Unable to boot High Sierra from SSD after successful install

[Bonesetter]

I've been searching around for a fix and I keep finding similar issues but none of the fixes have worked. I've been running Mavericks for quite some time and was unable to get my sound working. I figured it was time to start upgrading my system and attempt to get my sound back by starting from new. I bought the current recommended 860 EVO SSD and figured I'd get up to date as best I could. I found out that my system is too old for Mojave so I opted for High Sierra.

After creating my install usb, I installed and my SSD was converted to the APFS file system. When I tried to boot from the drive it would just freeze so I did some research and saw some threads about APFS not being the way to go yet (and thought maybe this was my issue) so I erased my SSD, reformatted, and installed using the No Convert script. I can boot from my USB drive just fine without any issues but when I unplug the drive and try to boot from the SSD it's sticking at the apple logo with the progress bar appearing but never filling.

I tried copying the USB EFI to my SSD's EFI partition and it still froze at the apple logo with the bar. I've tried adding VBoxHfs-64.efi and AptioMemoryFix-64.efi using Clover Configurator but neither seems to do anything for me. Other than the new SSD, all my hardware is from the recommended customac series 6. I used legacy both when creating my usb installer and when doing post installation with multibeast.

Attached are 2 different attempts in verbose mode where it got stuck. Should I revert to Sierra instead of High Sierra? Trying to figure out the latest that I can run without many issues on my older system. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Bonesetter]

Hmm...no responses. *Bump

Was really hoping I just missed something hardware specific or that there was just something simple I'm missing.

If there's any other report or log or anything that would also help figure out why it's hanging on startup I'd be glad to post it. Thanks again!

 

[Jamesbond007]

You said you did copy the contents of the EFI partition on your USB stick to the EFI partition of your SSD. Did you do that BEFORE or AFTER you installed Clover on your SSD?

If you do that BEFORE, the contents of the EFI partition may be replaced by the Clover install and therefore the boot may fail.

 

[Bonesetter]

You said you did copy the contents of the EFI partition on your USB stick to the EFI partition of your SSD. Did you do that BEFORE or AFTER you installed Clover on your SSD?

If you do that BEFORE, the contents of the EFI partition may be replaced by the Clover install and therefore the boot may fail.

Thanks for the response. I believe I copied the contents over after the clover install because it was after I had run Multibeast and selected Legacy as my bootloader. I will try copying again tonight when I get home from work and will report back the results. Thanks again for helping!