Hey guys. I haven’t been able to check on the thread for awhile but happy to see you're keeping it alive. You guys are awesome!!
Yesterday, I ended up with boot failing at FIPS. I spent all morning trying to understand what happened. I haven’t done anything major to my hackintosh and it was quite a surprise. Trying to fix it, I forgot just about everything - boot flags, how to navigate bootable USB and hence why I am here.
FIPS - my understanding is that system believes the hardware has failed. One thread was talking about RAM so I followed up on it and removed mine (64GB below Noctua D14). Tried with one stick obviously no luck. I was quite mad when it didn’t work but at least I cleaned my radiator lol. Anyways, got it all back together and thought it was time to ether check disk utility, recover or reinstall all together.
I found my Sierra OS USB still original from this thread. I kept it safe inside my computer case. Just have so much on my Mac side that it would send me to oblivion if I messed it up. But, I ended up trying to boot from USB and omg lol I forgot how to do it. I thought hey clover > pick USB and done but that thing wouldn’t budge. I timed out every time at ‘XMP change to bootstrap’. It took me forever to figure it out that USB has a separate clover and if you are loading from it you need to hit F8 and load USB in UEFI. I am telling you it was so dumb and yet so amazing. I was like THANK YOU UNIVERSE haha
But trying to boot OS using USB’s clover would still result in FIPS. That gave me an idea that it wasn’t necessarily the hardware (windows side was fine) or bad clover settings (USB was intact with Sierra on it) but rather something else altogether. I figured since my system was running straight for the past 3 days, Norton must've scanned the system and removed files it thought were threats.
To test this, I basically tried repairing disk first. The disk was okay. So the next step was booting recovery and using time machine. The first try I used image that was within the 3 days of system ruining and like I predicted it failed. I had to go with an even older recovery image and after half an hour it was all back to normal.
So yeah if you have Norton and you hit FIPS, you know what do. I kept Norton because of the aggressive firewall and I have 5 license and only 4 systems using it so i was like what the hell I'll install on my hackintosh. I might get it back but I need to find a way to restrict what it does when I am not around.
///////// With regards to updating //////////
I am waiting for MacPro 2019. I think it’s going to be much more inclusive system and it could be used for our setups. I am thinking to buy small SSD and another usb to sort of learn/install whatever is going to come with MacPro 2019. Remember that our hack is running on iMac 14.2 platform. That's why so many of us are having issues. There is a way to custom patch DSDT but if you don't know what you are doing that is like learning new language. MacPro 2019 is big system and it might allow more hardware compatibility and it could make transition easier. It cloud also be the opposite because now that they are using encryption chip, the system might not be able to verify what we have and bypassing it could mean finding a work around that might not be available.
Also since I don't have a another Mac having Sierra stable means I can go back and tweak settings. If I can get the system up and running in my spare SSD that means I can update. There is also AFS file conversion and I don't know how that plays into the update but hey at least if I fail, I know I have my working test SSD that I can use.
One last thing, I might consider going with Apple and maybe adding my Windows NVMe to it. This might be better overall option. I work on Mac side and only play on Windows. If I can get 60fps on mac in CSGO - I am happy