I've broken my Mojave install and can't get back in

[Monkey303]

Hi,

So, if it aint broke, don't fix it! Unfortunately, I did just that. I was trying to get rid of a program off my system, installed cleanmy mac (I know, I know) which didn't help anyway, so went through some system folders manually and ended up in library/extensions and noticed some kexts that I thought shouldn't be there, so I moved them to my desktop and rebooted and it gives me the clover boot screen with a choice of my windows install and the MacOS install, I choose the MacOS and it then goes to the black screen with the white apple logo on and the line underneath, but this takes anything up to 5 mins to complete and then the PC stays on and the monitor powers off and is unresponsive.

So normally, if this happened, I'd plug in my bootable USB drive, set it to boot from that in the BIOS and then start upo that way and make changes and needed. My system no longer recognises any of the USB drives in clover, but it does recognise them in the BIOS.

The only other things that I had done in the days before I rebooted were the latest MacOS update and installed a printer, which then gave me an update for the printer through the Mac settings, in the same way a Mojave update would be done.

The USB ports were all working perfectly prior to this.

I have unplugged everything from the other USB ports, tried USB 2 and USB 3 thumbdrives but I cannot get into Mojave at all.

I have a Windows install on a seperate drive, so went in that way and mounted the Mojave drive and dragged the files from where I had left them (the desktop) back to library/extensions. Still no luck, so from that, I think it has to be cleanmy mac that did the damage.

Is it possible to do a repair of the install? Can anyone point me in the right direction, please? Thanks.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi there.

Yes it is.

But...

First question - is there a recovery partition? Or was there?

You should still be able to boot into your UniBeast stick and instead of expecting to start the system, select the External icon so that you are heading into the UniBeast installer.

If you don't want to refresh your install (which should leave all your apps and data intact) and you don't want to use the Recovery partition, then the third option is to use Terminal.

Once the installer boots to its desktop, instead of proceeding, go to the Tools menu and choose Terminal.

With this you can navigate to your original drive and installation AND re-install the removed kexts, rebuilding the caches once done.

Having said that, it's not easy. This requires some learning of all those arcane Terminal commands to do the job, but it is possible, just daunting for the first time.

I'm not at my PC or info library at the moment, or I'd suggest a few commands, but there is plenty of info on this site etc. For example "ls" will list a directory. "cd" will change to a sub-directory. "rm" will delete (with options). "cd /Volumes/"Macintosh HD"/System/Library/Extensions" to get to the kexts etc etc.

 

[Monkey303]

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated

Regarding the recovery partition, I don't think there is, this was my first Hackintosh and it was a real pain to actually get the install part of it done, it kept failing at 2 mins remaining and so I followed maybe 4 guides before I got it installed. I started with the guides here. If I open Minitool partition wizard in Windows and look at the partitions on both drives, there's a recovery partition on the windows drive, but only an EFI and the main partition on the Mojave drive.

A refresh of the install sounds like what I need, but I cannot get any of my USB drives to be recognised by the clover boot screen. All thumb drives that i've tried are recognised in the BIOS and can be set as the bootable drive, but when I get to the clover boot screen, i only have two options, the windows one and the MacOS install. If I press f3, it gives me 3 more options, but none of them are the thumb drives. It seems like Clover bootloader is broken?

Thanks

 

[Monkey303]

I did the f3 thing at the clover boot screen and there is a recovery option, but it does the same, very slow loading and then eventual blank screen with PC still running.

 

[Monkey303]

Been going round in circles with Unibeast, for whatever reason it does not seem to want to work with my set up, it either refuses to see the USB drives, tried all kinds and sizes, 16GB, 8GB, 32GB, 128GB, USB 2, USB 3, SDCard in a USB 3 housing, Sandisk, Patriot, Kingston, unbranded etc and if it does see the drive, it installs the bootable stuff onto the drive, but then the system will not boot from it. I had this problem when I first started the guide, which was what led me to trying other guides!

Anyway, I used the thumb-drive-making-files from another site, worked first time, this booted straight into their clover boot loader, which gave me the options of booting from USB etc, I actually chose the MacOS drive that wasn't working and it booted right up.

So I'm in, but I'm guessing I need to fix the clover boot loaded on my macOS drive? Any help, much appreciated, thanks

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Good news

Ok, logically, if you now have access to your main macOS installation, you can use KextBeast to properly put back those kexts you removed. This will rebuild the caches correctly too. Doesn't matter if those you put back from Windows are still there.

Also now worth running DiskUtil - First Aid on the main drive just to make sure Windows didn't do anything nasty to it.

The way I would repair my EFI partition to make the drive bootable again is first mount the main drive EFI partition using EFI Mounter v3 (be careful to mount the correct one, not the one on your UniBeast USB stick) and check it is formatted correctly (MS-DOS FAT etc). Copy the EFI there away to somewhere if needed in future, then delete the original.

Now run MultiBeast to install a new one, or use a vanilla Clover installer.

Should do the trick.