Starting over, lots of problems

[rxninja]

My issue is complex. I had a stable build on Sierra, then I updated to High Sierra last year and things went downhill. I started getting the random freezing issue, so after dealing with that for a year I figured I’d switch from an Nvidia card to a Radeon and update to Mojave.

Several issues later, I realized my CPU wasn’t compatible with Metal, so I’m attempting to roll back to High Sierra and just try the graphics card switch to see if that fixes the freezing issue.

I completely started from scratch. Removed the graphics card entirely, removed all secondary drives, and booted from a fresh High Sierra USB. Here’s the state of things:

• I can boot up just fine when using my USB to do so and without a graphics card plugged in
• I cannot boot without the USB stick. I’ve tried running Multibeast, tried installing FakeSMC with Clover Configurator, USB Ownership, npci boot flags, everything I could search. It hangs on the attached line every time. At least I get boot options, right?
• Plugging in a graphics card means my monitor doesn’t display anything at all, not even the BIOS. Neither my old Nvidia nor my new Vega64 work, regardless of which slot. They were working before and they just...stopped? I have no idea what changed (maybe a BIOS setting?)
• Help?

 

[rxninja]

Anyone? I’ve tried a bunch of stuff and my machine just refuses to boot on its own, plus I can’t use a video card right now. My hackintosh has been unusable for weeks now.

 

[P1LGRIM]

The usual cure for a hang at this point is to add npci=0x3000 to your boot arguments.

 

[rxninja]

I’ve done that and it doesn’t work. It freezes before PCI configuration begins, but not at the same point reliably. Somewhere around SMC lines, usually, but it’s not consistent.

update: I got the Vega64 to display boot sequence and Clover things, but it shows only a blue rectangle on boot (which I suspect is just the top 1/4 of the login screen) and still only boots with the USB boot stick.

With both nv_disable=1 and npci=0x2000 in boot arguments this is what it gets through