Upgrade to El Capitan in situ, graphics driver and time backup question

[Macintyre]

The first question is not specifically an El Capitan issue, but rather about Clover. I am a little nervous about upgrading my system to using the Clover boot loader as there seem to a number of reports regarding issues with it. There also seem to be rather mixed reactions to El Captain with some reporting an improved experience, while others reporting performance degradation and various issues. I have already invested a lot of time in getting Yosemite working and it has been running very well for a month, so I don't want to risk breaking this installation. I have made a Time backup and also have the USB stick with the Yosemite installer, so I guess that I could recover my Yosemite installation if it came to it, yet what I have read still makes me nervous about making this leap.

I have created the USB boot/installer for El Capitan, and by way of experimentation I tried the suggested Clover boot test. After having selected the UEFI boot option, the system booted into Clover and it was then possible to select and boot into Yosemite. The network adapter worked, but there was no audio. I booted back into Yosemite via Chimera there was no audio either. I checked in Utilities/Sound and discovered that no devices were listed, yet it had been working fine prior to this. I re-installed the sound driver using Multibeast and audio started working again, at least when booting from Chimera. I now find that I can no longer boot Yosemite from Clover and when I try to do so I first get the black Apple screen and after a second or two the Apple logo changes to a crossed out circle sign. A few more seconds and I back to the Clover boot screen. I have also found that I can't boot either of my Windows partitions (7 and 10) from Clover. I am now wondering whether it is possible to just do an in-situ update directly on Yosemite using the downloaded El Capitan installer and keeping Chimera in place for now?

Secondly, Unibeast allows me to select the Intel HD3000 graphics driver or the NVIDIA driver, but not both. My system is based on an i7 which has HD3000 Graphics, but I also have an Nvidia graphics card installed so I was wondering if there is any way of including both drivers on the USB stick?

Finally, if I am successful in making the upgrade to El Capitan, will my time backup restore the system to the previous state of the Yosemite installation? That is, will it put all my drivers, apps and file back where they were, or would I have to install everything again?

My hardware spec is:

Asus P8H61 Pro Motherboard
i7 2600K Sandy Bridge, LGA1155
Intel HD Graphics 3000
8Gb RAM
Nvidia Geforce 210 passive graphics card
2 x 1Gb hard disk

One hard disk is reserved for OSX, the other one for a dual boot Windows7 and Windows 10 installation.

 

[ammulder]

Often (but not always) the prohibited sign just means you need to put the installer on a different USB port.

If you have Windows UEFI, you need Clover UEFI to boot it. And if you have Windows Legacy, you need Clover Legacy to boot it. It is possible to change Windows Legacy to Windows UEFI without reinstalling.

You cannot boot El Capitan with Chimera.

You should do the install with either Intel or Nvidia and then you can add the other later if you really want to use monitors on both GPUs. More commonly you just ignore the integrated graphics and put all your monitors on the Nvidia card, in which case you should do the install with Nvidia checked. However, be aware that some people have reported that the GeForce 2xx is too old and doesn't work with El Capitan. If that proves to be true for you you'll have to either go with the HD3000 or get a newer video card.

Once you install and configure El Capitan, you can use Migration Assistant to restore your user account and applications. It is not advisable to restore system configuration / drivers / etc. -- you'll want to get that working properly in El Capitan before you restore the rest.

 

[Macintyre]

ammulder, thanks for your reply and answering some of my questions.

So its clear that if I want to upgrade to El Capitan I will need to use Clover. I have Windows legacy at present on a second drive. I have just spent a couple of hours trying to get Clover to boot it. Earlier I rebuilt my USB stick using the Legacy option in UniBeast but I still cannot boot Windows 7 or 10. It gives me icons for the NTFS partitions, but when I select them I get a blinking cursor and then get back to Clover. I also tried changing PBR to LegacyBiosDefault using the CloverConfigurator and also setting LegacyBiosDefaultEntry to different values like 0,1 and 2 (I'm assuming here that this corresponds to partition table entries?) but still no joy. I can't help thinking that I need to supply the path to my hard disk and partition somewhere - otherwise how does bootx64.efi know which drive/partition to boot?

Regarding the graphics card, that would be a shame because I purchased it only a month ago to get Yosemite working. I chose it because I could source it locally, it was reported to work out of the box (which it did) and didn't cost too much and I didn't really need a high performance gaming card. At the time I had an i3 CPU on the motherboard and the Intel HD Graphics 2000 was a no-go. More recently I upgraded to an i7 and mistakenly thought that it had Intel HD 3000 graphics, but on further checking I discovered that its still only HD2000 (sigh!) so if the Nvidia card was not sufficient, then I would have to be looking to upgrade the graphics card again. As it happens though, after rebuilding the USB stick using the legacy boot option, I was able to boot and run the El Capitan installer and do a clean install to a spare partition on my OSX hard disk. So far, the only way I can boot into El Capitan is by using the legacy partition on the USB stick and that seems to work fine with the NVIDIA card I have so maybe the card is OK?

However I still cannot boot into it via UEFI and have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I also still cannot boot into Windows with Clover. I know that one workaround is to press F8 on system startup to bring up the BIOS boot menu and select the hard drive containing Windows, but it would be much nicer and more consistent if this would work from the boot loader.

 

[Macintyre]

Finally success!

I can now boot into El Capitan on my P8H61-M Pro board using UEFI boot. I thinks it was a combination of things, but the first step was to replace the OsxAptioFix2Drv-64 driver with OsxAptioFixDrv-64. This solved the memory issue and allowed the boot process to proceed. In order to do this I had to use the official Clover 3292 installer and use the EFI partition on my OSX HDD to experiment. I selected UEFI boot only and the OsxAptioFixDrv-64 driver in Drivers64UEFI. Other drivers selected included DataHubDxe-64 and PartitionDxe-64.

After this I used CloverConfigurator to modify the config.plist. With my setup I needed to add dart=0 to the boot flags. I also had the AppleRTC, AsusAICPUPM and KernelPm patches set. The number of ports reported on my Nvidia card was 2 whereas my card has 3 so I changed this to 3. It was also important to have NullCPUPowerManagement.kext and FakeSMC.kext in EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.11 (and 10.10 for Yosemite). I also added RealtekRTL8111.kext to get the network adapter working.

Of course, the USB stick already has these kexts so its probably the OsxAptioFix2Drv-64 that is key. Sure enough when I renamed OsxAptioFix2Drv-64 and copied in OsxAptioFixDrv-64 and booted from the USB drive again, it worked and I could now UEFI boot into both Yosemite and El Capitan.

Booting into Windows partitions still does not work though.