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

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I didn't unplug the first SSD in the same time. Is it an issue ?
Windows will overwrite the EFI partition it sees on the macOS system drive when you are installing Windows. You always want to disconnect your macOS SSD when installing Windows. See the Multibooting forum for more on this.
 
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So, do you think I should redo the full installation of macOS as well ?
 
So, do you think I should redo the full installation of macOS as well ?
Try booting it on it's own, with the Windows drive not connected and see if it boots. You may need to reinstall Clover, FakeSMC and other necessary kexts and UEFI drivers to the EFI of that drive to get it working again.
 
Try booting it on it's own, with the Windows drive not connected and see if it boots. You may need to reinstall Clover, FakeSMC and other kexts to the EFI of that drive to get it working again.
It does still work if I unplug Windows' SSD.

To be frank, I've red almost everything on the forums about this issue and I think I did all correct. My Windows installation was not legacy but UEFI, and I did not overwrite the Clover's EFI partition on disk0.
The only issue I keep having is the same as everybody on this thread and on others : if I chose Windows once on clover bootloader, it will start only booting straight to windows at each reboot. Only way to solve it is to unplug Windows SSD drive manually.

It has something to do, I guess, with the fact that Clover disapears from the booting options in the bios.

I've tried renaming the windows .efi and replacing it with clover's .efi file but without success (it basicly killed windows that could no longer boot from clover).
 
if I chose Windows once on clover bootloader, it will start only booting straight to windows at each reboot.
Do you have the name of your macOS system drive here or do you have "last booted volume."

411740
 
No, it is Macintosh HD, the name of my macOS drive.

411770
 
I want to start over clean, installing Windows first on a specific SSD with the over unplugged, following this guide. The thing is that if I start by making the Bios settings first, disabling legacy booting, I have only a black screen and can't do anything at boot. Windows doesn't boot, Clover doesn't boot, even my USB installers for windows or Clover don't boot. I'm forced every time to reset CMOS and go over again setting the time and date and then booting

So I really want to do everything from scratch but don't know how to do it...

EDIT : I started from the begining following the guide. Now, I'm sure the Windows is true UEFI cause it does work when secure boot is unactivated. The only troubling thing is that the screen doesn't light itself before windows is already logging itself.

But now, the true problem is that my SSD MacOS when re-plugged in is not seen by the system at all... I don't know at all what happened and I really, really start to desesperate to get this ever working...


EDIT 2 : after some unplugs, resets, etc. it finally works again but have no idea what fixed the issue.

Now, I have 2 EFI partitions I can mount : one on first SSd, one on second :
 
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First time Hackintosher here. Many thanks for this guide, trs96!

I’ve fixed all the bugs I care to fix, and have been successfully using the hackintosh for music production (via Logic Pro X 10.4.4) for about a month now. Everything I need is working fine, though I did have some scares during setup. Here are a few details, in case they can help anyone:

Motherboard:
HP Compaq Elite 8300 Small Form Factor (SFF)

BIOS:
The computer came with v02.90 installed. I’m running it in Legacy mode. Everything works fine.

Operating System:
Sierra (10.12.6)

RAM:
I added 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM from Ripjaws X Series (2 x 8GB cards), which combined with the 8GB of manufacturer RAM (2 x 4GB cards) gives me 24GB.

Storage:
I moved the default 500GB HD (with Windows 10 still on it) to SATA 1 and installed Mac OS on a 1TB SSD from Crucial, inserted in SATA 0. Easy install with the mounting bracket.

Graphics Card:
I went with the Nvidia GeForce GT 710. I’m able to run three monitors (VGA, DVI, and HDMI) simultaneously with no hiccups— though, granted, I’m not doing any intensive video processing. I had to install drivers and then update the drivers on the Windows side to get Windows to see it, but I was able to use the onboard graphics to do so without trouble. On the Mac side, I had to get through step 7 (running MultiBeast) and reboot, and afterward the graphics card worked fine.

Audio:
I installed the VoodooHDA and Apple HDA Disabler kexts, per Step 9. This enabled the front headphone jack, but I find the audio hiss coming through there to be way too distracting for me. Instead, I use an audio interface (3rd generation MBox from Avid) which connects via USB and outputs to stereo monitors and headphones. I don’t have a way to test HDMI audio, and I did not attempt DSDT patching.

Wi-Fi Card:
Archer T9e from TP-Link. On the Windows side, it worked immediately after installing manufacturer drivers and rebooting.

Mac OS, meanwhile, did not see the card, so I mistakenly tried installing a driver listed here for a TP-Link helper tool (designed for use with the TP-Link N150 Wi-fi/USB adapter, TL-WN725N), which crashed my whole setup. After installing and rebooting, the screen booted to the slashed circle symbol (ø) instead of the Apple logo. I used the BIOS to specify the startup drive on a second reboot, which (for whatever reason) allowed the computer to boot to Mac OS, though with graphical issues (opaque dock, horizontal bars flickering across the screen, etc.). Uninstalling the driver fixed the graphical issues and the crash on startup.

What finally got wi-fi working was to open my config.plist file in Textedit and replace the <array> section under <key>KextsToPatch</key> with a string of code I found here.

Note that I also installed Rehabman’s “FakePCIID” and “BroadcomWiFiInjector” kexts (https://bitbucket.org/RehabMan/os-x-fake-pci-id/downloads/) both in Clover’s 10.12 folder and in /Library/Extensions, rebuilt permissions with sudo Terminal commands “chown -R root:wheel [path]” and “chmod -R 755 [path]”, as well as ran the “kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel” and “kextcache -system-caches” commands. These had no effect before I did the fix in the above paragraph, but may have been part of the fix anyway.

The card sits about 30 feet from the router (Nighthawk AC2100) with two walls in between and works fine.

USB:
Despite the fact that HP 8300s predate USB 3.0, the refurbished model DID come with four USB 3.0 ports in the back, even though Amazon (where I bought it) did not specify whether the computer had USB 3.0 or not.

Dual Boot:
I use the BIOS’s startup menu to choose between SATA 0 and 1 (Mac on my 1TB SSD vs. Windows on the default HD). I haven’t tried using Boot Camp or otherwise partitioning one drive to have two operating systems.

Messages:
Following the steps in P1LGRIM’s iMessage guide (as linked in Step 10) did the trick, first try.

However, after a fiasco requiring me to reinstall OS from a flash drive, Messages became intermittent, even after I triple-checked all my steps (generating a new valid serial number, running iMessageDebug, giving it permission through my iPhone 6s, etc.). It could receive messages, and could send SMS, but would sometimes fail to receive SMS and would always fail to send messages. Group SMS I sent would also split into individual texts for each person.

The fix ended up being recovering the config.plist file I had before the OS crashed and copying the exact serial number, SMUIID, MLB, and ROM (UseMacAddr0) from it to my current config.plist. Rebooted, and everything worked.

Safari:
Safari frequently force-refreshes the page when loading content on Facebook. My guess is that updating Safari would fix the problem, but when I went to update Safari from 10.1.2 to 12.1.1, I mistakenly hit “Update All” in the App Store, which also updated iTunes Device Support Update and Security Update 2019-003 10.12.6.

Afterward, I couldn’t get past the Clover bootloader. The OS became stuck in Kernel Trap 14 when booted normally, displaying “panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff800affe255): Kernel trap at 0xffffff7f8ba4330, type 14=page fault” overtop of the Apple logo on bootup. The computer would then force restart, only to hit the same error and repeat, over and over. Booting to safe mode, recovery mode, etc. would display a blank gray screen with the mouse doing the spinning wheel of death. Strangely enough, I couldn’t even boot to the Clover-configured flash drive. Trying would give me a blank, black screen after choosing Mac OS from the Clover menu.

The fix ended up being disconnecting my wifi card from the motherboard, disabling legacy support and enabling UEFI in BIOS, formatting the USB with UEFI instead of legacy, and booting from that. This allowed me to finally get back inside Mac OS, which I then installed from the flash drive onto the SSD.

Since then, I’ve been too gun-shy to update Safari, and have just used Chrome to browse Facebook instead.

Persisting Problems:
Aside from the audio hiss and an out-of-date Safari (mentioned above), the only shortcomings of my build are no bluetooth, no microphone, and no webcam. But I don’t need those functions, so I’m happy!
 
Another new Hackintosher here - many thanks from me too. I wanted to replace our old Mac Mini and did a lot of research about the different ways people have done that. (I'm a loyal Apple customer and if the new 2018 Mini was the same price as the old one and was upgradeable I think I would've bought it - sorry, Apple)

I was almost going to buy an Intel NUC but then I read through this guide and found a good deal on an HP8300 USDT on eBay (I5-3475S). It came with 8G of DDR3-1600 RAM, a 120G SSD with Win 10 on it (no bloatware), and a 250G HDD (he had replaced the optical drive with the SSD). And it was $170.

We've had our Mini connected to a large-screen 4K TV and we use it as a DVR and as a general purpose machine. The DVR part is why we want to stick with OSX. I've used EyeTV for over 10 years and I really like it because it only does TV/DVR and that's all we need. It's kind of a neglected app now and it's still 32-bit but I figure we can stick with Mojave for many years.

I used some Win software I already had to clone the Win 10 install to the HDD (it *was* UEFI). I found that our TV can't handle the resolution that's used for UEFI booting so I kept that at Legacy Mode. It was very helpful to have all the info. about the HP BIOS right here in this guide. I really wanted to try a Vanilla install so I was preparing an EFI folder and then I found a post on ****** where someone had just done a Vanilla install on an HP8300 SFF and he attached his EFI Folder so I grabbed that and - since it mostly looked what I was already doing - I used it. So I didn't use Unibeast or Multibeast or Kextbeast.

The install went VERY smoothly (the only problem was what happened when I set Legacy to Disabled). I hadn't disconnected the HDD with Win 10 because it was already installed. I did have to make sure Inject Intel was working but then the graphics looked great. Wifi and Bluetooth are very important for this machine so I had researched that stuff and bought a D-Link 171 wifi dongle and a generic CSR 4.0 bluetooth dongle. It's great to have all the USB ports on the little HP8300 (as opposed to the small number on the NUC). I also added a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter. And that was it. We use some powered speakers that have USB input so that's our audio setup.

It's been several weeks now and everything is working really well. Sleep and Wake are fine (important for us for DVR scheduling). The audio volume is controllable via the OS because of using USB. And good old EyeTV is working just like it did on the Mac Mini. We have an HDHomerun device on our network for 2 channels of OTA TV. And because of the SSD, this setup is faster than the old Mini. We have the same external USB 3.0 drive connected to record the video and that's working well too. And I'm using our same Super Duper software to clone the Mojave drive each night to the USB 3.0 drive.

So we now have an upgradeable machine that's only a little bigger than the Mac Mini and runs Mojave just fine. And it's dual boot too. And the whole thing (including the extras I had to buy) was just a bit over $200. So we are very happy and we thank everyone who put this guide together.
 
Wanting to add 2 additional hard drives to my HP 8300 elite MT. The current 4 SATA ports are taken, so I purchased a Sata controller card that TRS recomended (as well as a reviewer on Amazon with similar hardware):
There are only a few that work in a Hackintosh. Here's one you can try.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005B0A6ZS/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

After purchasing this SATA Card from Amazon I inserted it into my motherboards PCIe-1 and PCIe-2 slot (as per directions), but the bios does not recognize any hard drive I attach to either of these ports.

Is there something I am missing (a setting in the bios for instance), or should I just assume this SATA card won't work with my motherboard.

Thanks for any assistance.
 
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