Help with update from Mavericks to El Capitan with clover

[Nodarkthings]

Hi!
A little information first: I see you're a Pro Tools user like me, is it PT10? If so, it won't work past MacOS 10.9, you must keep a 10.9 partition and use a recent MacOS installed on another partition/drive for your other activities.
I see you have DigiDal.kext installed, which is well known to create problems (it's only needed for some Digidesign interface, if I recall well, but you seem to use M-Audio so you could probably get rid of it. Moreover you have it in both L/E and S/L/E!!! (don't do anything about it yet, we'll deal with it later)
Can you post a screenshot from your "About his Mac" info, please?
About Clover:
- on my Z68, I had issues with any version past r5106, I can't tell for your mobo... but as it boots in safe mode, it looks ok.
- I see you have the EFI Clover folder on your Mavericks drive, it should be on your EFI partition of the same drive but I guess it can work also that way...
=> there we need to determine which EFI Clover folder you boot from (the EFI partition from your USB key? The one from the EFI partition of one of your drives? Possibly Mavericks? Or the one at the root of your Mavericks drive?...
- when you boot in safe mode, is it booting from your USB key or does it work without it connected?
- when you have successfully booted in safe mode, open Terminal then type
sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions && sudo kextcache -u /
(this must be done every time you modify L/E or S/L/E by adding or removing a kext)
This might be enough to boot normally.
Please answer precisely to all my questions otherwise it will be hard to help.
Bye!

 

[BobGad]

Hi,
Yes I’m on Pro Tools with an HD Native card using 12.5.0 and I use a DControl surface and Avid Eleven rack so that might explain the DigiDal and M Audio kexts.
The screen shots you requested are attached below.

I only booted once from the usb that just had clover on it, nothing else. Since that first boot I have removed the usb ( and erased it) and have since been trying to boot from the Mavericks system drive option. Not sure if that’s the root or not.

All successful boots into safe mode have been without usb inserted.

I typed the line in Terminal exactly as you suggested but still no full os boot, only safe mode.

Thanks,
Bob

 

[Nodarkthings]

Hi,
Yes I’m on Pro Tools with an HD Native card using 12.5.0 and I use a DControl surface and Avid Eleven rack so that might explain the DigiDal and M Audio kexts.
The screen shots you requested are attached below.

I only booted once from the usb that just had clover on it, nothing else. Since that first boot I have removed the usb ( and erased it) and have since been trying to boot from the Mavericks system drive option. Not sure if that’s the root or not.

All successful boots into safe mode have been without usb inserted.

I typed the line in Terminal exactly as you suggested but still no full os boot, only safe mode.

Thanks,
Bob

Ok, good starting point!
So, what we know so far:
- you're on 10.9.5 and PT12.5 is compatible with 10.9.5 and 10.11
- I still think that DigiDal.kext shouldn't be in both L/E and S/L/E but I can't be sure as I'm on PT10...

One thing that puzzles me is when you say "copying my system drive with Time Machine to an internal ssd"... It may be something I don't know but TM is not meant to clone a MacOS partition, I would have used Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper instead...
I suppose you still have your original Mavericks working drive and you can boot from it?
If so, I'd suggest cloning it again to your SSD, there's no reason it wouldn't work.
Instead, if you screwed up your only copy of that OS partition, I would clone it somewhere (even as a disk image with Disk Utility — sparsebundles are fast enough even if they occupy more space than dmg).
Then I'd install a clean 10.9 from the original installer: once it's installed and boots fine, I'd make another disk image of it, just in case we should start over again some other time (it's a lot faster than installing from scratch).
After your new clean 10.9 boots fine, use Migration assistant to import what you need from your old 10.9. If it's some part of the OS that's been corrupted, your new partition should work ok — there's still a risk that it imports something bad but it's worth taking the chance.

A particular note about old procedures: back in 2013, it's very likely that you used a patched AppleHDA (I've seen mentions of HDAenabler in your screenshots which has been deprecated long time ago...) Here, I was using AppleHDA 2.5.3 from Multibeast 6.1 — the more recent versions didn't work (but it may be related to my mobo, I don't know).

I understand you're reluctant to switch to OpenCore, but I could help you a lot more if you decided so — also starting over from a clean system.