Problems with Upgrade from SL to Mavs. USB-HDD hangs during boot up

[bamim2]

I have done my very best to follow the instructions carefully to build a bootable USB drive so that I can upgrade my Snow Leopard system to Mavericks. I have a 10.6.8 system. I have downloaded "Install OS X Mavericks" from the App Store. The .app file is in /Applications. The USB drive is formatted as a MBR drive (as per instructions), I have installed UniBeast on it & copied MultiBeast to it. I have shut my system down, remove all of the USB devices except the Keyboard, Mouse & USB boot device.

I then:
= Power my system on, press F12, choose USB-HDD
= Get the USB boot screen & choose USB
= It takes me to the Grey "Apple" screen where my system seems to 'start to load'
= About 10 seconds later my screen goes black
= About 10 seconds after that the monitor loses connection & looks the same as when it goes into power save mode (Power LED goes from Blue to Orange).
= The system just hangs there forever

I have let it keep running for an hour JUST to make sure it's not loading hoping it will come back. It never comes back. I have tried different USB ports, including USB 2 ports & USB 3 ports. I am using a 32GB Toshiba USB 3 flash drive. I can just power the system off & boot my system & it comes right back to Snow Leopard no problem (so far).

When I start "Disk Utility", I see my Hard drive, DVD drive, the USB drive & InstallESD.dmg.

Any help would be most appreciated. I have run out of ideas.

 

[P1LGRIM]

Problems with Upgrade from SL => Mavs. USB-HDD stops during boot up

Nobody can help unless you provide your system specs (it's a requirement of the rules too)

Good Luck

 

[bamim2]

OOOooops. Sorry. I WAS upgrading my OS, so I pulled everything to change my info to include the new OS. It was in the post I started when I started this XXXXing upgrade 3 days ago. Thank you for reminding me. I was told that I should also have additional info about my CPU too, but wasn't told how to get that. If this is incomplete, please let me know what I need to do & I'll do it ASAP.
My system:
Motherboard = Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3
CPU = Intel 3.1GHz Core i3
RAM = 16GB DDR3 Corsair
Video = 1GB EVGA NVidia GeForce Galaxy 210
HDD = 1.5TB Seagate

Thank you for any help I can get on this....

 

[k2blader81]

I am having the exact same problem. Updating from 10.6.8 on GeForce 210 as well. My monitors do the same thing after the apple loading screen. Go black, then into standby mode. Please let me know if you find a solution for this. I'll do the same

ecs h67h2-m2 mobo
3.1GHz Intel core i3
GeForce 210
16gb g-skill ram ddr3

 

[bamim2]

Gladly. Wow, it looks like we have almost the exact same system specs in fact. That must be where the answer is. I've done MANY searches on this site & on the Internet in general. I've had many years of UNIX & Linux experience (although it has been several years since I've used them now) too, so I've tried many different things including booting into Single User Mode (-s), -x, -v, all of the boot loading variables that are listed in the Unibeast instructions in every combination. I've even followed all of the instructions in the Unibeast forum stuff that Mac Man wrote to help people overcome these types of problems. STILL I've been working on this for about 3 or 4 hours a day for almost a week now & I'm no further along.

If you boot with Verbose mode (-v) at the boot prompt or just press the down arrow & choose "Boot Verbose", I see that the USB drive is missing "/var/db/Bootcache.playlist" & that the last thing that happens for the system goes to sleep is an error that it "can't allocate class com.apple.driver.AppleUSBXHCI". I've tried looking to see what these things mean, but haven't really had much luck.

Also, if I boot into Single User Mode & use the /sbin/dmesg command I see LOTS of errors. Dmesg shows Kernel error messages for Drivers/hardware & IO errors mostly. That said, even though I WAS comfortable with UNIX from the command line several years ago, I'm far from being an expert on the NeXT Linux that OS X is based on. I'm probably just knowledgeable enough to get myself in trouble, but not enough to really be useful.

Every morning I wake up with some new ideas & things to try, but I'm just about to the point where I'm going to just try to run the regular Mavericks Installation Upgrade for True Macs. I've got a couple more things to try & then there's nothing to lose to got that route. It probably won't work, but I do have a cloned copy of my drive, so what XXXX. I figure 1 week & 30 hours is just about my limit.

I REALLY hope you come up with something & post it back here. I'm off to try some more crazy stuff & if works I'll be back with the step-by-step version of what I did that worked. If not, I'll probably be back with more complaining like this...

GOOD LUCK!

 

[defbref]

Try use the bootflag GraphicsEnabler=Yes

Used to be the default on old installs, but has been switched round to NO in mavericks. Your GPU requires this bootflag set to yes.

 

[bamim2]

Thank you for taking the time to try helping. Setting GraphicsEnabler=Yes didn't help, but I REALLY appreciate the support. If you (or anyone for that matter) have any more suggestions, I'll try them. I'm pretty sure I did already try setting that bootflag before, but trying it more than once didn't blow up my system or cause the sun to fall out of the sky or that sorta stuff, so I'll try a few more of the other flags WITH that one & see if I missed some combo or something.

Thank you again for trying.

 

[k2blader81]

This is what a fellow poster replied to one of my post for help. I wasn't able to find a solution there, but maybe you'll have some better luck. Some useful info in those links. Good luck. Let me know if this helped you

Mavericks is a little different to older versions of OS X as there are now boot flags for integrated graphics when using MultiBeast. You may find adding a boot flag to switch off integrates graphics might help.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/378-new-intel-hd-graphics-boot-flags-chimera.html
http://www.tonymacx86.com/basics/116220-do-i-need-graphicsenabler-injection-not.html

You may need to play around with this for a while, but you should also put your motherboard model into the search facility and see if you can find anyone who has already recorded there success and settings.

This thread may also help:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/mavericks-desktop-support/113662-mavericks-osx-black-screen-boot.html

Make sure that you write down the steps that you attempt (boot flags) to keep track of what you have actually tried. Its easy to get lost otherwise and you start convincing yourself that you have tried things that you haven't. That wastes a great deal of time and causes more frustration.

Adrian B

 

[bamim2]

Thank you. I'm still not able to upgrade my system, so I WILL check this out. I've been working on this every day for about 2 weeks now & am no closer than when I started (if that is even possible). Something has to help PRETTY soon. I greatly appreciate you trying to help. Good luck with YOUR problem.