Help reviving a El Capitan Hackintosh with all my pictures.

[ManKina]

I had an el capitan hackintosh fail right after my daughter was born. I never got around to fixing it, but didn't worry because it had a z-array (I don't know why I did it that way!) and the failure wasn't the raid hard drives anyways.

I finally got around to fixing it (she's 3 now). I remember how chimera is working, I do a verbiose boot. Quickly realize its a catalog hieracrchy problem. Boot into single user, still won't repair. Fair enough, I remember I have my boot drive backed up on an external using superduper. Incredibly it boots immediately and perfectly. Here's where I screw up. I thought best to get that original HD immediately rewritten the other way using super duper to restore it from the backup. This goes well, but I was thinking its a perfect copy and won't have any issues. WRONG. It will not boot anymore. Stuck at the end of the bios. Believe I screwed something up with chimera, and that it was using the bad drive to boot chimera, then the good drive.

The only other OS X computer I have right now is 10.7, so I'm trying to get a USB drive bootable to at least be able to get back into the harddrive. I've tried every USB installation using the 4.7 multibeast I can think of (easybeast, custom dsdt, support ATI 48xx). I'm certain I've gotten closer, because it freezes the bios if the USB drive is inserted at any point.

Its a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P with a core 2 duo, and I have an ATI 4800.

I believe based on below that the EFI partition still exists:
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 TB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS Backup Booter 4.0 TB di

Long story short: I screwed up my chimera boot trying to restore my hard drive from a backup. Really appreciate any help.

 

[Bustycat]

How about rebuilding a stand-alone bootloader to your USB flash drive? Clover or even OpenCore could also work.

 

[ManKina]

How about rebuilding a stand-alone bootloader to your USB flash drive? Clover or even OpenCore could also work.

Tried that last night. I think I had clover as the bootloader anyways.

It's sitting at the end of the bios, where it sits when there's no boot drive, I've tried 2 flash drives, 2 versions of clover, and all three boot sector options (Don't update MBR, install boot0af in MBR, and install ootoss in MBR). Its like it doesn't know its a bootable drive. Should be boot0af I believe because its a legacy bios.

Old version of OS X, but I've done a partition journaled and journaled case sensitive and always check that GUID is picked. So strange. I could understand if it wouldn't boot succesfully for kext or other reasons, but it doesn't seem to even want to try. I have all 3 first boot devices as USB-HDD and out of paranoia I hold down f12 for boot options and select USB-HDD.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure why it doesn't list the USB device by name in the boot options, I'm definitely screwing something up there.

 

[Bustycat]

Tried that last night. I think I had clover as the bootloader anyways.

It's sitting at the end of the bios, where it sits when there's no boot drive, I've tried 2 flash drives, 2 versions of clover, and all three boot sector options (Don't update MBR, install boot0af in MBR, and install ootoss in MBR). Its like it doesn't know its a bootable drive. Should be boot0af I believe because its a legacy bios.

Old version of OS X, but I've done a partition journaled and journaled case sensitive and always check that GUID is picked. So strange. I could understand if it wouldn't boot succesfully for kext or other reasons, but it doesn't seem to even want to try. I have all 3 first boot devices as USB-HDD and out of paranoia I hold down f12 for boot options and select USB-HDD.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure why it doesn't list the USB device by name in the boot options, I'm definitely screwing something up there.

If you could see the Clover menu but no bootable drives (even no Recovery?), the system may be corrupted as well. You might have to try to duplicate your drive, make a bootable USB installer, and attempt to reinstall without formatting.

 

[ManKina]

Wow, feeling stupid. I'm at least in, I'm sure I have some kexts and a bootloader to install. Thanks. I think it was listed as USB-HDD0 and not USB-HDD. When I went through and treated it like a normal hard drive, it did fine.

Must have overthunk it, because trying out old flash drives I found my chameleon drive from an older install, and that booted but then gave the old kernel not found, and the hard drive recovery tools bootable usb.

 

[ManKina]

D

If you could see the Clover menu but no bootable drives (even no Recovery?), the system may be corrupted as well. You might have to try to duplicate your drive, make a bootable USB installer, and attempt to reinstall without formatting.

Didn't even see the clover menu, but thinking it through with your thoughts definitely helped. Helped me realize that the bios usually lists the manufacturer and either model or serial number for the flash drive to boot from, not just a generic USB-HDD. I got more suspicious that it wasn't making a genuine effort to boot from USB.

 

[Bustycat]

So it is likely the system is corrupted. If your goal is just saving your pictures, you may just need to connect the drive externally and copy.