I'm home at my desk and continued working on my hackintosh dual-boot + Win10 setup.
I decided to go with a iMac18,3 SMBIOS definition, and, now, after I sorted out my remaining issues, I want to give all fellow hackintoshers a quick overview of all the problems I had lately. This is mainly for those of you who are as new to hackintosh as I am. So to save your precious time, here are the top mistakes I made during setup:
Hardware related issues
There were some hardware related missteps I took. For example, please make sure to check, if the MoBo has enough space for the PCIe expansion you would like to install.
With the two slot graphics card that has very bulky fans in PCIe 16x, there's not much space left to spare. So, with the hardware components discussed in this thread (especially the Firewire PCIe 1x), there is only one more PCIe 1x slot left to use (the one at the bottom).
The remaining PCIe 1x slot on the bottom of the MoBo however, is covering the bottom M.2 NVMe SSD slot. So if you are going to equip the PCIe 1x slot with a Fenvi WiFi card, keep in mind to only use your second M.2 SSD either without or only with a tiny heatsink.
In my setup, with the Fenvi AC1900 WiFi card and the
Icy Box M2H2 701 heatsink it's right on point where it fits (heatsink and WiFi card are touching but it's working).
Backup issues
To be able to test future macOS updates or changes in my Clover / EFI setup, I wanted to make sure to have an exact copy of my hackintosh disk. For this purpose, I ordered two 500 GB SSD M.2 cards. The main one goes into the top M.2 slot (right below the Dark Rock 4 Pro - so make sure, you install the SSD prior to installing the CPU Cooler!) and for cooling reasons (the middle slot is covered by the graphics card), the second one goes into the bottom M.2 slot (see the above mentioned notes about its heatsink).
That being said, I strongly suggest,
not to use
Code:
dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1 bs=512
to make a bootable backup of your primary SSD. I unfortunately did and rendered my setup unusable: Since FileVault preboot somehow was not able to distinguish between both SSDs (they ended up having the same UUID identifier), it was not able to boot into macOS after entering the FileVault password and thus I had to create a bootable Ubuntu Linux stick and erase the second SSD.
So instead, the recommended action is the following:
- Boot into your primary SSD macOS.
- Install Carbon Copy Cloner and do a 1:1 copy from your primary SSD to your backup SSD (make sure to create a RecoveryHD on the backup SSD when Carbon Copy Cloner asks).
- Reboot (make sure to boot into your primary SSD's EFI, since there is none yet on your backup SSD) and select your backup SSD macOS in Clover.
- Mount the EFI folder from your primary SSD, copy it to your Desktop. Then unmount the primary SSD EFI and mount the backup SSD EFI. Copy the content from ~/Desktop/EFI to your backup SSD EFI.
- (Optional) Go to System -> Security & Privacy -> FileVault and turn it on.
- Make sure to set your MoBo BIOS-setting to always boot into your primary SSD EFI. (To be able to distinguish from which EFI clover is actually loaded during each startup, I used a slightly different Clover background image that I put into my themes folder in my backup SSD EFI Clover.
That way, you can do a 1:1 copy to your backup SSD any time using Carbon Copy Cloner and be able to boot it, if your primary SSD died.
Clover / EFI issues
1. Tidying up the Clover bootloader / Hiding unwanted instances
If you are going to hide all RecoveryHD and FileVault Preboot boot options, make sure to use Clover Configurator -> Gui -> Custom Entries.
For each FileVault drive you want to have as boot option, add a custom entry. While don't that, in the fields to fill out, select the "RecoveryHD" partition from the "volume" drop-down.
Hint: In case macOS created a logical volume while turning on FileVault, you will have to select "Preboot" instead of "RecoveryHD". To avoid confusion and hassle, which one was the right "Preboot", I did the following:
First, I did a 1:1 copy of my primary SSD to my backup SSD as described in Steps 1 to 6 above. Then, I booted into my backup SSD and erased the primary SSD, so I could copy all files back from my backup SSD with a 1:1 copy using Carbon Copy Cloner again - including the creation of a new RecoveryHD volume on the primary SSD. That way, both disk structures are the same and it is easier to distinguish between them within
as well as the Disk Utility GUI.
Now, in case you also be able to distinguish between the two macOS instances within the Clover bootloader, make sure to give them a different name under "Title / FullTitle" in each custom entry. If you want to add a different icon to be shown for each instance within the bootloader as well, add another "Image" to the custom entry. Make sure to use a 128x128 PNG (!) file, that is named "your_icon.
icns" since Clover is able to handle PNG files, but expects the file to be named icns. The path to be set in the "Image" file should point to the file like this: \EFI\CLOVER\themes\
your_theme\icons\
your_icon.icns
2. Preview not working
Since my Preview.app crashed while opening a .JPEG, I decided to enable my iGPU in the MoBo BIOS (BIOS -> Advanced Settings -> Chipset -> iGPU enable).
3. Uneasy sleep / Fixing random wakes in the middle of the night
In the first two nights, I woke up because my hackintosh would wake from sleep in the middle of the night. I fixed it by turning off "Power Nap" in System Preferences -> Energy Saver.
4. USB-Charging Power
You most probably want to be able to use an external Apple Super Drive or charge your iOS devices as fast as on a real Mac. For that, please take a look at
@jb007's guide. I used his iMac18,3 files (
SSDT-EC.aml,
SSDT-USBX.aml and
SSDT-UIAC-EC.aml - remember to remove the "-18,3" from the filename) and put them in /EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/.
Important: After installing the above mentioned *.aml files, I started getting random kernel panics while trying to boot into macOS or the FileVault bootloader. As soon as I added the "
keepsyms=1"
bootflag in my Clover config.cfg, the kernel panics stopped and I got a perfectly usable mashine (no crashes / freezes / delays what-so-ever)!
Final Configuration
Here's an overview of all my kexts installed in /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other:
Code:
AppleALC.kext
FakeSMC.kext
FakeSMC_ACPISensors.kext
FakeSMC_CPUSensors.kext
FakeSMC_GPUSensors.kext
FakeSMC_LPCSensors.kext
FakeSMC_SMMSensors.kext
IntelMausiEthernet.kext
Lilu.kext
WhateverGreen.kext
For you to review my current settings and be able compare it to your config, I also attached my config.plist (personal identifiers like the S/N created by the SMBIOS settings in the Clover Configurator or my SSD and HDD UUIDs are XXX'ed out).
I hope my hints can help some of you to avoid or tackle any issues you might face
Cheers,
hackmymac
, but I made it. Thanks to HackaShaq and others for their work here. I'm just wrapping up a slightly modified build with a fresh Mojave 10.14.2 install:
