<< Solved >> Suddenly Black screen after apple logo on system running almost 3 yrs

[jtnix]

Been knocking my head for hours on this but still have no idea what could have happened to suddenly cause my Mojave 10.14.6 install stop booting after the apple logo. This is the Z390 UD with RX 580 gfx from my sig and I've been using it as work pc for 2 years 10 months now, first went online in Nov 2019.

I have searched and read all of the Black screen threads I could find, esp. the ones on RX 580. I have not yet been able to boot into Mojave to get an EFI and system plist dump to share. This has been a dual boot Windows 10 / Mojave machine, with each OS on a separate Sata3 SSD ( no M2 drives). I also have a BCM3640 card which has been working fine up until recently.
The only things that have changed recently are:

• about a month ago the bluetooth keyboard stopped recognizing at startup. At the same time, the boot timeout and starting boot drive features in clover stopped working ( I had a 3 second time out, set to boot the 2nd drive Mojave). The machine would take 2.5x longer to post (25 seconds or so) and always default to windows drive with no timer. I did some minor troubleshooting and found out that when I shut down the machine entirely (hard power off) and reseated the BCM3640 card and gave the insides a good cleaning, the POST went back to normal 10 seconds and bluetooth worked and I could select the drive, but the default drive and timeout still wouldn't work. I tried reinstalling clover with a new timeout, but still it would never work.
• A week and a half ago, my second monitor, an older viewsonic 1080p monitor using DVI cable started failing, so I replaced it with a newer Asus monitor and switched to an HDMI cable. I made sure the ports were clear of dust before slotting a new cable, but it was working fine for over a week.

But this morning, it just wouldn't boot into Mojave - black screen after apple logo - I can hear the fans on the 580 pulse high then just shut off and confirmed they stopped spinning altogether waited 10+ minutes but nothing booted. Can't log in remotely via SSH terminal either.

Using the various Black screen troubleshooting threads, I checked my BIOS and made sure settings were kosher, I didn't have to change anything:

• CSM was off - to be sure I switched to Windows 8/10 mode and verified it was disabled
• VT-d was off
• Internal GFX was enabled, PCI slot 1 (580) was primary GFX boot

Other things tried:

• tried each monitor individually, unplugged main displayport monitor, left hdmi in - nothing, vice versa, nothing
• saw a post saying a faulty BCM card was causing other issues, knowing I had trouble with mine recently, tried removing that and rebooting twice, still black screen in same place
• saw a post saying their very old GTX 770 had failed, booting into windows revealed there was a problem with card. Windows is having no problem with the RX 580 card. I hadn't updated Windows Radeon drivers since Jan 2020, so I used their tool to reset card to factory and installed latest drivers. Windows is fine with the card, no evidence of issues, but still booting black screen in Mojave
• tried unplugging all monitors, switching BIOS boot gfx card to iGFX (internal intel gfx) and plugged hdmi monitor to mobo connection - boots to bios, but mojave dies during boot with long segfault (off screen, cant see what caused it - need to video record and playback, I guess)

I am going to keep plugging away at this and try to get it booting somehow but having trouble finding out how to get it to boot without a graphics card. Even headless so I could SSH / remote desktop in and grab some more info, try some new clover installs would be nice.

If anyone has any ideas what I can try, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Jt

 

[pastrychef]

Have you tried clearing NVRAM?

Are you able to boot in to the Recovery partition?

 

[jtnix]

I have not. How can I clear NVRAM? I thought that was a real mac thing only.. Same Ctrl Shift Cmd P R salute? I will try..
Also, not sure I have a recovery partition? I do have the original install USB stick still - can I use that to boot into recovery?

 

[pastrychef]

I have not. How can I clear NVRAM? I thought that was a real mac thing only.. Same Ctrl Shift Cmd P R salute? I will try..
Also, not sure I have a recovery partition? I do have the original install USB stick still - can I use that to boot into recovery?

To clear NVRAM, press F11 at the Clover boot menu.

Mojave should install a boot partition on your macOS drive. Trying with USB installer can also work just to see if the problem is your macOS installation.

 

[jtnix]

Thanks for the tips. Cleared NVRAM with F11 + extra reboot but no change.

Used F3 to find and boot from Recovery - it stalls about 70% through progress meter. Reboot and tried -v and saw that Recovery partition stops much sooner than visual timeout (see attached pic)

I see my Firewire card is last listed, so I will try and remove that and see if that helps.

I also noticed in a video cap of the normal boot verbose log that there were a couple dozen hard drive inode fixes happening - makes me wonder if the SSD is giving out.

 

[pastrychef]

Thanks for the tips. Cleared NVRAM with F11 + extra reboot but no change.

Used F3 to find and boot from Recovery - it stalls about 70% through progress meter. Reboot and tried -v and saw that Recovery partition stops much sooner than visual timeout (see attached pic)

I see my Firewire card is last listed, so I will try and remove that and see if that helps.

I also noticed in a video cap of the normal boot verbose log that there were a couple dozen hard drive inode fixes happening - makes me wonder if the SSD is giving out.

It sounds like SSD to me...

Try booting from USB installer and see if booting completes.

 

[jtnix]

I am thinking the same, except I tried booting the Install USB and it gives the almost exact output as the Recovery partition boot - right after trying to mount an APFS volume.

I will try and peel off the Mojave drive and more devices/cards tomorrow and use the install stick to boot again and see if I can at least get it to boot to some macos.

Been looking to build a new hack. Maybe it's now or never, lol.

 

[Edhawk]

Try using this OpenCore EFI, it is based on OC 0.8.2. Copy it to the EFI partition on a spare USB drive. See if this boots your system.

The EFI was created for a similar Coffee Lake system using a Z370/i5-8500/RX580, but has been adapted to suit your Z390 UD system and to run macOS Mojave.

All you need do is open the config.plist and add your MLB, ROM, SystemSerialNumber and SystemUUID to the PlatformInformation > Generic section. The rest should work just fine with your setup.

When you get to the OC boot screen, press the spacebar, this will unhide a number of icons.
Select the ResetNvram.efi tool and the system will clear NVRAM and reboot.
When you next see the OC GUI screen boot macOS Mojave.

 

[jtnix]

Thanks for the efi - I tried putting it in the EFI on the Mojave Recovery stick I had, after backing up the existing EFI (and there was no OC folder, so I copied it) When I tried to boot the Install Mojave part on the stick, it halted saying the boot wasn't for this version of MacOS. I am not sure if I need to clean out the other non-oc EFI folders first, or start with a new stick and get a new Mojave install pkg since this one is surely out of date. Gonna keep tinkering on it.

 

[jtnix]

After some more hours fiddling around, I was able to get the drive to boot with my old Mojave install stick. I am not sure what exactly happened but I guess my EFI partition or files there-in got corrupted somehow. I ran diskutil repairVolume on both the Macintosh HD part and the EFI part and neither came up with errors.

I ended up re-running Multibeast, following the instructions from the GA-Z390 Designare post and put my original custom SSDT and now it boots again from the HD. Yay!

The recovery was touch-and-go for a bit, because of the certificate expiration on the old Multibeast 11.3 for Mojave. Setting the clock back to 2019 worked, but the install took 40+ minutes to complete, I can only imagine it was hitting some 2-3 minute web timeout for every install step due to the non-functional internet because of the time-clock difference.

What I am not understanding is why the subsequent post-install Clover Configurator setup steps didn't complete according to the guide (I switched the time back to present before running configurator). Particularly the SMBIOS and System Parameters settings are not filled in automatically like they seemed they should according to the guide. Attached is a pic of my current / new config vs my 2019 once-stable config. Should I copy some of these values over or leave be? I am able to log in to Messages and Facetime and my iCloud account seems to be working.. although it has asked me to log in again once now because of some vague services error. I can't understand why the Bios ID Version would be different either.

Should I update these values?