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H97N + Xeon + GTX 960 Maxwell - Cannot Boot Installer - Please help

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May 4, 2014
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Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-H97N-WIFI
CPU
Intel Xeon 1231v3
Graphics
MSI NVIDIA GTX 960 Gaming 4GB
Mac
  1. MacBook
  2. MacBook Air
  3. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. Classic
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
Hello All,

A little over a year ago I built an h77n hackintosh with a gtx 760 no problem. I've just completed another build for my friend and it has been a nightmare so far. I originally installed Mavericks and was able to boot from the SDD but soon learned that Maxwell GPUs are not supported and so am now trying for El Capitan. At least I believe I can be sure that my BIOS settings are all good.

The new config is as follows: Gigabyte Hh97n-wifi - Intel Xeon E3-1231V3 Haswell 3.4 GHz - MSI GTX 960 4GB Gaming OC - 16GB RAM (2x8 sticks). The Xeon has no integrated graphics so I am connecting directly to my HDMI port on my graphics card, wasn't a problem with my old build and seems to be fine here.

Currently I can get my App store copy of El Capitan onto my USB thumb drive using Unibeast, however I cannot get the installer to boot. I am booting the distro of Clover included with Unibeast with boot flags nv_disable=1 and -v and the installer crashes at "still waiting for root device" - the entire screen gets all garbled and displays the prohibited circle. I've tried moving the USB to different ports to no avail per this thread. I have not tried any of the other graphics related flags as they all seem to relate to Intel HD graphics, which I do not have.

According to this thread, this may have something to do with the h97n having more USB ports than what El Cap supports, but I have no idea how to use a fakesmc kext as it is describing. I've also tried changing my SMC to 15,1 as indicated in the same thread rather than the possibly incorrect 14,2 that Clover is defaulting to, however I am not sure if I need to change other options such as the serial #, etc that are present in Clover's bootloader options.

The Unibeast El Capitan Guide briefly mentions downloading the full Clover package separately to further customize the bootloader, but I'm not really sure what I need to be doing there. Also, there seems to exist a Clover Configurator as well, but I have no idea what the difference would be between using that and just downloading the clover package itself, and again.

In summary, I'm really not sure if I'm having a graphics issue, a USB issue, or an SMC issue, or if I need to tweak/customize Clover in some capacity. Any help would be greatly appreciated as my buddy and I both want to get this thing up and running so he can focus more on homework and less on getting his new awesome hackintosh working :headbang: Thanks!
 
Still waiting for root device indicates that El Capitan cannot find your USB drive.

Try putting the USB Fix on your USB install drive.

Other than that and nv_disable=1, it should be just as as UniBeast created it (don't try other SMBIOS system definitions or anything just yet).
 
Try putting the USB Fix on your USB install drive.

Thanks so much for your help ammulder. I actually recall that my first build wasn't actually totally smooth sailing either, but the help of others on here got me on track, so thank you for the assistance and all that you and others have done here. I was able to install by adding the USB Fix kexts to my USB drive.

Unfortunately I am still unable to get the GTX 960 to work when booting from disk, the monitor receives no signal after Clover attempts to boot into OS X. My full install procedure is below.

I booted into El Cap with flags dart=0 nv_disable=1 -v and ran MultiBeast with the following:

Quick Start > UEFI Boot Mode
Drivers > Audio > Realtek ALCxxx > ALC892
Drivers > Misc > FakeSMC v6.18.1394
Drivers > Misc > FakeSMC Plugins v6.18.1394
Drivers > Misc > FakeSMC HWMonitor Application v6.18.1394
Drivers > Network > Atheros > AtherosE2200Ethernet v2.0.1
Drivers > Network > Intel AppleIntel1000e 3.2.4.3
Bootloaders > Clover v2.3k r3320 UEFI Boot Mode

I then installed NVIDIA web drivers 346.03.05f01 (my install of El Cap is 10.11.3), check that they were enabled in System Prefs, mounted my EFI partition using EFI Mounter v3, copied all of the USB Fix kexts to EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/ and /10.11, added nvda_drv=1 to my config.plist boot arguments, and rebooted. Clover begins to boot and gets so far before blacking out and cutting signal to the monitor. I believe the last message displayed before going black is something about CPU power management (it all flies by pretty fast). I also attempted rebooting with nv_disable=1, changing my System Definition to MacPro 3,1 (although I read somewhere this shouldn't matter anymore with newer web driver versions), rebooting and reinstalling the web drivers, but no dice.

I've double checked that my PCI slot is selected properly in my Bios and that graphics_enabler=yes wasn't present anywhere in config.plist. My MB's BIOS is version F7 (2015/04/24) and newest is F8 (2015/09/18) but I'm hoping that's not the issue. I have not bothered to install CUDA drivers yet as my reading indicates that they have no effect on the card working or not.

Did I miss something? Should I be making other modifications to my config.plist, or clearing my kext cache in some way? Does anything need to be added to my S/L/E? Again, thanks a ton for your help!
 
can you boot using cpus=1 ?
 
So weird thing is, I took the machine back over to my buddy's house to work on it some more, plugged it in and turned it on, and it booted just fine! I am currently in the process of trying to install Windows 7 along-side my OS X installation by installing onto a separate partition on the same SSD... I will update with any notes or issues for others' reference as well.

Currently have Win 7 on a DVD and an MS-FAT GUID partition ready to be installed onto (didn't bother with Boot Camp Assistant). If I read correctly the installation of Windows 7 will over-write my installation of Clover, so I will need to boot back into OS X using my Multibeast USB and reinstall Clover with the same settings once windows installs successfully, and hopefully Clover will be able to boot to either install at that point. Thanks again guys.

Edit: First snag -- cannot boot into windows installer from Clover, so I booted directly to the disc by setting DVD-drive as boot priority in my BIOS. However the windows installer will not allow me to format the partition I created or in effect install to it. It will not let me modify or delete any partition for that matter. In my BIOS boot options I selected "ASUS DVD Drive..." and not "UEFI ASUS DVD Drive...", I don't totally know if that's the issue or which one I want, gotta go eat now though, back soon...
 
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