Thank you for writing this up
jaymonkey. It's very insightful.
When I followed the advice of this thread initially, my computer, which was working fine before, refused to boot fully -- even in single user mode. I took it to verbose mode, and found out that there was an issue loading some kexts.
I booted into recovery mode from the Clover menu (thank goodness that worked), mounted my EFI partition, and navigated to the /Volumes/HDD/Library/Extensions folder in two separate terminals, listing the directories of each.
I proceeded to delete every kext I copied from the EFI folder to the /Library/Extensions folder. Rebooted, and the system came back to life. I could've left it there, but knowing that I was doing things incorrectly didn't sit well with me.
Obviously, I had a bunch of kexts that were wrong for my system and/or causing conflicts, so I needed to do some house-cleaning.
I wound up removing all of these kexts from my EFI folder (safely putting them in the root directory of EFI to recover them quickly if I needed to). Before I removed these kexts, I looked them up to refresh my memory on what they were for:
- ALXEthernet.kext
- AppleIntelE1000e.kext
- BrcmFirmwareData.kext
- BrcmNonPatchRAM2.kext
- BrcmPatchRAM2.kext
- lspcidrv.kext
- Patched_10.7_AppleRTC.kext
- RealtekRTL8111.kext
- VoodooPS2Controller.kext
At some point or another, I had convinced myself I needed those kexts - the Brcm ones being related to another issue I've been having with my Magic Mouse 2 intermittently losing its connection. I'm now hopeful that that issue will be resolved by
your pro tip guide to extend my antennas that
UtterDisbelief pointed me to.
Once I cleaned house, I copied the remaining kexts from /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other to /Library/Extensions using Hackintool:
- AirportBrcmFixup.kext
- AppleALC.kext
- FakeSMC.kext
- Lilu.kext
- USBInjectAll.kext
- WhateverGreen.kext
Once that was done, I removed all kexts except for FakeSMC.kext from the /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other folder.
Rebooted, and everything works as it did before. I feel like I have a better understanding of
why these kexts are appropriately placed now, I've cleaned up kexts that were
not relevant to my configuration and could potentially cause problems, and was introduced to a pretty nice tool in Hackintool.
Thanks again
jaymonkey - this is a huge help for me.
Hopefully, if someone else runs into a brick wall because they've loaded their system up with a whole bunch of kexts that they don't need, this gives them some direction.
Less is more.
Edited to add: apparently, going through this process fixed a
long-standing issue I've had with my computer saying it's "been restarted because of a problem". Amazing.