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Prohibited Sign - Won't Boot!

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Joined
Apr 3, 2020
Messages
8
Motherboard
Gigabyte Z390 Designare
CPU
i9 9900K
Graphics
Vega 64
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
My OS Catalina Hackintosh has been working flawlessly since I built it back in April.

Processor: i9 9900K
Motherboard: Z390 Designare
Memory: 64GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200Mhz
Graphics: Sapphire Radeon Vega 64 8GB Nitro+
Storage: Sabrent Rocket 2TB M.2 2280 NVME

However, I have come to it this morning and I get a quick flash of the apple logo, then a prohibited sign. After a few seconds, it comes up with 'WAS error, press any key'. I hit any key and it takes me into the clover boot menu. I can chose all the options, and see all my settings from clover, but I can't see my EFI partition in the hard drive list.

I've done no recent updates since updating to the latest OS 10.15.5 shortly after it came out. I waited for the update post on here to see whether it was safe to proceed; it updated smoothly and been running fine since.

I've tried my USB boot loader in a USB2 slot, and it's even not booting from that either. Same prohibited sign.

Luckily, I haven't lost any of my data files since I'm using a time machine, so that's all good.

However, it looks like it can't find my config.plist file. *attached photo*

Through the clover menu, I've managed to put it into verbose boot, and I've attached what comes up there too.

Do you reckon my hard drive gone?
 

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Managed to get it to boot from a USB stick that I had to re-build from scratch.

Installed all post-installation files such as Kexts, etc, and updated the config.plist to what I had on the USB stick.

However, it hangs when I shut it down, so have to re-start with with the button ontop of my case, and then when I go to boot it from the hard drive again, the original message appears.

I reboot it from the USB stick, boot into OS Recovery, run first aid on my Sabrent hard drive, and it looks like it has corrupted. Re-format it, and start again, so occurrence.

IMG_2476.jpeg


So looks like it's the hard drive that's gone, as it's been working completely fine for that past 3 months.

Hopefully Sabrent will take it back under the 12-months warranty.
 
Well, it's not the hard drive.

I've installed windows for the past month and been running stress tests most days on graphics, cpu and hard drive.

It's been running flawlessly!

So I've now hit a brick wall so to speak.
 
Well, it's not the hard drive.

I've installed windows for the past month and been running stress tests most days on graphics, cpu and hard drive.

It's been running flawlessly!

So I've now hit a brick wall so to speak.

Hi there.

What this problem is caused by is corruption due to Windows writing to the disk.

When Windows is on the same physical drive, if it writes to the root or efi it knows nothing of macOS and usually overwrites something vital. If it is on a second discrete drive and it is able to communicate either through a cross-platform disk driver, or a common disk format, then again problems will soon follow.

In my experience you will find most Disk Rescue utilities cannot recover drives with this problem. Unless you are lucky, you will probably find you need to reformat the macOS partition and double-check EFi.

To prevent this happening again in future, use separate disks and no cross-format drivers or common disk areas. Some will tell you of reliable cross-format utilities they've used that do work reliably. Your choice etc.

:)
 
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Hi,

It’s not windows, as at this point I had not got windows installed at all.

I’ve only installed windows in the past month to run hardware tests. But when I put in my USB boot loader, I format the hard drive so windows is completely removed and macOS installed in its place.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway!
 
Hi,

It’s not windows, as at this point I had not got windows installed at all.

I’ve only installed windows in the past month to run hardware tests. But when I put in my USB boot loader, I format the hard drive so windows is completely removed and macOS installed in its place.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway!


Okay, I misunderstood.

So if your SSD has been working flawlessly with Windows for the last month it's not faulty. Good news. And as you had macOS running flawlessly on it before, something else changed to cause the disk corruption.

You are now confident the SSD is healthy, and my theory is wrong, but something must have written to the file-system to wreck it - the evidence is in the screengrab.

Did you repartition your SSD before re-installing macOS? Or just reformat? If the latter any damage to the EFI partition would be left untouched. Remember the latest versions of Windows 10 are UEFI and use the EFI too.
 
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No worries.

So I boot from my USB stick Clover 5119 Bootloader. Boots fine into the recovery screen of MacOS. I select disk utility, select the parent Sabrent Media and format it to APFS. This should erase all partitions of the hard drive. (Can be seen on the second post.)

I install MacOS 10.15.5 onto the Sabrent Media and it installs fine. It does tend to hang on 2 Minutes Remaining and I have to manually reboot. But it carries on installing once it’s rebooted. Launches into MacOS Catalina.

I run through the post installation of installing multibeast and select the Sabrent Media as the destination, everything installs properly. I then reboot and boot into the Sabrent Media instead of the USB. And then this message comes up on boot.
 
No worries.

So I boot from my USB stick Clover 5119 Bootloader. Boots fine into the recovery screen of MacOS. I select disk utility, select the parent Sabrent Media and format it to APFS. This should erase all partitions of the hard drive. (Can be seen on the second post.)

I install MacOS 10.15.5 onto the Sabrent Media and it installs fine. It does tend to hang on 2 Minutes Remaining and I have to manually reboot. But it carries on installing once it’s rebooted. Launches into MacOS Catalina.

I run through the post installation of installing multibeast and select the Sabrent Media as the destination, everything installs properly. I then reboot and boot into the Sabrent Media instead of the USB. And then this message comes up on boot.


No, just formatting to APFS does not erase all partitions of your SSD.

Annoying, I know, but what I said in post #6 is correct.

Also re-read the Disk Utility error message. Last three lines ...

What I said. :thumbup:

If you try to mount the EFI partition using EFIMounter v3.1 you might be lucky and see the folder tree. If you can you might check for any Microsoft boot files. The problem is caused, in part, because we format our EFI in an MS DOS format, which makes writing to it easy...
 
Okay.

So when I format my Sabrent Media in disk utility, it gets rid of all the Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data partitions. I'm just left with Sabrent Media as the parent. So are you saying that there are still partitions after I've formatted the hard drive from the parent?

I'm not keeping windows, I was just using to test hardware. So how can I completely format the whole hard drive, so it's not got any partitions at all and I'm starting from scratch?
 
Just for knowledge, I followed this guide. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...390-thunderbolt-3-i7-9700k-amd-rx-580.267551/

It's been updated since I made my hackintosh, so I'll follow the ** Micro-Guide: Unlocking MSR 0xE2 on Gigabyte Designare Z390 ** and then **Mini-Guide for Fresh Installation of Catalina 10.15.4 and Newer **

See if that makes any difference as it looks like a few Kexts have been updated since I made my hack.
 
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