Updating to El Capitan

[Haravikk]

So, I'm currently on Yosemite, but started hackintoshing on Mavericks, and I have to admit I've not been very good at keeping Clover, drivers etc. up-to-date (if it works I just leave it alone, usually a sound policy). I installed most of this manually as UniBeast didn't support Clover at the time, but I loosely based the process on the Clover guide that was available here at the time.

Anyway, I'm thinking I should probably strip back my Clover installation and try to reapply it all "fresh", and I'm just curious what the steps might be for this. I've never used UniBeast and MultiBeast before, so how do these cope with existing Clover installs?

I assume for the El Capitan installation I need to boot from a UniBeast created USB since my current Clover probably won't do, but what steps should I take to get Clover refreshed? What should I do with my current SMBIOS settings? I eventually managed to get iMessages working, so I'd like to keep the current settings.

Also, does MultiBeast cover applying of patches for power support? My motherboard is an Asus Q87T which mostly supports OS X out of the box (it actually goes to sleep without crashing, unlike a Gigabyte motherboard I had to replace) but it doesn't seem to support all temperature sensors properly (I can get CPU temp and fan speeds but nothing else) so I assume I should have patched the DSDT or SSDT or done something involving some other acronym I don't know anything about

I think the only other thing I needed before was a tweak to make sure my WiFi card (Broadcom BCM94352) is recognised as an Airport/AirDrop device, and I have a Bluetooth Firmware uploader to enable Bluetooth support. Will MultiBeast cover these? Also I enabled TRIM support for my SSD as a Clover patch, is this still the preferred method for enabling TRIM?

 

[bolmen]

So, I'm currently on Yosemite, but started hackintoshing on Mavericks, and I have to admit I've not been very good at keeping Clover, drivers etc. up-to-date (if it works I just leave it alone, usually a sound policy). I installed most of this manually as UniBeast didn't support Clover at the time, but I loosely based the process on the Clover guide that was available here at the time.

Anyway, I'm thinking I should probably strip back my Clover installation and try to reapply it all "fresh", and I'm just curious what the steps might be for this. I've never used UniBeast and MultiBeast before, so how do these cope with existing Clover installs?

I assume for the El Capitan installation I need to boot from a UniBeast created USB since my current Clover probably won't do, but what steps should I take to get Clover refreshed? What should I do with my current SMBIOS settings? I eventually managed to get iMessages working, so I'd like to keep the current settings.

Also, does MultiBeast cover applying of patches for power support? My motherboard is an Asus Q87T which mostly supports OS X out of the box (it actually goes to sleep without crashing, unlike a Gigabyte motherboard I had to replace) but it doesn't seem to support all temperature sensors properly (I can get CPU temp and fan speeds but nothing else) so I assume I should have patched the DSDT or SSDT or done something involving some other acronym I don't know anything about

I think the only other thing I needed before was a tweak to make sure my WiFi card (Broadcom BCM94352) is recognised as an Airport/AirDrop device, and I have a Bluetooth Firmware uploader to enable Bluetooth support. Will MultiBeast cover these? Also I enabled TRIM support for my SSD as a Clover patch, is this still the preferred method for enabling TRIM?

Hi Haravikk,

I saw you're running an Asus Q87T. I'm planning a similar build with either this Asus board or the Gigabyte equivalent. Did you manage to install El Capitan? How did you fix the sleep/wake issue?

Cheers,
Tim

 

[Haravikk]

I managed the upgrade okay, though I've still some niggling issues. Sleep/wake is okay actually without any DSDT patching required, only caveat is that Power Nap doesn't work (it may seem to for a few times but after a while it fails to wake and restarts instead), so I recommend turning it off. With no access for developers it's not that important a feature IMO anyway.

There are some issues you'll want to be aware of:

• Onboard Audio: Realtek ALC887 kext should do for this, may also require a Clover config tweak, but I'm not using it under El Capitan so didn't bother installing it. I did have it working under Yosemite but it was a while ago.
• HDMI Audio: Requires an SSDT patch and some kernel/kext patches under Clover. Again I'm not using this under El Capitan so didn't bother applying them. I'm using an external USB audio adapter as it's just so much easier.
• Multi-monitor Support: Seems to be a quirk with the chipset, but if you connect two monitors you need to switch the HDMI monitor on after the Asus boot screen appears, but before Clover's OS selection appears, otherwise it might not be recognised properly and ends up stuck in a hardware mirrored mode (usually garbled since the resolution will be wrong). Switch it on as soon as you see the Asus logo on the other screen though and it should work just fine once the OS X login screen appears (it may still appear garbled before then though, but it'll correct itself). The quirk means that when your HDMI monitor is turned off it's as if you've disconnected it completely, OS X doesn't just behave like it's still there (as it should on a real Mac), it's a little annoying but mostly not a problem.
  That said, El Capitan's loginwindow seems to have a weird issue due to this quirk, basically when you wake your multi-monitor machine you want to make sure that only the DisplayPort monitor is switched on until you login, as switching the HDMI monitor on will cause a resolution switch that can leave the login window black and unusable. Of course if you only plan to use a single monitor neither of these issues should affect you!
  
• UEFI Boot Quirks: Seems to be a chipset problem, but the board can have difficulty determined UEFI boot disks if you install support for Windows. Since Clover can boot Windows for you you'll want to avoid letting Windows create an EFI folder, or remove it if it does. If you use Bootcamp to setup Windows (or better yet, can get away with never using Windows at all) then you're fine!

If you don't need either of the onboard audio sources and can provide a wired network connection then it's dead easy to setup; just follow the Unibeast/Multibeast guide and select the Intel Mausi and Realtek network drivers. I recommend using Clover Configurator or the Clover preference pane to mount the EFI partition though just to check the kexts are in the 10.11 folders and not 10.10 though, as was the case for me, which resulted in none of them loading. Otherwise patching the audio is tricky but should work, and getting wireless to work will be as fun as it is for everyone; even with a recommended Broadcom BCM94352 combo card I've had no end of trouble getting it working just right, I've got WiFi working but Bluetooth is still defeating me, but that's the trade off we make for going unofficial


Also, I had the Gigabyte equivalent board before the Asus one, actually I've had two of them and both failed with the same problems. Seemed like a major BIOS fault that eventually led to it failing to recognise UEFI boot disks at all (this went beyond the quirk I mentioned above, it only recognised the Windows boot manager even on disks where it wasn't present) before they started failing to recognise disks at all. The second board also lost the ability to power my fan. Their software for updating the BIOS is also horrendous (the instructions are for creating a floppy disk, which gives you some idea) so flashing a newer BIOS version to potentially fix the issues was not an option; even when I got a USB stick created properly I couldn't get the board to recognise it, probably related to the issue I was trying to fix.
For my Akasa Euler case the Gigabyte board also has a poor layout for the SATA and fan connectivity; it's an awkward case at the best of times but the Gigabyte board really tested the limit of my ability to connect a half dozen cables without smearing thermal paste everywhere before somehow lowering it into position without pulling anything loose.
Also the Gigabyte board didn't support sleep/wake out of the box, which was my whole reason for choosing it (a lot of guides suggest Gigabyte boards are generally well supported for hackintoshes and didn't need patching); it reset whenever it was put to sleep, and I could never get DSDT patches to work, though I'm far from an expert on those.

The Asus board has a much better BIOS utility, can be flashed with updates a lot more easily (just pop them on a FAT formatted USB stick, plug it in and open the tool in the BIOS to find the file and flash it). Most of its options are better explained and easier to configure, though there are still a heap of acronyms you'll need to lookup the meaning of (or leave well alone).
One downside is that in the Euler case the Asus layout means I could only install one fan, whereas I could fit two with the Gigabyte board. Of course the Euler is intended for purely passive cooling, but my CPU is a little hotter than they recommend (a 45W i7 vs 35W i3 or i5) so it needs a fan to stop the heat building up inside, as the side vents aren't very large, they are however excellent for wedging a 40mm fan into at an angle, holding it just as solidly as a proper fan mount would


Sorry to text wall you, I'm generally happy with the Asus board, aside from the minor niggles that just come from running on unofficial hardware, but that's the nature of the game! In the Akasa Euler case I have a tiny system, and with an i7-4790T it even outperforms the 2008 dual quad 3.2ghz Mac Pro it replaced (albeit without ECC, but then for a fraction of the cost I can live with that).

Assuming you're aiming for a tiny case like mine I'd recommend sticking to the 35W TDP CPU limit unlike me, and also recommend against an mSATA drive if your case can take a 2.5" drive. I tried an mSATA SSD but heat was an issue even when I wasn't pushing the extra power of my 45W TDP CPU, causing it to run slow quite frequently. A 2.5" SSD meanwhile seems to be just fine, is just as fast anyway and will usually save you a bit of money, though it does mean extra cables to connect.

 

[bolmen]

I managed the upgrade okay, though I've still some niggling issues. Sleep/wake is okay actually without any DSDT patching required, only caveat is that Power Nap doesn't work (it may seem to for a few times but after a while it fails to wake and restarts instead), so I recommend turning it off. With no access for developers it's not that important a feature IMO anyway.

There are some issues you'll want to be aware of:

• Onboard Audio: Realtek ALC887 kext should do for this, may also require a Clover config tweak, but I'm not using it under El Capitan so didn't bother installing it. I did have it working under Yosemite but it was a while ago.
• HDMI Audio: Requires an SSDT patch and some kernel/kext patches under Clover. Again I'm not using this under El Capitan so didn't bother applying them. I'm using an external USB audio adapter as it's just so much easier.
• Multi-monitor Support: Seems to be a quirk with the chipset, but if you connect two monitors you need to switch the HDMI monitor on after the Asus boot screen appears, but before Clover's OS selection appears, otherwise it might not be recognised properly and ends up stuck in a hardware mirrored mode (usually garbled since the resolution will be wrong). Switch it on as soon as you see the Asus logo on the other screen though and it should work just fine once the OS X login screen appears (it may still appear garbled before then though, but it'll correct itself). The quirk means that when your HDMI monitor is turned off it's as if you've disconnected it completely, OS X doesn't just behave like it's still there (as it should on a real Mac), it's a little annoying but mostly not a problem.
  That said, El Capitan's loginwindow seems to have a weird issue due to this quirk, basically when you wake your multi-monitor machine you want to make sure that only the DisplayPort monitor is switched on until you login, as switching the HDMI monitor on will cause a resolution switch that can leave the login window black and unusable. Of course if you only plan to use a single monitor neither of these issues should affect you!
  
• UEFI Boot Quirks: Seems to be a chipset problem, but the board can have difficulty determined UEFI boot disks if you install support for Windows. Since Clover can boot Windows for you you'll want to avoid letting Windows create an EFI folder, or remove it if it does. If you use Bootcamp to setup Windows (or better yet, can get away with never using Windows at all) then you're fine!

If you don't need either of the onboard audio sources and can provide a wired network connection then it's dead easy to setup; just follow the Unibeast/Multibeast guide and select the Intel Mausi and Realtek network drivers. I recommend using Clover Configurator or the Clover preference pane to mount the EFI partition though just to check the kexts are in the 10.11 folders and not 10.10 though, as was the case for me, which resulted in none of them loading. Otherwise patching the audio is tricky but should work, and getting wireless to work will be as fun as it is for everyone; even with a recommended Broadcom BCM94352 combo card I've had no end of trouble getting it working just right, I've got WiFi working but Bluetooth is still defeating me, but that's the trade off we make for going unofficial


Also, I had the Gigabyte equivalent board before the Asus one, actually I've had two of them and both failed with the same problems. Seemed like a major BIOS fault that eventually led to it failing to recognise UEFI boot disks at all (this went beyond the quirk I mentioned above, it only recognised the Windows boot manager even on disks where it wasn't present) before they started failing to recognise disks at all. The second board also lost the ability to power my fan. Their software for updating the BIOS is also horrendous (the instructions are for creating a floppy disk, which gives you some idea) so flashing a newer BIOS version to potentially fix the issues was not an option; even when I got a USB stick created properly I couldn't get the board to recognise it, probably related to the issue I was trying to fix.
For my Akasa Euler case the Gigabyte board also has a poor layout for the SATA and fan connectivity; it's an awkward case at the best of times but the Gigabyte board really tested the limit of my ability to connect a half dozen cables without smearing thermal paste everywhere before somehow lowering it into position without pulling anything loose.
Also the Gigabyte board didn't support sleep/wake out of the box, which was my whole reason for choosing it (a lot of guides suggest Gigabyte boards are generally well supported for hackintoshes and didn't need patching); it reset whenever it was put to sleep, and I could never get DSDT patches to work, though I'm far from an expert on those.

The Asus board has a much better BIOS utility, can be flashed with updates a lot more easily (just pop them on a FAT formatted USB stick, plug it in and open the tool in the BIOS to find the file and flash it). Most of its options are better explained and easier to configure, though there are still a heap of acronyms you'll need to lookup the meaning of (or leave well alone).
One downside is that in the Euler case the Asus layout means I could only install one fan, whereas I could fit two with the Gigabyte board. Of course the Euler is intended for purely passive cooling, but my CPU is a little hotter than they recommend (a 45W i7 vs 35W i3 or i5) so it needs a fan to stop the heat building up inside, as the side vents aren't very large, they are however excellent for wedging a 40mm fan into at an angle, holding it just as solidly as a proper fan mount would


Sorry to text wall you, I'm generally happy with the Asus board, aside from the minor niggles that just come from running on unofficial hardware, but that's the nature of the game! In the Akasa Euler case I have a tiny system, and with an i7-4790T it even outperforms the 2008 dual quad 3.2ghz Mac Pro it replaced (albeit without ECC, but then for a fraction of the cost I can live with that).

Assuming you're aiming for a tiny case like mine I'd recommend sticking to the 35W TDP CPU limit unlike me, and also recommend against an mSATA drive if your case can take a 2.5" drive. I tried an mSATA SSD but heat was an issue even when I wasn't pushing the extra power of my 45W TDP CPU, causing it to run slow quite frequently. A 2.5" SSD meanwhile seems to be just fine, is just as fast anyway and will usually save you a bit of money, though it does mean extra cables to connect.

Thanks a lot for the instant reply and your excellent advice. I will go for the power saving 4570T CPU and the same board. Audio and WIFI is not a big deal for me since I have wired ethernet and a USB audio dongle that works perfectly on my current hack. Stability is an issue and I want to have the system as vanilla as possible. One of my killer criteria is sleep/wake - that's a must. I plan to use only one monitor connected via DP and it should potentially handle 4K. I'll report once I have the parts and start the build.


Cheers,
Tim

 

[Haravikk]

Thanks a lot for the instant reply and your excellent advice. I will go for the power saving 4570T CPU and the same board. Audio and WIFI is not a big deal for me since I have wired ethernet and a USB audio dongle that works perfectly on my current hack. Stability is an issue and I want to have the system as vanilla as possible. One of my killer criteria is sleep/wake - that's a must. I plan to use only one monitor connected via DP and it should potentially handle 4K. I'll report once I have the parts and start the build.

No problem, and the CPU should be a good choice, I forgot to mention but the HD4600 is a solid little integrated GPU for a tiny system if that's all you're going to have, and the best you can get on a socketed Haswell chip.

I don't have a 4k screen so I'm afraid I can't confirm how well that works, but it does perform very well; I've even managed to play some Skyrim on it, reduced it to 720p but handles fairly high stock settings plus a bunch of mods, including graphical ones, just not the hi-res texture packs (pushes the shared RAM too hard I suspect), this was also under WINE (which ran it better than rebooting into Windows, strangely).

Plus it supports Metal which makes a lot of the OS animations noticeably smoother in El Capitan.

 

[LmnLm3]

Did you just run the "upgrade" installer from the app store, or did you make a UniBeast USB and when that ran you upgraded instead of the wipe/install instructions sticky on this forum?

I'm on Yosemite right now (Gigabyte mobo) but could never get clover to install properly so I boot from my USB stick every time anyway. I've been recently getting errors about kexts (fakesmc in particular) so I'm thinking I might as well try to upgrade, maybe these things will be fixed in the next unibeast? And if not, I can back up what data I can, wipe and install fresh (I'd rather not, I have loads of drivers for audio equipment, never mind 100GB worth of downloads for my software... This is why it was nice to buy software on DVDs 10 years ago!!!)

 

[Haravikk]

I created a UniBeast USB because I have a few regular Macs as well and figured it'd be easier to update them all that way; the upgrade installer should work but you'd likely need to update your boot loader in advance at the very least, to avoid running into issues with System Integrity Protection.

I'm curious what you mean by failing to get Clover to install properly though, was the installer not recognising your intended disk, or is your motherboard failing to recognise Clover as a bootable drive? If your USB stick currently has Clover on it then you could try copying it across; a tool like Clover Configurator will let you mount the EFI partition on one device, you can then copy the EFI folder to your desktop, unmount the partition and mount the one you want to use and copy the folder onto that.

That said, if the Gigabyte motherboard you mean is the Q87TN then I had one of those and had a lot of trouble getting it to consistently recognise Clover UEFI disks. If you boot into Windows and have a Windows Boot Manager installed (an EFI/Microsoft folder on your EFI partition) then it tends to only recognise that, only solution I've found is to remove that but then you can't boot directly into Windows without preparing another boot loader for that instead, fun right? Yet it seemed to recognise USB sticks just fine.

 

[LmnLm3]

I created a UniBeast USB because I have a few regular Macs as well and figured it'd be easier to update them all that way; the upgrade installer should work but you'd likely need to update your boot loader in advance at the very least, to avoid running into issues with System Integrity Protection.

I'm curious what you mean by failing to get Clover to install properly though, was the installer not recognising your intended disk, or is your motherboard failing to recognise Clover as a bootable drive? If your USB stick currently has Clover on it then you could try copying it across; a tool like Clover Configurator will let you mount the EFI partition on one device, you can then copy the EFI folder to your desktop, unmount the partition and mount the one you want to use and copy the folder onto that.

That said, if the Gigabyte motherboard you mean is the Q87TN then I had one of those and had a lot of trouble getting it to consistently recognise Clover UEFI disks. If you boot into Windows and have a Windows Boot Manager installed (an EFI/Microsoft folder on your EFI partition) then it tends to only recognise that, only solution I've found is to remove that but then you can't boot directly into Windows without preparing another boot loader for that instead, fun right? Yet it seemed to recognise USB sticks just fine.

What I mean by not installing properly is that OSX would not boot with it. The only way I can get it to boot now is by using the USB stick Unibeast (which I think has chameleon?) or it didn't install properly, one or the other. I don't have an EFI on the motherboard, it's an old school BIOS, not sure if that makes a difference.

And it's not that motherboard, it's a Z68MX-UD2H haven't had any real problems with it yet...

 

[bolmen]

No problem, and the CPU should be a good choice, I forgot to mention but the HD4600 is a solid little integrated GPU for a tiny system if that's all you're going to have, and the best you can get on a socketed Haswell chip.

I don't have a 4k screen so I'm afraid I can't confirm how well that works, but it does perform very well; I've even managed to play some Skyrim on it, reduced it to 720p but handles fairly high stock settings plus a bunch of mods, including graphical ones, just not the hi-res texture packs (pushes the shared RAM too hard I suspect), this was also under WINE (which ran it better than rebooting into Windows, strangely).

Plus it supports Metal which makes a lot of the OS animations noticeably smoother in El Capitan.

Hi again,

I got myself this neat little Asus Q87T board and the i5 4590T. Added 16 GByte of ram and a Samsung 256 GByte SSD (MSata); an Atheros 9280 as WIFI card. The system works perfectly with El Capitan and it seems all "basic" functions like sleep/wake, power management (with SSDT), power nap, etc. work just fine.

What doesn't work is iTunes and DRM material (movies, TV shows). The systems freezes instantly if i try to start a trailer or movie on itunes. I was totally unaware of that. Now I know this seems to be a non-solvable standard issue with Haswell CPUs but before building this hack I didn't. Do you have the same problem?

Cheers,
Tim

 

[Haravikk]

Woah, I just tried this and experienced the same thing that you must be; all video output is frozen with no apparent way to interact with the system (I wasn't able to try a remote shell as I forgot to enable it before trying this).

I'm really sorry, I only buy music through iTunes, and rip all my TV shows and movies from Blu Ray, so I've never encountered this issue before. I assume the DRM is trying to use some kind of GPU hardware feature? But I would have thought it should still work though, or should at least fail in some way. Do you have a lot of DRM protected files?

It seems to have blocked my keyboard input, as I tried to trigger sysdiagnose (shift + control + alt + command + period) and it doesn't seem to have run either.