[Guide] HP 6300 Pro / HP 8300 Elite - A 100 percent Working and Easily Affordable CustoMac

[trs96]

@trs96 Thanks again for the guide. The last two Elites that I built (SFF and MT with I5 CPU, GT 1030 and HS 10.13.6) experience random temporary (~5 sec) mouse freezes while in Clover Configurator. Otherwise both systems function normally. Is anyone experiencing this and found a solution?

Does the same thing happen no matter which USB port the mouse is plugged into ? Does it only happen with CC ?

 

[taskrov]

Does the same thing happen no matter which USB port the mouse is plugged into ? Does it only happen with CC ?

Only in CC. Keyboard and mouse are both plugged into the USB 2.0 ports in the back. I suppose I can try some of the other ports.

 

[geekroick]

Hey guys,

I've been around the Hackintosh world for about the past eight years. I've built a couple of machines. The first Hackintosh I built was in 2010 running Snow Leopard, in 2013 I upgraded (kept the case) to a Gigabyte Z77-DS3H running OS X on a 120GB Crucial SSD.

This past November I picked up a used HP 8300 CMT on eBay for £160 (approx $210) and put the SSD in that, after reading through this guide and at how foolproof the whole process looked it seemed like a perfect machine. It came with 4GB RAM, but I kept the 16GB from my last build and added that too.

I've always kept things pretty simple on my Hackintosh builds. I use the built-in HD4000 graphics because I'm not fussed about gaming or intense graphical demands. I use a USB sound card. I never bothered with all the faffing around installing Chameleon on the SSD during any version of OS X, I'd just boot it off the Unibeast-prepared USB stick that I left permanently inserted into the machine.

And yet with every installation I've had, I get the same basic error: on a seemingly totally random basis, the machine will lock up.

With my first build it just used to freeze and I'd have to turn the computer off and back on again. On the second and current ones it's just a total reset. Sometimes, one of these resets will somehow corrupt the SSD and prevent it from booting (black screen, circular logo with a line through it), and the solution is to boot into another working installation of OS X on another hard drive (I have a selection of USB hard drives) and run DiskWarrior 4 on the corrupt drive. This has worked for me without fail over the past five years.

I've never really messed around with much in the way of kexts. When I got this HP, I followed this guide exactly as stated, used Clover Configurator (which was something I'd never bothered with before), and it was working fine... for a few hours, and then I got a reset once more. It's still going on: sometimes it could reboot multiple times in an evening, other times it could run for days without issue.

I don't do much in the way of heavy duty work, the odd WAV editing, video encoding, etc. Most of the time it's pretty basic stuff like iTunes, VLC, Chrome and the like.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this a sign of a faulty power supply or something? RAM issues? Am I just fundamentally missing something in all this process and tinkering? I've done enough fooling around with Hackintoshes to know how to get things up and running but I can't seem to find a solution to this and it's driving me mad. Without the resets, I'd have a 100% working computer instead of the 99% it's currently at, and I'm really stumped.

The main reason I bought this next-generation model to use instead of my previous generation build was that I was sure it would "just work" - almost as Mac-like as you can get, right?! - and yet I here I am, still getting the same damn problem as before.

Please, can anyone offer me some useful suggestions?

Thanks <3

 

[trs96]

his past November I picked up a used HP 8300 CMT on eBay for £160 (approx $210) and put the SSD in that, after reading through this guide and at how foolproof the whole process looked it seemed like a perfect machine. It came with 4GB RAM, but I kept the 16GB from my last build and added that too.

It would be a good idea to test each stick of ram individually to see if one of the DIMMS is causing this. Start with just the one 4GB module that came with it, boot up and run it for a while to see if the same thing happens. Do this with each one installed individually. You can also test the various ram slots too but it sounds like the problem carried over because you carried over the ram from the older build. If after that testing the ram is not the issue then I would do a clean re-install of macOS to the SSD and see if that fixes it.

 

[geekroick]

It would be a good idea to test each stick of ram individually to see if one of the DIMMS is causing this. Start with just the one 4GB module that came with it, boot up and run it for a while to see if the same thing happens. Do this with each one installed individually. You can also test the various ram slots too but it sounds like the problem carried over because you carried over the ram from the older build. If after that testing the ram is not the issue then I would do a clean re-install of macOS to the SSD and see if that fixes it.

I did already try running a brand new installation on the SSD after cloning my main one to another SSD, and got the same thing, but I haven't tried taking out my 16GB of RAM. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Daneland]

Updated to 10.13.6 (17G5019) (security update) w/o a problem. I am still waiting for NVIDIA drivers for 10.14

 

[BanjoBobby]

I've followed the "HP 6300 Pro / HP 8300 Elite - A 100 percent Working and Easily Affordable CustoMac" guide installing everything exactly as shown on an HP Elite 8300 SFF with 16GB RAM, the MSI Radeon RX560 graphics card, two 500GB Western Digital Blue SSD's (one for Win10, one for High Sierra) and a Rosewill RNX-AC1900PCE. Everything is working great except that I get random restarts of the machine. When running FCPX especially, the screen will go black and restart. I can't seem to find a specific condition that replicates the issue. Anyone else with a similar configuration having the same problem have any suggestions as to what might need to be done to correct?

 

[taskrov]

I have essentially the same system and it crashes occasionally. It is running 10.13.6 with 2019-001 security update. It was built as 10.13.6. Not sure how to diagnose it and have not seen a pattern yet.

 

[nicksoph]

Edit: Sorry. I made these comments thinking it was the HIGH sierra thread.

@BanjoBobby - I think mine was pretty much rock solid on High Sierra but I was using a different graphics card.
FCPX - is it generally stable for others in the version you have?
OSX seems to crash on hardware glitches more tahn windows, but if it is stable in windows you can be 'fairly' sure its not a hardware issue.
Dual booting can bring its own complications (sometimes relating to NVRAM) but if you have followed a guide, that's probably been covered.
If you are up for a complete rebuild, you might want to look at - https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...p-6300-pro-using-clover-uefi-hotpatch.265384/ - signs are that it's a better build and not that much more difficult a process.
but a q for you - Why no ssd?

 

[BanjoBobby]

Edit: Sorry. I made these comments thinking it was the HIGH sierra thread.

@BanjoBobby - I think mine was pretty much rock solid on High Sierra but I was using a different graphics card.
FCPX - is it generally stable for others in the version you have?
OSX seems to crash on hardware glitches more tahn windows, but if it is stable in windows you can be 'fairly' sure its not a hardware issue.
Dual booting can bring its own complications (sometimes relating to NVRAM) but if you have followed a guide, that's probably been covered.
If you are up for a complete rebuild, you might want to look at - https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...p-6300-pro-using-clover-uefi-hotpatch.265384/ - signs are that it's a better build and not that much more difficult a process.
but a q for you - Why no ssd?

@nicksoph I have 2 SSD's and 1 HDD. Each 500GB SSD is dedicated to a different OS (one for High Sierra and the second for Win10) with a 4TB internal HDD used for my 4k media and FCPX libraries. Depending upon how troublesome the stability issue gets, I may rebuild the system using the hotpatch method. This was my first attempt at a Hackintosh, so I went with what I perceived as the easiest approach first. Now that I'm more familiar with the tools & basic process I may try again.