Stable Hackintosh running Yosemite unexpectedly and suddenly pooped out

[BHuij]

Hey all--

I'm running Yosemite (one update short of the latest version; can't remember numbers though) on a Hackint0sh that's about 18 months or so old. Since I first went from Mavericks to Yosemite about 3 or so months ago, I have had almost zero problems. A couple of issues with sleep, and some weird USB foolishness that I was too lazy to ever get around to fixing, but the install to Yosemite was delightfully easy and it ran more stable than I could ever get even Mavericks to do.

Today I shut my computer down, and when I started it back up, it lost power a couple of seconds after booting. I have had this happen before. Usually it corrupts the main BIOS, but the Z77X UD5H has a backup BIOS that automatically reloads and then the computer works just fine. I just unplug the machine, wait a few seconds, plug it back in, and start it up; works fine.

This time however, it seemed fine until it hit the very last loading bar screen before it actually shows my desktop. I boot from an SSD, so usually it hits that screen for about 2 seconds before instantly loading my Finder. This time it was crawling until it got to just under halfway (after roughly 2 minutes of waiting), then stopped.

So I whipped out my handy dandy rescue flash drive that is bootable into (I think) the same version of Yosemite. I selected that flash drive to boot from, and the same thing happened. This time however, the loading bar went away after a minute or so, and I got a gray background with a cursor. The cursor went to a beach ball after about 5 seconds, and stayed there. Didn't seem to matter how long I waited, it wouldn't do anything else.

This worries me. I've yet to hit a problem that I couldn't fix by booting off of my rescue drive and reinstalling the OS as necessary.

I do however have a separate hard drive in the tower with Windows XP installed. XP boots just fine. I'm writing this post on my computer after booting into XP right now.

The fact that a rescue drive won't boot into Yosemite suggests it's not my SSD. The fact that I can boot Windows XP just fine suggests it's not... anything? I dunno. I thought maybe my power supply was wacky since that seems to have been the onset of the problem. I have also had to RMA the same model of power supply before; the first one I ordered when I built the machine about a year and a half ago was a lemon.

Any ideas on how to proceed from here? I have some licensed Adobe software on my SSD that I would LOVE to have an opportunity to deactivate before wiping the drive and reinstalling from a fresh install drive if possible (assuming that would work at all...)

Thanks in advance. I can always count on this awesome community to help people with only rudimentary computer knowledge like myself get out of pickles like this

 

[StrongOak]

Boot into single user mode (-s)
If it makes it to the prompt then type each line and hit enter waiting for the prompt to return before typing the next:
/sbin/fsck -fy/sbin/mount -uw /
touch /System/Library/Extensions
kextcache -f -update-volume /
exit

 

[BHuij]

Here's what I get. It freezes here and then keeps spitting out another line of "Still waiting for root device" every minute or so. This is booting with -s off of the rescue drive.



Edit: Here is where it gets stuck when I try to boot from the SSD on -v:

 

[BHuij]

So bad news... the same thing happened with my brand new install drive drive as did with my rescue drive. I was just going to try and start over and reinstall the OS, but I still got a gray screen and an eternal beach ball... :S

Any recommendations? At this point it seems like the problem is something with the BIOS or motherboard, rather than something wrong with the install of the OS. I guess at least that means in theory if I can figure it out, I may not have to reinstall my OS, or spend 45 minutes on the phone with Adobe explaining why I can't un-license my software to free up a slot because I deleted it...

Can anyone help me out?

 

[Graeme43]

Did the bios reset its settings and change something that you had to change to get it up and running previously?


The USB boot one looks like the drive isn't getting any power.. I got that message before trying to boot from USB3 flash drive and it wouldn't work yet it would work on my celeron 847 hackintosh (USB2 only). Maybe try this and see if it will boot from the USB?

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...uch-power-error-when-nothing-connected-2.html

 

[BHuij]

I'll take another look at the BIOS settings and see if that's what's going on.

I noticed the errors about the USB ports too, but I thought it was only talking about the USB3 ports in the back. I'm trying to boot from a USB2 flash drive in a USB2 port in the front.

Edit: *sigh* It was the Vt-d that got auto re-enabled when the BIOS restored. Well, happy ending.