )
    • In the Section SMBIOS, the ‘Product Name’ should already be ‘MacPro5,1’. You can select this from wizard (the up/down icon on the far right under the Model Lookup/Check Coverage buttons.) This fills in all the items on the screen. Then open your TextEdit document with your pre-generated serial numbers in it, and copy and paste them into Clover Configurator.
    • In the Section System Parameters, for the GTX 970 WebDrivers check “NvidaWeb”.
  • Use File -> Save then Quit. When you quit you will receive a pop-up waning about config.plist being on a volume that does not support permanent version storage. (This is the EFI volume.) This is expected, so click Ok.
  • Copy your DSDT file to the EFI volume. You need to copy the file to the EFI disk in the folder EFI -> CLOVER -> ACPI -> patched. It should be named DSDT.aml as that is the default Clover will use. (You can use Clover Configurator to change this.)
  • Copy the apfs.efi to the EFI volume. Just as we did for the USB drive, copy the apfs.efi file to the EFI on your install disk into the folder EFI -> CLOVER -> drivers64.
  • Unmount the USB drive and Reboot. You should now successfully boot from your High Sierra install.
  • Run the High Sierra Security Update 2019-006 update. After it does its initial install, it will reboot you machine. On the reboot there will be a macOS Install volume present. If everything is configured correctly, Clover will automatically select “macOS Install from <drive>” where <drive> is your boot drive. Allow this to occur or manually select it, as booting from this is what completes the install of the security update. As with the OS install, ignore any “Prebooter” drives that may be listed.
  • Follow the instructions at the top of the apfs.efi page to access the just updated macOS apfs.efi file and copy it to the clover directory. The Tonymac page says to place apfs.efi in the drivers64UEFI directory, but because we are running clover in legacy (BIOS) mode, it should be placed into the /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/drivers64/ directory as that is the one Clover reads from in legacy mode.
  • Run the Nvidia WebDriver installer, which is required for the GTX 970. Allow it to install and reboot your machine.
  • Once rebooted, in ‘System Preferences’ in the ‘Energy Saver’ area, make sure ‘Start up automatically after a power failure’ is checked. This is required so on wake from sleep the OS is running instead of a reboot being started. Memory says this is from an old guide somewhere.
  • To enable audio output I had to change the selected output device to 'Internal Speakers' in the 'System Preferences' in the 'Sound' settings.
I based the darkwake setting to fix sleep on posted research by NeXTguy. In my testing back on OS 10.8.5 Snow Leopard there was no noticeable difference between using a value of 8, 9, 10, or 11. I chose 8 for initial testing on subsequent OS installs and as it is working correctly, I have not tried other values.

Sleep is working as well as it did for me in prior releases. In my testing I was able to put the computer to sleep using the Apple menu item or selecting sleep using the power key menu. Wake always brought the system up fully functional in 1 or 2 seconds with either a single wired mouse click, a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse click, or a keyboard key press. Multiple sleep and wake cycles produced no problems.

I have completed a number of stability tests, running the machine for days without sleeping both playing iTunes and completely idle, running prime97, running Rember (a GUI frontend for Memtest), all without issue.

When booting the machine, you will be presented with a screen full of the messages as seen in the [Solved] Anyone shed some light on these APFS errors on boot up?] post. I ignore them, as the disks are correctly accessed.

The following is the original changes made by direct copy and paste to the Clover config.plist file (from February 2019) to apply the ICH10R patches, before I understood how to do so in Clover Configurator. The information is useful, in that you can open config.plist file in Text Edit and verify the Find and Replace strings.
Code:
            <dict>
                <key>Comment</key>
                <string>External icons patch</string>
                <key>Disabled</key>
                <false/>
                <key>Find</key>
                <data>
                RXh0ZXJuYWw=
                </data>
                <key>InfoPlistPatch</key>
                <false/>
                <key>Name</key>
                <string>AppleAHCIPort</string>
                <key>Replace</key>
                <data>
                SW50ZXJuYWw=
                </data>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>Comment</key>
                <string>fix I/O error for ICH10</string>
                <key>Disabled</key>
                <false/>
                <key>Find</key>
                <data>
                RYX2D5XCiciD4P5mhcl4D4TSdQs=
                </data>
                <key>InfoPlistPatch</key>
                <false/>
                <key>Name</key>
                <string>AppleAHCIPort</string>
                <key>Replace</key>
                <data>
                iciD4P5mhckPmMFBCMyQkJCQdQs=
                </data>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>Comment</key>
                <string>fix I/O error for ICH10</string>
                <key>Disabled</key>
                <false/>
                <key>Find</key>
                <data>
                icglQGACAD1AIAAAdQyB4b9///+Ji1EBAAA=
                </data>
                <key>InfoPlistPatch</key>
                <false/>
                <key>Name</key>
                <string>AppleAHCIPort</string>
                <key>Replace</key>
                <data>
                kJCQkJCQkJCQkJCQkJCQkJCQkJCQkJCQkJA=
                </data>
            </dict>
 
Last edited:
I have the same motherboard, but my FSB (Bus Speed) shows up as 533Mhz (instead of 133Mhz) resulting in system that runs at half speed. Do you have this issue?
 
There can occasionally be issues with bus frequency detection in Clover. So there's an option to override it.

To get the current value you run the command: sysctl hw.busfrequency

The sysctl output is in mhz and the Clover option is specified in khz.
 
The System Information.app utility gives me the FSB speed (and so does sysctl hw.busfrequency on the command line). Also clover gives my correct speed 133MHz at the boot screen, but once the OS loads it changes to 533Mhz, and now the system is half as fast. So everything takes 2x longer. What is your FSB speed?
 
I checked sysctl hw.busfrequency and it returns 532000000. As for System Information, what tab are you using to get the FSB? I've looked and don't see it listed. In poking around, the FSB is not present with the Lynnfield processors (nor their predecessors.) Just curious but what System Definition have you set in Clover, I'm using Mac Pro 5,1 and that setting does change what System Information displays.
 
I also get 532000000, and in System Information's Hardware Overview tab I get the wrong FSB as well. And changing it it clover's config does nothing.
74092302-efab9680-4a8f-11ea-8870-4f200ad74696.png



However, at the clover boot prompt, I do get the correct speed:
74092300-e91d1f00-4a8f-11ea-8ba0-6259b603489e.png


I bet your system is running at half speed. I know for sure that mine is. Have you tried a benchmark? If I boot with enoch/chameleon, my system runs at normal speed.
 
Ok, I'm on Mojave with this machine now and Hardware Overview tab does not list the Bus Speed. I'm also using MacPro5,1 definition due to the iMac14,2 resulting in my system being unstable with lower loads. Mine benchmarked out in Geekbench 5 with a 588/2132 (see 1082020) which puts it at the top end of i7-860 CPUs. This is at a stock 2.8 Ghz but with an oversized air cooler which keeps the core temps down.
 
My GB5 score is 617/2291 in Linux, which is about the same as yours. I can't run GB5 in mac because still I have 10.12. But my GB4 scores are less than half of what they are in Linux. So my hackintosh is half-fast.

Maybe it's my BIOS, I have version F9. Or I have an incorrect clover setting. Could you attach your config.plist so I can compare?
 
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