Interesting Lack-of-POST problem and the interim solution: ASUS Z97-A

[Beermotor]

I'll preface this by saying I've seen a few people posting in this forum with a similar problem, and the common denominator here seems to be using Clover in UEFI mode. I'm not ready to point a finger at anything yet, but I've laid that out there.

My hardware basics are in my profile. A little more detail on how I built my build.

• Three hard drives.
  • Drive 1: 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, EFI partition containing only Windows loaders, single Windows partition. C: in Windows
  • Drive 2: 2TB Seagate SSHD Hybrid. Single NTFS partition. D: in Windows
  • Drive 3: 1TB Seagate HDD: GPT: EFI partition with Clover goodies, jHFS+ 500GB Partition with OSX 10.11, 500GB NTFS partition which is E: under Windows
• Installed using Clover in UEFI (from Unibeast 6)mode
  • kexts:
    • FakeSMC
    • The Intel Gigabit Ethernet (I use a wired gigabit connection)
  • EFI Drivers: Stock Clover UEFI load-out.

When it is booted up, my Hackintosh works perfectly; Ethernet works, GPU uses the proper driver, wakes from sleep just fine, audio is fine, power management is fine. Everything is great.

The problem is that on occasion after a shutdown or reboot from OSX, my machine will turn on, poll the USB devices, spin up the drives, sends enough signal to the monitor to keep it on, but does not actually POST. It doesn't display anything on the screen and by all indications just sits there and doesn't boot.

The only way to get it to boot is to crack the case open and unplug my OSX hard drive. Then I can boot it back into Windows, putz around for a while, shut the machine down, and plug the OSX drive back in. After that it'll POST just fine and I can boot back into OSX.

This obviously isn't any way for a sane person to want to live, so I wanted to post a report of my plight to both share my experience with folks having issues, and to perhaps get some feedback from those with more knowledge than I about ways that I could possibly work around this issue. I'm completely open to ideas. My latest hunch is there's something about that drive that the Asus/AMI UEFI firmware on my motherboard doesn't like and that's what's causing it to not even POST. Any help is appreciated.

TL;DR: Clover UEFI z97 Hackintosh doesn't POST on occasion if the OSX drive is plugged in. Will post if the drive is unplugged, and will post and boot back into OSX just fine if the machine completes a boot cycle with it temporarily unplugged.

 

[xenophon61]

Perhaps this is relevant:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/to...r-bios-boot-entries-prevent-further-problems/

 

[Beermotor]

Thank you xenophon61, I've read a few of Anacronaut's posts here and there but I had not seen that one before. It was very relevant and educational. I've decided to go with the "rethink your system design" option and simply stick to one EFI partition on one disk, that way Clover doesn't go absolutely nuts trying to enumerate my EFI partitions and my UEFI boot list every single time it boots.

This raises the question: why does Clover exhibit this behavior in the first place? Why can't it just set a single boot entry (perhaps two if you're going to have a working HFS+ recovery partition) and just leave your firmware alone forever after? Why does it keep enumerating every single time it boots, writing new entries to the UEFI now and again until some poor souls end up with five or ten "UEFI OS" entries in their boot list?

So far I've not found anything in posts or available documentation that would instruct me in how to disable this behavior. I've looked in what appears to be the official documentation, but did not find anything. Perhaps I just completely suck at Google.

Again I appreciate that article, it certainly helped me clean up the horror that was my UEFI boot menu.