Solving NVIDIA Driver Install & Loading Problems

[slim.jim]

It's helpful to think of booting the OS as two distinct booting steps, one which boots Clover, and one which boots your OS. Your OS can be on any logical partition of any disk, and Clover is typically in the EFI partition of a physical disk. You can boot clover off the EFI partition of your Windows physical disk, and boot macOS off it's logical partition, and any combination thereof. Your BIOS controls where you boot Clover from, or you can override it typically with F12. When we install macOS we typically create a USB key and install Clover there, then boot off it until we install Clover to the EFI partition of the macOS physical disk. In a single physical disk environment it's very easy, there's just one EFI partition and you can't confuse anything mostly. With more than one physical disk (USB key is considered a physical disk) you can potentially boot Clover from any physical disk. And technically you can install Clover to the EFI partition -OR- to the non-EFI partition, so for all anyone knows you could have two (or more! one per logical partition!) on each physical disk.

So, when you think you've installed a particular version of Clover but the Clover control panel reports a different version, you don't understand which Clover you're booting, or the disk has a Clover installed in the non-EFI partition and your BIOS is not set up to boot EFI. Investigate your BIOS to understand which physical disk it's booting. Temporarily use F12 to override. Double check that there is no non-EFI-installed Clover on any logical partition.

Hopefully this is taken as helpful. I'm not trying to tell you your business.

well said.

 

[walleO]

It's helpful to think of booting the OS as two distinct booting steps, one which boots Clover, and one which boots your OS. Your OS can be on any logical partition of any disk, and Clover is typically in the EFI partition of a physical disk. You can boot clover off the EFI partition of your Windows physical disk, and boot macOS off it's logical partition, and any combination thereof. Your BIOS controls where you boot Clover from, or you can override it typically with F12. When we install macOS we typically create a USB key and install Clover there, then boot off it until we install Clover to the EFI partition of the macOS physical disk. In a single physical disk environment it's very easy, there's just one EFI partition and you can't confuse anything mostly. With more than one physical disk (USB key is considered a physical disk) you can potentially boot Clover from any physical disk. And technically you can install Clover to the EFI partition -OR- to the non-EFI partition, so for all anyone knows you could have two (or more! one per logical partition!) on each physical disk.

So, when you think you've installed a particular version of Clover but the Clover control panel reports a different version, you don't understand which Clover you're booting, or the disk has a Clover installed in the non-EFI partition and your BIOS is not set up to boot EFI. Investigate your BIOS to understand which physical disk it's booting. Temporarily use F12 to override. Double check that there is no non-EFI-installed Clover on any logical partition.

Hopefully this is taken as helpful. I'm not trying to tell you your business.

Ive been careful to install only to the sirrera disk but im not sure what partition, the efi partition has an efi folder but so does my sierra partition too. what im going to do once i get home is unplug all the other 2 drives i have and leave only the m2 sierra drive in then do a fresh install and update clover to 4204.

 

[mohammedamr]

Who makes the card? I know it is an Nvidia card but who is the manufacturer. IE: Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc...

Help me help you.

Ooh yea sorry Its MSI

 

[slim.jim]

Ooh yea sorry Its MSI

If you are not able to see anything at all until the system boots then you need to set the PEG as the primary video device in your bios.

 

[Tec Junkie]

These steps below helped fix my nvidia web driver from changing back after reboot...
note i did both so not suer which one worked.

How to Install the Web Drivers:

In order to use the alternate drivers on a CustoMac, you must first install the driver package.


As of macOS Sierra, nvda_drv=1 in config.plist under Boot > Arguments is no longer working to initiate drivers. Clover has been updated with a new System Parameter setting called NvidiaWeb.


There's a new method for enabling the NVIDIA Web Drivers in the latest versions of Clover. It can be turned on and off by editing /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist to add SystemParameters/NvidiaWeb. This takes the place of nvda_drv=1 boot flag, which will not work in macOS Sierra.


1. Mount EFI Partition

2. Open /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist with text edit, Xcode, or Plist Editor Pro

3. Edit as shown below:


Code (Text):

<key>SystemParameters</key>

<dict>

<key>InjectKexts</key>

<string>YES</string>

<key>InjectSystemID</key>

<true/>

<key>NvidiaWeb</key>

<true/>

</dict>


4. Remove Boot/Arguments/nvda_drv=1 if necessary

5. Save and reboot

This also could help you...

Problem 6: You select Nvidia Web Drivers in the menu bar or the Nvidia Driver Manager preference pane but when you restart OS X Default Graphics Driver is checked.

This is caused when your board does not have native NVRAM support such as Gigabyte 100 series boards.



Fix: setup emulated NVRAM to store the nvda_drv=1 boot flag in boot-args.


Download the latest Clover installer pkg here, launch the installer and choose customize here:


After that make sure you have selected EmuVariableUefi-64:


Proceed with the Clover upgrade install and reboot when done. After the reboot open up your system preferences and go the the Nvidia Driver Manager. It is a good idea to make sure you have the most up to date driver so go to the updates tab and click the Check Now button. If there is an update, perform the update and reboot when it tell you to. You should be done at this point. If there isn't an update proceed to the next step.


If there was no upgrade, click on the Graphics Drivers tab and then choose the radio button next to the NVIDIA Web Drive. Reboot.


Once rebooted, it should say that you are using the NVIDIA web driver. If it is not working still then you may need to re-run the Clover installer and select "Install RC scripts on target volume".


----------------------------


Please let me know of any other errors you are encountering and I will update this post with solutions.

 

[aol]

Ive been careful to install only to the sirrera disk but im not sure what partition, the efi partition has an efi folder but so does my sierra partition too. what im going to do once i get home is unplug all the other 2 drives i have and leave only the m2 sierra drive in then do a fresh install and update clover to 4204.

If your sierra partition has an EFI folder that's probably bad. If you believe you're booting in EFI mode as you normally would with any modern hackintosh, there should be no EFI folder at the root of any of your logical partitions. You can use diskutil list in terminal to see your partitions, and ordinarily you should see one with type EFI and name EFI, followed by probably your partitions (your Sierra drive) named as you named them, followed by your recovery partition, typically 650MB with name Recovery HD.

There are lot of ways to mount your EFI partition so you can see it, including Clover Configurator, which is handy enough to keep around. If you mount your EFI partition it'll show up as a disk in Finder like any other partition does. You can then muck around with it.

The typical clover upgrade does not involve first mounting your EFI partition. The clover installer knows that's where it goes and it mounts and unmounts the partition as it needs to, as long as you install Clover in efi mode. I don't know if there's a harm in running the installer with the EFI partition mounted, but I know that if you have two physical disks with EFI partitions and for whatever reason you mount them both, they both show up with the name "EFI" in Finder (but in /Volumes they will have different names). For this reason, I always create a little file inside my EFI partition with a name that tells me which EFI partition this is, so there's no confusion.

 

[walleO]

If your sierra partition has an EFI folder that's probably bad. If you believe you're booting in EFI mode as you normally would with any modern hackintosh, there should be no EFI folder at the root of any of your logical partitions. You can use diskutil list in terminal to see your partitions, and ordinarily you should see one with type EFI and name EFI, followed by probably your partitions (your Sierra drive) named as you named them, followed by your recovery partition, typically 650MB with name Recovery HD.

There are lot of ways to mount your EFI partition so you can see it, including Clover Configurator, which is handy enough to keep around. If you mount your EFI partition it'll show up as a disk in Finder like any other partition does. You can then muck around with it.

The typical clover upgrade does not involve first mounting your EFI partition. The clover installer knows that's where it goes and it mounts and unmounts the partition as it needs to, as long as you install Clover in efi mode. I don't know if there's a harm in running the installer with the EFI partition mounted, but I know that if you have two physical disks with EFI partitions and for whatever reason you mount them both, they both show up with the name "EFI" in Finder (but in /Volumes they will have different names). For this reason, I always create a little file inside my EFI partition with a name that tells me which EFI partition this is, so there's no confusion.

thanks aol. i may have mis-spoke. i meant i have a clover folder on my sierra partition but i only have one EFI folder in my other partition ( the EFI partition im guessing.) i always mount it with clover configurator

 

[slim.jim]

thanks aol. i may have mis-spoke. i meant i have a clover folder on my sierra partition but i only have one EFI folder in my other partition ( the EFI partition im guessing.) i always mount it with clover configurator

This statement is even more confusing. The only visible folders that should be at the root of your macOS drive are: Applications, Library, System and Users. You might have an EFI-Backups folder if you have ever upgraded Clover.

Once mounting the EFI partition on your macOS drive then you should have an EFI folder on the EFI partition that contains all of the necessary Clover stuff. You don't want Clover installed any where else.

When you run the Clover installer to perform the steps of problem #6 what drive does it say you are going to install Clover to?

 

[mohammedamr]

set the PEG as the primary video device in your bios.

i am really sorry for asking too many questions but if you can tell me how to do it or give me a tutorial to watch it will be really nice from you Thankyou.

 

[slim.jim]

i am really sorry for asking too many questions but if you can tell me how to do it or give me a tutorial to watch it will be really nice from you Thankyou.

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