HP Envy 700-230qe shuts down before reaching installer

[jborland]

Hello everyone! I have a Snow Leopard machine that I used to make an El Capitan installer USB (UEFI). When I run it, I get the attached screenshot. I went through the installer guide, and I turned off VT-d and Secure Boot but I didn't see any of the other options. I tried some stuff like nv_disable=1, cpus=1, and all of the options in the space bar menu with the same result. Do I need a DSDT? Is there a flag I haven't tried or something I haven't read? Thanks for any advice.

 

[jborland]

OK I sorted it out, I was doing a few things wrong:
- My original Snow Leopard "machine" was a VM. I since found a post saying that VM's generate bad installers, so I installed Snow Leopard as the base OS and made a new installer from there.
- I used the Haswell iBoot instead of the regular iBoot (I didn't realize there was a special Haswell one)
- Before installing El Capitan I used the terminal to set the date to June 2017 (otherwise I get the "no packages eligible for install" message)

Boom I have a working El Capitan! Woo!

 

[trs96]

Boom I have a working El Capitan! Woo!

Note that HD4600 has support all the way through Catalina. Works well. What is the specific model of HP that you have ? Putting that in the Motherboard section of your hardware profile is more useful than the specific model of motherboard.

 

[jborland]

Great to hear! I have changed my profile as you suggested. I can't seem to download the Catalina installer from within El Capitan - the app store tells me "This version of macOS 10.15.2 cannot be installed on this computer". Perhaps I need to download this from a mac running on apple hardware and copy it over? Or do I need to upgrade to some intermediate OS version to get to Catalina? I don't see any other versions in the app store.

I am sure all the answers exist somewhere in the forum, I am just getting started...

 

[trs96]

This version of macOS 10.15.2 cannot be installed on this computer. Do I need to upgrade to some intermediate OS version to get to Catalina?

If you're using El Capitan now, you can install macOS Catalina. You will also need at least 4GB of memory and 12.5GB of available storage space. I would guess that you're still using Mac Pro 3,1 system def. and that is why you get the above message. Change it to iMac 14,2 and then try to download Catalina again. You can run Multibeast to change it to iMac 14,2. Make only this one selection then click on the Build tab -> Install. iMac 14,2 is probably the best sysdef for your hardware so if it works, stay with that. SMBIOS is another name for system definitions.

You will need to use createinstallmedia method to make your Catalina installer. This requires that you manually install Clover and select the proper drivers. If you don't want to do that just use Unibeast for Mojave and install Mojave instead of Catalina.

 

[jborland]

That allowed me to download the Catalina installer, thanks! Unfortunately when I try createinstallmedia it tells me "Install macOS Catalina.app does not appear to be a valid OS installer application". The app is only 21MB, I assume this is just a bootstrap thing that downloads an actual installer when it is run. Is there a way to download the full installer?

 

[jborland]

nvm, I got the full installer as suggested by the post "XPS 15 9560 MacOS Catalina 15.1 Full Install Guide" in Catalina Laptop Guides. Worked like a champ. I am running Catalina! Thanks so much everyone!