*Help* won't read my 950 pro m.2 drive on reboot (El Capitan)

[RockLee]

Hello everyone, I currently just built my first set up. The hardware installation was awesome. It's the software installation that's killing me. I've been at it for 7 hours straight.
I'm trying to boot from my Samsung 950 pro m.2 drive and keep running into problems after problems.

Details of what I've done so far:

On my macbook pro I have a 16g drive in which I've partitioned to be extended journaled.
I've installed Unibeast successfully with El Capitan 10.11
Download EFI Mounter: http://www.tonymacx86.com/resources/efi-mounter-v3.280/
Ran EFI Mounter
Mounted it to the correct Drive
After having the USB drive EFI boot partition mounted. I navigated to:

EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.11

and dropped the NVMe driver kext in there. Then dropped the EFI Mounter app in the root of the USB drive.

With that I was finally able to see the m.2 drive as an option to install the O.S in when booting.

Once I installed El Capitan on the m.2 drive, I proceeded to partition the drive as well so I can add the same kext as I did the USB. I also mounted both the drive and the partition and put the EFI mount in the m.2 drive.

Everything is then working fine. Im setting up my wifi, entering my apple I.D. searching the web etc.

I open clover config and set my mac to mac pro 3.1 etc.

Here's where the trouble starts:

When I go to restart my computer it doesn't recognize the 950 pro and a black screen pops up with white letters saying "Reboot and select proper boot device" error

So I restart my PC and go to the clover boot menu and click on the 950 pro m.2 drive.

The apply logo shows up and it starts loading but then a prohibition sign pops up and freezes!

Someone please help me and what I should do.

 

[kiiroaka]

I take it that you set it up for UEFI? Did you get into the Clover UEFI terminal and do a 'bcfg boot dump' to see what devices are mapped? If so, did you 'bcfg boot rm "xx" ' any non-HD devices?

To me, UEFI has presented many problems (it doesn't matter if it's Windows or OSX.) I typically end up booting up a Linux LiveCD to use 'Disks' and 'gparted' to blow away the EFI partitions and then retrying the installation. Or I'll get a PC that blue screens on install, say with a "IRQ_Not_Less_Than" error - which typically means a bad driver but it in the case of UEFI usually means a corrupted PCI map entry.

In your case it may be a UEFI/BIOS setting, either selecting a SATA controller always be set to AHCI or in the boot priority where after installing a OS (specially if it was done through PXE) one has to change the boot order so that the HD is always the first boot device (instead of CD, PXE, USB, floppy, etc.) Check to see if there is a Delay setting that can be set, perhaps setting a Delay on any HDDs so that the SDD has time to initialize. idkfs.

You may want to resort to what I did - instead of selecting UEFI as the boot loader in MultiBeast, select "Legacy" instead. It still creates an EFI partition with a disk GPT. But in my case I no longer get UEFI corruption and it boots fine. (Kind'a like Winodws 8x - it creates an EFI partition and it may even create a GPT (Linux complains that there is no fake-DOS (?) file in the EFI) - but it's not "really" UEFI. Idk about Windows 10, though... )

 

[RockLee]

I take it that you set it up for UEFI? Did you get into the Clover UEFI terminal and do a 'bcfg boot dump' to see what devices are mapped? If so, did you 'bcfg boot rm "xx" ' any non-HD devices?

To me, UEFI has presented many problems (it doesn't matter if it's Windows or OSX.) I typically end up booting up a Linux LiveCD to use 'Disks' and 'gparted' to blow away the EFI partitions and then retrying the installation. Or I'll get a PC that blue screens on install, say with a "IRQ_Not_Less_Than" error - which typically means a bad driver but it in the case of UEFI usually means a corrupted PCI map entry.

In your case it may be a UEFI/BIOS setting, either selecting a SATA controller always be set to AHCI or in the boot priority where after installing a OS (specially if it was done through PXE) one has to change the boot order so that the HD is always the first boot device (instead of CD, PXE, USB, floppy, etc.) Check to see if there is a Delay setting that can be set, perhaps setting a Delay on any HDDs so that the SDD has time to initialize. idkfs.

You may want to resort to what I did - instead of selecting UEFI as the boot loader in MultiBeast, select "Legacy" instead. It still creates an EFI partition with a disk GPT. But in my case I no longer get UEFI corruption and it boots fine. (Kind'a like Winodws 8x - it creates an EFI partition and it may even create a GPT (Linux complains that there is no fake-DOS (?) file in the EFI) - but it's not "really" UEFI. Idk about Windows 10, though... )

Sorry I'm very new to this so a lot of the things you said went over my head. But when I first got into El Capitan on my PC everything was working fine. I had not yet opened multibeast because the tutorial I was watching suggested I do it after the re-boot. But when I tried rebooting it took me to the "Reboot and select proper boot device". I went into my bios and checked to see if I could change the AHCI to NvMe but that wasn't an option. I changed the order of my m.2 and put it as boot option #1 as well. But it kept taking me to the clover boot loader. I guess what I'm asking is if its possible for you, maybe put what you said in beginners terms? Maybe a step by step on what you would do?

 

[kiiroaka]

Okay. But just remember that I've had problems with UEFI and OSX bricking a SaForce controlled SDD.

First things first... Your "Reboot and select proper boot device" probably means that it is NOT booting from the HDD; that you need to boot into the USB to be able to boot the OS. There are few threads which address that issue, starting with http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/big-list-of-solutions-for-el-capitan-install-problems.173991/ and http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/u...pitan-on-any-supported-intel-based-pc.172672/

So, the first question to ask is, "Did it boot okay when using the USB Clover stick?' If it did not, did you hit an "F" key to allow you to select the USB stick in the boot selection? and if you did, did you try the UEFI USB and the non-UEFI boot selections?

Re-reading your original posit, it would seem that it booted okay.

But,

Once I installed El Capitan on the m.2 drive, I proceeded to partition the drive as well, so [that] I can add the same kext as I did [to] the USB. I also mounted both the drive [which drive?, both?] and the partition [which drive?, both?] and put the EFI mount in the m.2 drive.

why did you do that?

I believe that when the HDD or SDD is initialized by the Clover install that OSX will automatically create the EFI partition. It doesn't matter if you chose "UEFI" or "Legacy" as your boot loader. IIRC, the next step is to copy the contents of the USB EFI Clover folder into the SDD EFI Clover folder. (Yes, I had trouble with that too... until I just gave up and installed the Legacy bootloader. My problem was that no matter what EFI I selected through Clover and EFI Mounter if I changed one I automatically changed the other. I even resorted to mounting the USB EFI and copying the Clover folder to my desktop, then rebooting and mounting the HDD EFI and copying the files over. It didn't work too well... maybe it will work for you. I even tried copying Clover to the HD (see http://cloverboot.weebly.com/install-clover-to-usbhdd.html ) and then copying the USB Clover files to the HD Clover files... I loved it when it said, "A common case for failed install is if you already have Clover installed and did not clear nvram before install.

To solve:
Open terminal and type nvram -c
Install Clover again.")

So maybe you should try clearing the nvram before trying to copy the USB Clover files to the SDD EFI partition. idkfs.

So I think that's your problem - you need to copy the USB CLover files over to the SDD Clover folder. But why you changed the partition size and then created "another" EFI parition has me baffled. (I know it's not something I would do within Linux, for example, because if I change the swap space it will probably fudge the OS. Only Windows can change the partition sizes on the fly without destroying the OS, as far as I know.)