Configuration
Asus Z170X Premium (the latest Z170 board by Asus with thunderbolt and U.2)
Intel i5-6600K Skylake
Gigabyte GTX 960 Gaming G1
G.Skill 4x8GB DDR4-3200
Samsung EVO 120 GB SSD (OS installation)
Samsung 950 Pro 256 GB
This was my first both PC and Hackintosh build from scratch. I actually returned the newer iMac to give Hackintosh a shot. And I must say it was well worth it.
What is required?
- A lot of patience! (took me over 80 hours to fix issues, at least 34 re installs because every time I would screw up something which I wouldn't know how to fix)
-
TonyMac's Guide to install El Capitan on Any Intel Processor
-
This guide to install Nvidia Card
- BIG LIST OF SOLUTIONS! This is like Bible of Hackintosh installation on Skylake, Tony Mac showing the path to serenity, just have faith :
- Bunch of other things, which I will mention along the way.
Pre installation steps
- USE THE USB 2.0 PORT ON THE BACK PANEL
In my case, only the red and the green port on the back (for keyboard and mouse) worked in every successful install. I connected a 4 port USB hub to one of these ports and everything ran smoothly.
- UPDATE YOUR BIOS to 1402
Nothing worked for me for about 2 days until I updated the BIOS. The IOAPIC setting which every body keeps talking about was also not present before updating the BIOS. Once I got the BIOS updated, a lot of good signs started to show up, e.g. IOAPIC setting, BIOS started detecting my Samsung 950 pro NVM SSD etc.
- REMOVE THE GRAPHICS CARD
This gave me a lot of trouble. I played with nv_disabled and other flags but every time, my display would shut down after initial boot sequence. So remove the graphics card and let your on board GPU do the installation
- LOAD THE BIOS DEFAULTS
I tried to be smart with BIOS by fooling around with different settings. Don't waste time. Just Load optimized defaults, set the Secure Boot OS to Other and LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE AS IS.
- DON'T TRY TO INSTALL ON M.2 DRIVE
I had two drives, Samsung 950 Pro NVM and a Samsung. None of them worked. BIOS detected both the drives but OS installer didn't, so don't waste time. Just use the 2.5 inch SSD like Evo.
Creating Installation media
- This is straight from original guide (check the link above). Use unibeast to create your drive. Also, Don't add any graphics card or other kexts.
- Download the EFI that I have attached. It has a patched DSDT and a patched config file.
- Replace the EFI files in your USB with the ones from step 2.
Installation
Here in this step, I spent over 20 hours. Because every time, I was getting the Error allocating pages error. Don't use the FixDrv2. Use the FixDrv.kext version included in the EFI. Nothing worked until I used the patched DSDT. If everything went well with Steve Job's Grace, you ll have El capitan installed on your machine.
Post Installation
This is where I spent most of my time. I ran multi beast just like the original guide with ALC1150 and AppleIGB driver, but my OS won't boot from the drive. So I ended up making these changes
- Replace the EFI in your drive with the one in your USB
- Under ACPI, check "Fix Shutdown" as I was getting kernel panics upon restarting the system.
- Use Clover Configurator to open your config.plist from boot drive and make these changes
- Under boot, change the default volume setting to the name of your boot drive volume. It will be set to PCIE by default (in my case, I changed it from PCIE to Macintosh)
- Change the Bootloader setting below it to BOOTX64.efi
DO NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE IN THE CONFIG
I used another tool to install kexts and repair permissions called
KMPC Utility Pro. I ran this once and fixed the permissions.
- Reboot your system without USB and it should work.
Graphics Card
Installing the Graphics card was really easy. Once you are able to boot from drive, just get the Nvidia Web driver and install it. THATS IT! I did NOT use any other flag while booting. If you notice, I didn't inject any graphics driver or boot flag in the USB config as well which is what I am using on my boot drive. Its that simple. Shutdown your Hackintosh Next, install the graphics card on your mother board, plug the Display Port or HDMI cable and call it a day, you should have the nice 4K@60 HZ
Networking
WiFi worked OOB. However, it doesn't work with 802.11 ac meaning it doesn't pick my 5GHZ signals from Apple Time Capsule.
This motherboard has two Ethernet cards.
DO NOT USE THE MAUSI DRIVER, IT MESSES UP THE CARD. RATHER install this
Ethernet Driver (Also attached). With this, both of your ethernet ports will start working.
Bluetooth
Get the build 1016 from here (
https://bitbucket.org/RehabMan/os-x-brcmpatchram/downloads). Also attached. This particular build has the Bluetooth Injector precompiled. Install ONLY the injector using the KCPM and fix the permissions and rebuild cache. Reboot and your bluetooth will be working.
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What mistakes you can avoid
- Don't change the SMBIOS to anything other than MacPro 5,1. With iMac, I had issue where my screen will go black and my GPU will shutdown.
- Don't play with config more than what you understand. I did this trying to be cool, but trust me, most of the things are already done for you, so don't try to hack your way around a hack.
- Always do clean installations rather than trying to fix stuff. You might disagree but here is my reasoning. I can get the Hackintosh working in lets say 10 hours by chance. But unless I m sure about the exact steps that I performed to get there, I can't settle. I reinstalled the OS so many times, to find out exactly what was needed to get this set up. There are tons and tons of fixes and its hard to keep track of what you did in the last boot which made your system work.
- Not sleep and try to get it done on the first night. Well, I am total noob, it took me lot of time, just to understand what is what. Read about various flags, Clover Config (check out their doc on github, thats where I found out about the Default Volume Fix). Don't rush and try to keep a track of what you are doing.
Update 1: Got my Samsung 950 Pro M.2 drive working (both in installer and in OS) using this guide
http://www.tonymacx86.com/hardware-...cards-com-works-gigabyte-gaming-g1-m-2-a.html
Its insanely fast, Reads at 1200+MBps, Writes at 1000+MBps (Black Magic Disk)
Up
Update 2: Sleep wake was not working, the mac would sleep but not wake up. So I used the following
sudo pmset standby 0
sudo pmset autopoweroff 0
Update 3: Updated Clover successfully to 3333. This time, instead of replacing everything from my EFI, I only replace these DIRECTORIES (everything in these directories) => "kexts", "ACPI", "Drivers64..."
Whats still not working:
Its almost perfect except AirDrop! is not working. Also, I haven't tested the
ASMedia 3.1 and U.2 yet.
Update 4: Got USB 3.1 working, Read the comments below for the Kext. Now its just Airdrop!
