Non-Booting High Sierra w/GEFORCE 1060 - Where do I start?

[joeljgarrett]

I have a Hackintosh set up and upgraded through the last updates to the NVidia WebDriver and macOS High Sierra and Clover v4630. I know that's a long ways back.


The system stopped booting all the way into macOS. If I try to boot from the High Sierra OS volume, the progress bar at boot gets about 2/3rds of the way across and then takes a really long time to get all the way across and the system just restarts.

The only way I am currently able to bring the system up in any form is to remove the GEFORCE 1060 card, connect to the machine's built-in VGA port and boot to the Recovery partition, but that doesn't really provide a lot of functionality (a terminal window from which I am able to see that the filesystem/HDD/SSD devices all appear to be ok, but not much else) and I am at a total loss as to where to begin on troubleshooting/repairing this system.

Is there some set of either Clover or system boot options that I can use to bring the system in some form of reduced functionality akin to safe mode in Windows?

If this is an RTFM exercise, I'll gladly follow whatever documentation there might be available to help get the system up enough to be able to either:

1) Upgrade to a newer version of macOS with a compatible ATI graphics card (Radeon RX580 - again, not the newest/greatest, but originally purchased with the intent to move as far beyond High Sierra as I could go.

2) Get the system as-is up and running enough to be able to connect over my home network and copy/move files off, wipe everything out and start all over again from the highest macOS version possible.

I'll gladly provide necessary info, if someone can help me out with what commands, settings, etc. would be needed to get started.

The info at the bottom of this posting includes all the standard info that has been required to at least describe the system's basic info.

Thanks in advance to anyone able to help me out.

 

[Jamesbond007]

I have a Hackintosh set up and upgraded through the last updates to the NVidia WebDriver and macOS High Sierra and Clover v4630. I know that's a long ways back.


The system stopped booting all the way into macOS. If I try to boot from the High Sierra OS volume, the progress bar at boot gets about 2/3rds of the way across and then takes a really long time to get all the way across and the system just restarts.

The only way I am currently able to bring the system up in any form is to remove the GEFORCE 1060 card, connect to the machine's built-in VGA port and boot to the Recovery partition, but that doesn't really provide a lot of functionality (a terminal window from which I am able to see that the filesystem/HDD/SSD devices all appear to be ok, but not much else) and I am at a total loss as to where to begin on troubleshooting/repairing this system.

Is there some set of either Clover or system boot options that I can use to bring the system in some form of reduced functionality akin to safe mode in Windows?

If this is an RTFM exercise, I'll gladly follow whatever documentation there might be available to help get the system up enough to be able to either:

1) Upgrade to a newer version of macOS with a compatible ATI graphics card (Radeon RX580 - again, not the newest/greatest, but originally purchased with the intent to move as far beyond High Sierra as I could go.

2) Get the system as-is up and running enough to be able to connect over my home network and copy/move files off, wipe everything out and start all over again from the highest macOS version possible.

I'll gladly provide necessary info, if someone can help me out with what commands, settings, etc. would be needed to get started.

The info at the bottom of this posting includes all the standard info that has been required to at least describe the system's basic info.

Thanks in advance to anyone able to help me out.

High Sierra does support the RX 580. I use it to run Sierra / High Sierra / Mojave / Catalina myself.

How about replacing the GTX 1060 with the RX 580 and see if the system boots?

And the RX 580 supports the current MacOS versions including the latest Sonoma.

 

[joeljgarrett]

OK, so I followed the guidance for searching using keywords and found the following thread that looks really similar to my situation:

Fix for failure NVIDIA Web Driver on High Sierra, black screen, panics.

This post addresses very specific issue which seems to be common problem world-wide - black screen or infinite reboot loop after installing NVIDIA Web Drivers. You have installed High Sierra on your comp or upgraded Sierra into High Sierra and everything looks nice expect you month have...

www.tonymacx86.com

I followed the guidance there to use the terminal in Recovery to remove all signs of the NVidia Web Driver files/kexts/etc. Unfortunately that hasn't changed the behavior I'm seeing. I am still only able to start up in Recovery and get the terminal window w/very limited functionality.

If I attempt to let the system go ahead and boot from the High Sierra volume, the progress bar on boot still only gets about 2/3rds of the way across and then after a long pause just keeps restarting.

 

[joeljgarrett]

High Sierra does support the RX 580. I use it to run Sierra / High Sierra / Mojave / Catalina myself.

How about replacing the GTX 1060 with the RX 580 and see if the system boots?

And the RX 580 supports the current MacOS versions including the latest Sonoma.

Thanks for the reply and suggestions. Before I can really use the new RX580, aren't there going to need to be some changes made to the system config to allow its use with High Sierra? I'm game for trying just installing the card though.

Please note my other reply on this thread - I followed the guidance on a suggestion for how to get your Desktop back when using NVidia Web Drivers (which I had been up to the point of this problem) - I cleaned out all of the NVidia-related kexts, etc. in the High Sierra volume's Library/Extensions and System/Library/Extensions folders and rebooting but I still get the same reboot loop with no desktop behavior.

In the past when disabling or removing the 1060 card or its drivers I was usually able to boot to a very slowly refreshing desktop long enough to load the newest version of web drivers, etc. to get things back on track, but that was a LOOONG time ago.

 

[trs96]

The only way I am currently able to bring the system up in any form is to remove the GEFORCE 1060 card, connect to the machine's built-in VGA port and boot to the Recovery partition, but that doesn't really provide a lot of functionality

Use HDMI instead of VGA as the latter is not supported. I second the idea to go with an AMD polaris gfx card. Much better suited for running macOS.

You have both onboard DVI and HDMI, HDMI is the best choice when using iGPU HD630 graphics.

 

[joeljgarrett]

Use HDMI instead of VGA as the latter is not supported. I second the idea to go with an AMD polaris gfx card. Much better suited for running macOS.

You have both onboard DVI and HDMI, HDMI is the best choice when using iGPU HD630 graphics.

View attachment 576501

You were both correct on the RX580 working out of the gate with High Sierra. I am kicking myself for not trying this before! As usual, I was overthinking things at the time.

Thanks to both you and @Jamesbond007 for the sanity check! Now onward to updating to a newer hopefully actually still supported version of macOS and updating my system config to work best with the new graphics card!

Happy New Year to you both!

Best Regards,
Joel

 

[joeljgarrett]

You were both correct on the RX580 working out of the gate with High Sierra. I am kicking myself for not trying this before! As usual, I was overthinking things at the time.

Thanks to both you and @Jamesbond007 for the sanity check! Now onward to updating to a newer hopefully actually still supported version of macOS and updating my system config to work best with the new graphics card!

Happy New Year to you both!

Best Regards,
Joel

@trs96 , @Jamesbond007 - I managed to make an even dumber mistake while prepping the system for updating to Catalina before attempting to go on to Ventura or Sonoma.

I followed the instructions at https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/update-directly-to-macos-catalina.284463/ and updated to the latest version of Clover from https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader/releases/tag/5156

I downloaded the .pkg file and did all the security bypasses required to successfully run the install package.

I got v3.1 of the EFI Mounter to mount my EFI and make sure I was updated to the latest version of FakeSMC - I didn't see any other kexts under /EFI/CLOVER/Other besides FakeSMC so I made a backup copy of the existing FakeSMC

I also got the latest version of FakeSMC from https://www.tonymacx86.com/resources/fakesmc.358/ (based on the date of posting, it's most likely the same version I had before, but wanted to play it safe.

Then I took a look at trying to download the Catalina installer application from the app store, which didn't work, probably because it's old enough to not be officially supported any more.

I started poking around into the section on the site here for using gibMacOS at https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/how-to-download-macos-ventura-with-gibmacos.321284/

Here's where I made my 2nd biggest mistake (besides not doing an image backup of my system before starting - facepalm)

I figured I better make sure the updated version of Clover was functional so I went ahead and restarted the system.

I ended up on a very festive Xmas-themed Clover boot screen with basically no bootable MacOS volume choices:

Is there a way using the shell or any other tools that I might be able to work out clover boot options to boot properly from the current high sierra or recovery volumes?

Thanks,
Joel

 

[P1LGRIM]

In the newer versions of Clover the folder structure has changed, make sure that you have all of your drivers in the new location. /EFI/CLOVER/drivers/UEFI.
There is also the addition of a Quirks section in the config.plist which means that you cannot just take your old config.plist and use it with newer versions of Clover.

Each time that you update Clover a copy of your /EFI folder is saved to the system disk in /EFI-Backups, you can use this to revert to the state you were in previously.

 

[joeljgarrett]

In the newer versions of Clover the folder structure has changed, make sure that you have all of your drivers in the new location. /EFI/CLOVER/drivers/UEFI.
There is also the addition of a Quirks section in the config.plist which means that you cannot just take your old config.plist and use it with newer versions of Clover.

Each time that you update Clover a copy of your /EFI folder is saved to the system disk in /EFI-Backups, you can use this to revert to the state you were in previously.

Thank you for that clarification, @P1LGRIM ! (I was hoping this wasn't going to potentially be a total loss)

Is there any documentation available on how to mount/manipulate the required volume/folders/files from either the UEFI shell or perhaps some other platform such as a bootable recovery USB or live DVD, etc, since I currently am not able to actually boot either the High Sierra or Recovery volumes on this system?

Thanks for any additional pointers to documentation, info!

 

[P1LGRIM]

Is there any documentation available on how to mount/manipulate the required volume/folders/files from either the UEFI shell or perhaps some other platform such as a bootable recovery USB or live DVD, etc, since I currently am not able to actually boot either the High Sierra or Recovery volumes on this system?

Maybe, have a look.

An alternative would be to create a USB flash drive with the boot loader on it.