So, I have an issue with just booting my USB stick.
I have a Gigabyte X99 UD4 board, with F12 bios. I've done a lot of research and I've tried to be very careful to the follow the instructions, but I can't even get my USB stick to boot.
I have successfully installed Yosemite on an older Gigabyte Z77 board, with a nVidia GTX 970 card, so I've had some success in the past.
The hardware: Gigabyte X99 UD4 (F12 bios), i5820k CPU, MSI 970 card (was working in the old Yosemite build with the Z77 board), Crucial RAM (currently only one 8GB stick in the motherboard) - all works just fine if I boot with Win 8.1. Hardware is solid, I think.
Downloaded the latest Unibeast, and also Yosemite at the same time, installed on a known good USB stick, copied over the Voodoo kext for the i5820k, patched following instructions from Tony's guide (only once via Stinga11). Added npci=0x2000, etc.
But it won't boot. Continuously hangs at various points. I double checked the bios settings. I've tried various boot flags.
-x -v -f npci=0x2000 nv_disable=1, and added cpus=1 at one point (no luck), cpus=0, kext-dev-mode=1, etc.
Is it possible that I have 10.10.3 Yosemite that I downloaded from the Apple site and that might be the problem (because 10.10.3 might have some surprises in it)?
OKAY! I got it. And I have some words of advice for anyone trying to configure an X99 system running Yosemite.
Each system appears to have unique requirements for the boot loading. For me, it was:
-v nv_disable=1 npci=0x3000 kext-dev-mode=1
First: successful boot parameters vary widely, even with hardware that is very similar. This I don't quite understand. Many others who have my board and video card were using other parameters, including npci=0x2000, which for whatever reason was not working for me. All had X99 UD4 boards, with nVidia GTX970/980s and their boot flag requirements were different. Annoying, but true....I had tried all types of combinations of boot flags, and they all didn't seem to work. Until......(see next paragraph)
Secondly, you have to wait after you boot with a set of flags. At least 20 minutes. Because in one case, that's how long it took for the installer to get to the Mac OSX install screen. I hadn't been waiting long enough, and probably had the right parameters entered once or twice before, but I hadn't waited long enough for the system to load the OSX image. The way I found out was I had set some boot flags and started the boot, but had to walk the dog. The screen looked like it was frozen, as usual, so I said to myself, screw it, and went ahead and walked the dog. But 20-25 minutes later, when I got back, there was the install gui screen!
Hackintoshes are still a bit of an art, I think.....
ALSO: I did get the very latest version of Yosemite (10.10.3), and it's a bit more difficult to get to boot and install (in my opinion) AND if you have a GTX970/980, yes, you WILL need a newer nVidia Web driver! (346.01.02f01 will NOT do it....)
Good Luck....
EDIT: Also, I changed bios revisions from F12 to F11 (not sure if that helped or not), and I changed from an MSI GTX970 card to a EVGA GTX980 card (again, not sure if that helped either).