[Solved] Dell/Costco XPS 8930 Desktop, High Sierra, clover early backtrace...

[WestfW]

Costco had a sale on a Dell XPS 8930 system (i7 8700 6core, 16GB RAM, Nvidia 1050 graphics) ($899) - it seemed like it might make a good replacement for my 2008 Mac Pro.

I downloaded High Sierra on my Wife's iMac , since the Mac Pro can't run it ran the latest Unibeast, and seem to have a bootable USB drive. At least, it gets to the clover menus. However, trying to boot MacOS fails very early (after the apple appears on the screen, but before a progress bar appears.) With -v, I get the same tracebacks as in this thread: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/immediate-backtrace-crash-on-install.232279/
(It's not a requirement that I run Unibeast on a system with similar versioned OS to the one I'm trying to install, is it?)
I haven't installed any custom kexts, and the only changes to the clover config.plist for for the USB Fixownership and inject, as suggested in various forum posts (which didn't seem to change anything.)

None of the suggestions there seem to help, though (assuming that I've applied them correctly, which is uncertain.) I've disabled secure boot and IO Virtualization in the bios, but the Dell bios doesn't seem to have many of the other suggested changes. The USB drive is somewhat suspect - it was slow as molasses to write, but it gets much further on another PC (Asus i5 laptop), so it would have be be some strange system-specific interaction. I get the same behavior on USB3 and USB2 ports.

Any ideas? I realize that this is a pretty recent system; has anyone else experimented with it?

Attached preboot.log...

 

[pcbroch]

Hey, I'm curious to know if you ever managed to get MacOS on you 8930?

 

[fravin]

(It's not a requirement that I run Unibeast on a system with similar versioned OS to the one I'm trying to install, is it?)

No it is not.

Can you post your config.plist file?

It looks to me that you are using the old method of enabling USB (USB InjectAll from Multibeast). In 10.13.4 you have to patch: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/new-usb-raise-port-limit-patch-for-high-sierra.226072/

You should try to disable iGPU in BIOS and use only Nvidia WebDrivers. And you have to choose the new WebDriver method.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/new-method-for-enabling-nvidia-web-drivers-in-clover.202341/

I see that you have choose two ehternet kexts, Atheros and Intel. It's not the cause of your problem, but unnecessary kexts can impact system behaviour.

 

[WestfW]

Yes, I ended up using the info here: https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/forums/topic/330706-dell-xps-8930-resource-extravaganza/
It wasn't quite as painless as unibeast/multibeast might have been, but things seem to be working now.
I'm sad to say that I didn't keep track of exactly what the "fix" was - it might have just been going through the BIOS settings as suggested.
I think I had assorted version problems with the Clover left behind by unibeast not liking the slave-zero's plists; when I started things from scratch, it went better.

I'm a little disappointed that I never found what I'd consider an "intermediate" tutorial. It all seems to be "use this automatic stuff, or this recipe, and hope", or "become an expert on MacOS drivers, EFI, and alternate bootloaders." Ah well; my system seems to be working, and that's good enough.

 

[pcbroch]

Yeah, I'd like to be able to recreated it from scratch as well, but haven't had any luck so far. That said, any chance you'd be willing to share your Clover EFI folder? :-b

 

[BreBo]

@pcbroch, please update your profile (personal details) with your Motherboard, CPU and iGPU or Graphics Card.
If you have a prebuilt computer enter make and model instead of motherboard (Mobo).

Profiles need to contain at least your primary system to assist others with helping you.

 

[pcbroch]

@pcbroch, please update your profile (personal details) with your Motherboard, CPU and iGPU or Graphics Card.
If you have a prebuilt computer enter make and model instead of motherboard (Mobo).

Done.

 

[WestfW]

>> any chance you'd be willing to share your Clover EFI folder?
​

I'm not quite sure what you need. The whole EFI folder (from mounting the boot disk EFI with CloverConfigurator, right?) is some 20MB (zipped), so I stuck it on my Google Driver here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WxewzWZUdqpgaxZQ9gRpYiRbQQvUuXdM
(hopefully it contains no private information!)

 

[pcbroch]

Cool! That works very nicely at a first glance. Thanks!

Only one thing, sleep seems to disconnect the network and it takes a long time to reconnect, do you experience that too?