Unibeast Maverick Update Guide Crippled My System

[Hambone]

The bizarre/quirky meter is now in the red zone.

I managed to boot from the UniBeast USB drive and install Mavericks! I randomly connected another USB external hard drive to backup some files and forgot to remove it when I rebooted. Suddenly, the USB UniBeast drive became bootable.

This is just the kind of happy coincidence that I 2% love but 98% hate. I am thankful that I was able to finally use UniBeast, but why was I able to use UniBeast? Had I not forgotten to disconnect my external drive I could have been futilely trying random things to no end, on a wild goose chase filled with dubious theories, absurd experiments and lots of furious cursing.

Who's to say that spinning around 3 times on 1 foot, unplugging then plugging the computer in 5 times and rubbing my belly while patting my head might have resolved this issue? It's so obnoxiously random, arbitrary and illogical.

Anyways, I was able to install Mavericks, so you could argue that all's well that ends well. Except it hasn't ended well. Now I get a freeze/kernel panic while booting Mavericks. I think it has to do with AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement because I see that text on the screen when it crashes.

I can't even boot into Mavericks via the UniBeast USB drive, it still crashes. I will now dedicate more hours of my life to aimlessly experimenting with the employment of various boot flags, if that works I can randomly tinker with reinstalling MultiBeast with arbitrarily different settings, focusing my random efforts around this PowerManagement thing.

 

[Hambone]

[SOLVED] Unibeast Maverick Update Guide Crippled My System

SOLVED - for the most part

I've learned a quite a bit from the hellish experience. I have a:

GA Z68X-UD3H-B3 (F12)
Intel Core i7 2600 (Sandy Bridge)
Radeon Sapphire 5770 GPU

For the past couple years I've been successfully running OS X 10.6.7 / 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, but I recently purchased a new GPU to facilitate faster 3D rendering using Nvidia CUDA. I got a Gigabyte GTX 660 (OverClocked) 2 GB GDDR5 and, based on my research, needed to update OS X because the GTX 660 is designed to work straight out of the box in Mountain Lion onward. I'm cheap and would rather update to Mavericks for free than an older OS for $30. So the journey began...

The title of this thread should really have read (initially), "Fiddling with BIOS (as per the Mavericks Update Guide) Crippled my System"

The only real problem was the boot disk priority, and a couple of other changes that selecting "Optimized Defaults" caused. In hindsight I should have left my BIOS settings alone, but I'm not an electrical/software engineer, I am a sheep, and the guide said to push that button so I did.

I was led to believe that the subsequent boot problems and kernel panics were the result of kext/MultiBeast settings, so I fiddled with that and ended up creating problems for myself.

The UniBeast USB drive was fine from the get-go, there was nothing wrong with the hardware nor was anything wrong with the software. There was no need to re-format the USB drive, there was no need to re-download the Mavericks installer and there was no need to re-install UniBeast.

Once I got the boot priority issue fixed, and undid all the MultiBeast changes I had made, I was back to square one.


THE REAL PROBLEM!!!! (aside from having reset optimized defaults in BIOS)

The real problem with this Motherboard and the UniBeast USB flash drive is that the motherboard does not recognize the USB flash drive as a drive during the initial boot process. I added a delay for HDD search into the BIOS, but it seems that no matter how much time the MoBo has to look, it does not know or care that my USB flash drive is connected.

If I direct the BIOS to boot from USB-HDD, it gives the USB hardware a cursory once-over and essentially says, "eh nothing there" then proceeds to boot from the internal hard drive.

This might be an issue with my particular USB Flash drive (PNY 8 GB Flash USB 2.0) or it might apply to all USB Flash drives. If you are having this problem, consider the following.

I accidentally left a larger Seagate external USB drive (1 TB "Backup Plus for Mac") connected during a system restart and this allowed my PNY flash drive to be recognized as a bootable drive by the MoBo BIOS.

Everything from there was really academic: Install Mavericks, restart (in safe mode for me -x), run MultiBeast (FOR MAVERICKS), restart and the system works so long as you installed all of the right things in MultiBeast.

I also discovered that there is absolutely no need to pull your hardware apart during the update process. That was somewhat vague in the guide. I ended up pulling out RAM in excess of 4GB, extraneous hard drives, PCI cards, etc. WASTE OF TIME and only adds risk by introducing the potential to break/misplace/drop delicate hardware components, screws and such that are being needlessly yanked from the motherboard and case.

For some reason the sound still isn't working for me, I added the kext for ALC889, which the z68X-UD3H-B3 uses, but I'm sure that I will figure that out sooner or later.

 

[macnutt]

Hi Stork

I've tried several times to get the 4k sector problem fixed on a couple of my hard drives. Are you saying that the hard drive companies have a fix takes care of the problem? I have a new Western Digital wd5000BPVX which won't work as a boot drive in my HP Probook. I have tried the fixes on TonyMacx86 on 3 separate occasions, and haven't had any luck. Do you think that there would be a firmware available that would fix the issue? I also have a 2 year old hitachi 1.5 gigabyte drive which I can't use as a boot drive.

If you've ever personally had emulation firmware updates fix this problem, I'd like to know about it.

Thanks

Macnutt

 

[RehabMan]

Hi Stork

I've tried several times to get the 4k sector problem fixed on a couple of my hard drives. Are you saying that the hard drive companies have a fix takes care of the problem? I have a new Western Digital wd5000BPVX which won't work as a boot drive in my HP Probook. I have tried the fixes on TonyMacx86 on 3 separate occasions, and haven't had any luck. Do you think that there would be a firmware available that would fix the issue? I also have a 2 year old hitachi 1.5 gigabyte drive which I can't use as a boot drive.

If you've ever personally had emulation firmware updates fix this problem, I'd like to know about it.

Thanks

Macnutt

Boot0 problem on 4k/AF drives is easily solved. See: http://www.tonymacx86.com/25-boot0-error-official-guide.html