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<< Solved >> High Sierra on Toshiba Satellite C660-1FL laptop (i3-380M Arrandale + ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 graphics)

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Motherboard
Toshiba Satellite C660-1FL
CPU
Intel Core i3-380M
Graphics
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Friends, I have this old Toshiba Satellite C660-1FL laptop (an old i3-380M Arrandale chip + ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 graphics) which I've decided to repurpose and install HS on it. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get Opencore to install HS, which I eventually succeeded in, overcoming some major obstacles and learning a lot in the process. However, I couldn't get the graphics going. I spent another two weeks trying to get some graphics acceleration with OC, but failed. Eventually I decided to switch to Clover with the hope that I would be able to do some graphics injection going using it's capabilities, because all success stories that I've seen with similar hardware were done through Clover.

To cut the long story short, after a week I managed to get a config together that lets me get to the installer but then I hit a brick wall with a very strange problem that I've been trying to resolve for the last four days, trying different things from searches online, but failed. I have a feeling it's something simple that I've missed. The problem is that when I get to the installer, it can't see any USB memory sticks connected to the laptop apart from the one that has Clover, the one I'm booting from. So, I can't proceed with HS installation, because I want to install it onto another USB memory stick. I've tried different sticks formatted in different formats. The laptop has two USB ports, plugging the Clover stick into the other port doesn't change anything.

I would greatly appreciate if someone can point me in the right direction how I can fix this problem. I've ran out of ideas at this stage. Here is the information about my Clover configuration - a photo of the UFI directory and config.plist.
 

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I have this old Toshiba Satellite C660-1FL laptop (an old i3-380M Arrandale chip + ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 graphics) which I've decided to repurpose and install HS on it. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get Opencore to install HS, which I eventually succeeded in, overcoming some major obstacles and learning a lot in the process. However, I couldn't get the graphics going.
That first gen Core i3 has no Intel iGPU that is required to work with macOS. It relies on the ATI HD 5470 which is not supported as far as I know. For High Sierra you'd need a cpu with at least 2nd gen Core i CPU that has HD3000 gfx.

Screen_Shot_9.jpg
 
Thank you for you reply. According to dortania guide desktop versions are supported:

HD 5000 Series(5xxx)
#Highest Supported OS: High Sierra(10.13.6)
#Initial Supported OS: Snow Leopard(10.6)
HD 5450
HD 5470
HD 5570
HD 5630
HD 5670
HD 5690
HD 5730
HD 5770
HD 5850
HD 5870

Not sure if this translates to mobile versions being supported too.
My Opencore High Sierra installation detects it and reports as HD 5450 with 5mb of ram, so not properly configured, hence no acceleration. I've found threads where people were able to get the desktop versions going with HS by injecting drivers through Clover.

This laptop has been a pain in the butt, a major challenge for me and by far the hardest installation. I've been struggling with it for the last 6 weeks or so. During this time I have done a desktop and another laptop with a Skylake processor and they were easy. I keep coming back to this old laptop because of the challenge I've been learning a lot about how things work.
 
Well, I almost broke my brain trying to get the graphics going on it, but finally succeeded. Not sure if anyone out there cares, but I'll leave it here for the record.

Fixed the USB ports by following this guide:
This was quite easy.

Getting the graphics working was a major pain. After trying a lot of different things the solution was to patch the framebuffers. This guide is excellent:
It gave me a foundation for figuring out my own patches, but they didn't work at first. I found a description of a patch for a similar laptop and changed a couple of numbers in my own patch and then it worked.

The bottom line is - if your ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 graphics card is recognized by the system, meaning you get a picture, just no acceleration, low resolution and low video memory 3/4/5/8Mb (btw, you can get full resolution by ticking Patch VBios in Clover Configirator - you can use this trick until you get your patch worked out), it means that WhateverGreen won't work for you (and all the trickery around it with fake ids and such won't get you anywhere) because your AMD framebuffers differ from the standard ones configured in AMD5000Controller.kext and need to be manually reconfigured. So, you can delete WhateverGreen and create your own patch, apply it and enable Load VBios and if your patch is correct, everything will be cool. If you get a black screen after enabling Load VBios, it means your patch isn't correct and something needs to be changed. Once it's correct for your system, it will boot with Load VBios enabled and you will get full resolution and graphics acceleration.

Now, the question is - Does Opencore have a feature similar to Clover's KextsToPatch? Is it possible to do framebuffer injection with it?
 
Hi! I have a C660-2L5, very similar to your config. I have tried to install HS on it for weeks, but no luck. Could you please share a guide or something to make it work? Thanks!
 
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