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[SUCCESS] Old Hack, New Tricks II - Upgrading My GA-Z77X-UP5 TH System to Catalina

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So. I reenabled my iGPU which doesn't seem to make any difference. Even with my iGPU deactivated in BIOS, Adobe ME and VideoProc still use it for encoding. I can tell because iStats doesn't show any dGPU activity while encoding.

Switching to iMacPro1,1 seems to enable HEVC hardware encoding. So I recommend using that. I haven't so far found a way to completely disable the iGPU so it would use the dGPU instead for encoding. But hey, 195fps is actually not bad at all :)
 
Any chance of some advice, please?

I would love to upgrade my GA-Z77X-UP5-TH system from High Sierra to Catalina if possible.

I am currently using a Gigabyte GTX 1070Ti graphics card with NVidia Web Drivers. I appreciate that I will need to change to an AMD Radeon card for Catalina support.

My system is dual booting Windows 10 and High Sierra from separate SSDs.

As I also use it for gaming, what would be an equivalent or better AMD graphics card to my existing one?

How straightforward would the upgrade be or should I consider a fresh install? Can someone post their EFI folder and config.plist to assist if this is the case?

Thanks in advance.
 
Any chance of some advice, please?

I would love to upgrade my GA-Z77X-UP5-TH system from High Sierra to Catalina if possible.

I am currently using a Gigabyte GTX 1070Ti graphics card with NVidia Web Drivers. I appreciate that I will need to change to an AMD Radeon card for Catalina support.

My system is dual booting Windows 10 and High Sierra from separate SSDs.

As I also use it for gaming, what would be an equivalent or better AMD graphics card to my existing one?

How straightforward would the upgrade be or should I consider a fresh install? Can someone post their EFI folder and config.plist to assist if this is the case?

Thanks in advance.

Sorry, but that's beyond my expertise...I don't dual-boot or anything like that. But in general, I would suggest following the normal macOS and dual-boot tutorials here on Tonymac to succeed - they have been the basis of all of my work in keeping this old system up and running.

For video cards, I would start with something like this to guide thinking about this, then bounce it against Tonymac hardware recommendations:

Finally, I'd suggest a fresh install (with MultiBeast now being released for Catalina). I'm probably going to try my hand at that for my daily driver to shake some issues that I suspect are residual from upgrading from a build that started as High Sierra and was upgraded and used to both Mojave and Catalina.
 
Thanks @itwas for your information!

I was able to get my system up to Catalina this week. Everything continues to work great-- mainly just bumping this thread again to ask if anyone had any success getting their machine to sleep or if anyone has any experience getting clover to a higher resolution for a 4K monitor. The sleep thing seems like a crap shoot for many systems, but I haven't been able to have any luck, so I find myself leaving it logged into my windows disk more often just because I know it'll sleep properly.

As for the 4K clover boot screen, the most information I've found elsewhere is that you have to disable CSM and switch your OS to "other OS" but I haven't seen any way to do that in our BIOS and disabling CSM seems to outright kill the system until you refresh the CMOS. I found a 4K catalina theme and tried using that but that made things worse somehow-- the screen ended up even lower resolution than it does with my mojave theme! Obviously I've tried setting the resolution with Clover Configurator but that doesn't seem to do much to help. It's the only drawback of having a fancy new monitor currently.

In Mojave, I have the same CMOS crash here, if I try to switch bios to other os windows 8 to set CSM never. GTX 680. Doing research, gtx 680 is not UEFI...So my totally unconfirmed intuition is that installing UEFI only might give problems to Nvidia owners. And that because of that we might need some older uefi64 clover drivers...
 
To whom it may concern: I deactivated the iGPU, switched to iMacPro1,1 and now HEVC is supported in VideoProc. Not sure which measure actually did the trick. But like you said, FCP and PP probably do it anyways. Didn't test it yet, though. Does it even make any sense to activate the iGPU at all? It doesn't output 4K so it's pretty useless for video output. It might be possible that it slows things down more than it actually helps.
with what GPU?
 
Not CPU, GPU. Just add that second build in your signature. Half of the information you gave in you interventions is of no use if we don't know the hardware. As this is a z77 thread.... I already know for newer boards like you Designate the iMac Pro 1.1 with no IGPU in bios will give you all that. What I want to know is if it will work with UDH board and my GPU. And although I've read 7 of you comments in the 7 pages here I still don't know what GPU you use with your z77-ud5h or z77-upth board, and if it's applicable to my set up.
 
A while back, I posted how I got Mojave running on my Gigabyte-based Hackintosh that is built around a GA-Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard. This build is showing it's age a little bit, but it still serves me well. Since Catalina is past its initial release bugs with 10.15.1, I figured I'd update my Hack via an upgrade installation—which seemed to be working fine for many people.

So, here's what I did for those who want to give something similar a try:
  1. Update your boot drive backup using your tool of choice (in my case, SuperDuper! works wonderfully).
  2. Downloaded the latest tonymacx86 version of Clover - v2.4k_r4961-UEFI.
  3. Launched an auto-upgraded Clover Configurator.
  4. Mounted my boot drive EFI partition with Clover Configurator.
  5. Duplicated the CLOVER folder on the EFI volume to ensure I have a backup of my current working configuration.
  6. Went to my /Library/Extensions folder to find my installed Hackintosh kexts. I then downloaded any available updates to prep them for installation in my Mojave installation.
    • AirportBrcmFixup.kext - was 1.1.9; now 2.0.4
    • AppleALC.kext - was 1.3.8; now 1.4.3
    • FakeSMC.kext - was 6.26-357-gceb835ea.1800 — no update
    • Lilu.kext - was 1.3.6, now 1.3.9
    • NoVPAJpeg.kext - now deprecated and no longer needed, with functionality available in WhateverGreen as described here. Deleted this kext prior to upgrading the others.
    • WhateverGreen.kext - was 1.2.9, now 1.3.4
  7. Updated all these kexts in the /Library/Extensions folder using Hackintool as described in this excellent tutorial (see Part 7). This is a safe and easy way to install kexts properly! If you delete any kexts, be sure to either do it prior to installing new ones (which includes rebuilding cache automatically) or to manually force a rebuild.
  8. While I was in Hackintool, I generated a quick information page to have all my custom serial numbers and UUIDs handy -- very useful in the event a clover.config file gets botched!
  9. Reboot the system and test things to ensure all your new kexts are working properly and you're still logged in to iCloud, etc.
  10. Install the tonymacx86 package for the latest Clover build. Reboot and confirm the Mojave build still works 100% properly.
  11. Download the current Catalina installer. I did this by visiting the App Store, which then bounced me into Software Update in system preferences. Once it downloaded, the installer auto-launches. Quit the installer at this point.
  12. Update your boot drive backup again for extra precaution—for the truly paranoid, do this on a separate backup from the one you updated in Step 1.
  13. Run the Catalina installer. Things worked very smoothly for me - all reboots automatically went to the correct working partition, etc. Remember - Catalina uses a new boot volume partition scheme that's described in this post. This is one of the reasons why backups are critical!
  14. After a while and multiple reboots, I was logged back in to my user account on a newly-upgraded installation of Catalina. Nearly everything worked as expected. Here are the little bumps I ran into due to the uniquenesses of my setup:
    • I ended up in an iCloud authentication loop - the PrefPane kept asking me to log in, but it never "took." A full reboot of the system fixed the looping issue.
    • Once I was fully logged in to iCloud, I couldn't turn on iCloud Photo Library. I got an error about the volume format for my the disk with my Photo Library—which is a bit odd, as the non-boot volume where the library is stored was already in one of the "allowed" formats. Thanks to this post, I rebooted into recovery mode, ran Disk First Aid on the volume storing the library, and then rebooted. After that, I could turn on iCloud Photo Library without problems. NOTE - I also booted Photos and let it spin overnight to upgrade the library, which has about 70K photos and movies in it...no issues with that. Once iCloud Photo Library was turned on successfully, Photos also wanted to "upload" everything again - which I believe, in fact, is doing a (SLOW!!!) consistency check between the iCloud library and my locally-stored library.
    • The new separate Music app wasn't showing album art for basically ANY of my albums. That's a pain in the butt. It appears that just letting the app sit and run (don't let the machine go to sleep!) is SLOWLY fixing this problem. You'll see a "Loading artwork..." message at the bottom left of the Music window while this is underway. I have nearly 350GB of music in the library across 4,500+ albums, so this is going to take a while...
  15. Update any apps with new versions via the Apps Store (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc.). Launch all other apps to confirm everything works as expected, force updaters to fire, etc.
All things considered, this upgrade went pretty smoothly. A little bit of Clover and kext housekeeping, run the installer, troubleshoot some things that seem to happen on "real" Macs as well. No panic moments at all!

Hope others find this useful. Happy Hackintoshing!
@mickelsn: Please, can you upload/share your EFI folder?
 
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