The nearer my destination...the more I'm slip sliding away!

[DSP316]

Beginner trying to get my feet wet. Thank you for the excellent guides and resources here. It's been an adventure-trying to get El Capitan on Dell XPS 8300 Core i7, 12 GB RAM, GeForce GTX560Ti (OEM)-trying first on external USB drive. Clover (first from here and then updated online on EFI partition -which I have to mount every time before I tinker with the config.plist)-Legacy mode. Unibeast USB thumbdrive will avoid infinite reboot only with 'nv_disable=1' flag but beyond that I was able to install and boot clover and then the OS on the 1 TB WD Passport (incl. getting an old Broadcom kext for the Ethernet) and all is good except that it reboots without any obvious KP message unless I use the "nv_disable=1" flag. Usually it comes to a line about 'Apple ACPM false' or something to that effect and then reboots. If I try any of the other boot flags or inject NVidia etc (SMBIOS got it set up as iMac 13,1), then it produces sometimes 'P state stepping errors', so I quit trying other flags. Also when I try to run the audioclover patch for my on board Realtek (0887), terminal gives message about "Inherently unstable" IOreg missing Apple HDA etc and terminates without doing anything. I read through several posts with folks who had similar boot issues, but not able to find a similar situation with El Cap (incl. trying PCIRootID=1 flag which I understand does not apply to Clover anyway). Incidentally, when I get into system properties, oftentimes the card is correctly identified but other times it is listed as NVidia chip 3 MB or something similar. So I think the OS's native drivers seem to recognize the card at times even though the monitor resolution is not set correctly. Very rarely I got it to boot with 'cpus=1' and then it looks gorgeous with the full 1080p resolution on my Dell UltraSharp monitor. But now the 'cpus=1' trick does not work after I updated clover although one good thing is that now the P state error messages have gone away...so close and yet I am afraid I'm slipping away...

Any thoughts and input would be greatly appreciated.

Dan

 

[aopisa]

Beginner trying to get my feet wet. Thank you for the excellent guides and resources here. It's been an adventure-trying to get El Capitan on Dell XPS 8300 Core i7, 12 GB RAM, GeForce GTX560Ti (OEM)-trying first on external USB drive. Clover (first from here and then updated online on EFI partition -which I have to mount every time before I tinker with the config.plist)-Legacy mode. Unibeast USB thumbdrive will avoid infinite reboot only with 'nv_disable=1' flag but beyond that I was able to install and boot clover and then the OS on the 1 TB WD Passport (incl. getting an old Broadcom kext for the Ethernet) and all is good except that it reboots without any obvious KP message unless I use the "nv_disable=1" flag. Usually it comes to a line about 'Apple ACPM false' or something to that effect and then reboots. If I try any of the other boot flags or inject NVidia etc (SMBIOS got it set up as iMac 13,1), then it produces sometimes 'P state stepping errors', so I quit trying other flags. Also when I try to run the audioclover patch for my on board Realtek (0887), terminal gives message about "Inherently unstable" IOreg missing Apple HDA etc and terminates without doing anything. I read through several posts with folks who had similar boot issues, but not able to find a similar situation with El Cap (incl. trying PCIRootID=1 flag which I understand does not apply to Clover anyway). Incidentally, when I get into system properties, oftentimes the card is correctly identified but other times it is listed as NVidia chip 3 MB or something similar. So I think the OS's native drivers seem to recognize the card at times even though the monitor resolution is not set correctly. Very rarely I got it to boot with 'cpus=1' and then it looks gorgeous with the full 1080p resolution on my Dell UltraSharp monitor. But now the 'cpus=1' trick does not work after I updated clover although one good thing is that now the P state error messages have gone away...so close and yet I am afraid I'm slipping away...

Any thoughts and input would be greatly appreciated.

Dan

I think if you break up your post into paragraphs you may get more help. It's just too hard to read in this form.

 

[DSP316]

Thank you for your suggestion to break it up into paragraphs 'aopisa'. I appreciate it.

My rig= Dell XPS 8300 Core i7, 12 GB RAM, GeForce GTX560Ti (OEM)

Install-El Cap with Unibeast Legacy mode in external WB HDD. Set as iMac13,2

Problem-Boots only with "nv_disable=1" flag otherwise reboots just after it loads the NVDA. Had the same issues with the Unibeast thumb drive when installing the OS on the External HDD.

Any input appreciated.

Dan

 

[DSP316]

The nearer my destination...the more I'm slip sliding away! Solved!

Finally got the XPS 8300 into good books with the El Capitan! I used (besides the stock ones which come with Clover) 3 boot arguments and no need to inject NVidia etc. nvda_drv=1, rootless=0 and kext-dev-mode=1 and SMBIOS set to iMac 13,2. Inter net works and I used the shake 12 times to generate a s. number and after verification with the apple website that it was a valid but not in database serial number, set up iMessage and it works without doing anything else. For the onboard Realtek 887 sound, I used Toleda's excellent instructions with his patching script (https://github.com/toleda/audio_RealtekALC) and it works great. My only issue is that sometimes when starting it up, it will reboot without any KP just when the verbose boot says "Bluetooth manager not found" or something like that. Then I reboot and it works. Maybe the native NVidia driver of the OS has something to do with it. I have the Dell Ultrasharp monitor connected via DVI-D and a Displayport cable and initially the logon screen was blank because it was actually showing the extended desktop coming via DVI-D and the log on was on the screen coming via the displayport (the OS was seeing my single monitor as two separate monitors as I had two connections). Once I switched the input to Displayport, I logged on and went into the Display preferences and "mirrored" the display then I have it boot right on to the logon screen with auto-detect on the monitor now turned back on.

Many thanks to tonymac!