XW8600 Hackintosh - Only can boot in Safe Mode

[kermit62]

EDIT: XW8600 Hackintosh - Only can boot in Safe Mode

Hi folks
not exactly new to Hackintosh world, I built a couple three years ago.
Now I got this XW8600 HP workstation laying around, powerful enough to emulate a Mac Pro 3.1 early 2008, so I decided to give it a try.
Here's what I did: I downloaded on my MacBookPro from Mac App Store OSX Yosemite 10.10 image, installed to a USB stick with Unibeast and followed Tonymac's instructions, as three years ago install procedures were somewhat different. I set the BIOS to enable DEP and disable VT-d and VT-x, enabling separate IDE controller instead of SATA/AHCI; being a workstation's BIOS, available options are really not so many.
Yosemite installed perfectly using GraphicsEnabler=yes and no other boot flag. The install has completed correctly, but when I restarted from HDD, I saw I couldn't get the machine to boot if I didn't use Safe Mode (-x).
There is the usual Apple grey screen with progress bar going on with fans at full speed, then fans slow down and I'm greeted by a black screen with a black-on-White progress bar, that sometimes stays there, sometimes goes up to the end....anyway computer is stuck, and after awhile spinning wheel stays forever.
Booting in safe mode screen will flash several times with a "venetian blind" effect, after that screen is ok, resolution is fine but obviously without QE/CI. Graphics card is correctly recognized.
Thinking it was a 'by design' behavior due to still missing MultiBeast tweaks and kexts, I got on, booted with -x, installed MultiBeast w/EasyBeast settings and rebooted.
From then on, I tried all kinds of boot flags to no avail, so I'm asking you what am I doing wrong. I know some people who could successfully install Mavericks 10.9 on an XW workstation, so even if Yosemite's newer, I would exclude incompatibility.
Tried to boot -v , everything seems OK but if there's errors I don't know what to look for.
I swapped video card with another Nvidia 9800 I had, same result.
My complete specs:
XW8600 HP workstation
Last available BIOS revision
Dual quadcore Xeon 3 GHz
16 GB 667 MHz FBDIMM ECC RAM
1,5 TB WD15EADS
2TB WD20EARS
LG DVD RW unit
Graphics card PNY Geforce GTS250
Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Kermit

EDIT: Inspection of the system log shows the culprit of it. It's the dreaded
NVDA(OpenGL) CHANNEL EXCEPTION! DMA engine error.
So I'm stumped. I used this very card in another Hackintosh running Lion and never had a freeze.....it's time to dump it and turn to AMD, cause as far as I know there is no certain workaround for that. I tried a clean Mavericks install, but no luck.

 

[Benjudas]

Did you try to boot without GraphicsEnabler Flag?

 

[godman]

Hi folks
not exactly new to Hackintosh world, I built a couple three years ago.
Now I got this XW8600 HP workstation laying around, powerful enough to emulate a Mac Pro 3.1 early 2008, so I decided to give it a try.
Here's what I did: I downloaded on my MacBookPro from Mac App Store OSX Yosemite 10.10 image, installed to a USB stick with Unibeast and followed Tonymac's instructions, as three years ago install procedures were somewhat different. I set the BIOS to enable DEP and disable VT-d and VT-x, enabling separate IDE controller instead of SATA/AHCI; being a workstation's BIOS, available options are really not so many.
Yosemite installed perfectly using GraphicsEnabler=yes and no other boot flag. The install has completed correctly, but when I restarted from HDD, I saw I couldn't get the machine to boot if I didn't use Safe Mode (-x).
There is the usual Apple grey screen with progress bar going on with fans at full speed, then fans slow down and I'm greeted by a black screen with a black-on-White progress bar, that sometimes stays there, sometimes goes up to the end....anyway computer is stuck, and after awhile spinning wheel stays forever.
Booting in safe mode screen will flash several times with a "venetian blind" effect, after that screen is ok, resolution is fine but obviously without QE/CI. Graphics card is correctly recognized.
Thinking it was a 'by design' behavior due to still missing MultiBeast tweaks and kexts, I got on, booted with -x, installed MultiBeast w/EasyBeast settings and rebooted.
From then on, I tried all kinds of boot flags to no avail, so I'm asking you what am I doing wrong. I know some people who could successfully install Mavericks 10.9 on an XW workstation, so even if Yosemite's newer, I would exclude incompatibility.
Tried to boot -v , everything seems OK but if there's errors I don't know what to look for.
I swapped video card with another Nvidia 9800 I had, same result.
My complete specs:
XW8600 HP workstation
Last available BIOS revision
Dual quadcore Xeon 3 GHz
16 GB 667 MHz FBDIMM ECC RAM
1,5 TB WD15EADS
2TB WD20EARS
LG DVD RW unit
Graphics card PNY Geforce GTS250
Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Kermit

EDIT: Inspection of the system log shows the culprit of it. It's the dreaded
NVDA(OpenGL) CHANNEL EXCEPTION! DMA engine error.
So I'm stumped. I used this very card in another Hackintosh running Lion and never had a freeze.....it's time to dump it and turn to AMD, cause as far as I know there is no certain workaround for that. I tried a clean Mavericks install, but no luck.

I have fully working xw8600 with gtx275, now hd5870 with mavericks.
Tried to install yosemite and I had same problem as you did. Couldn't pass to login page without -x.

 

[jdryyz]

My experience with Yosemite and the xw8600 is somewhat different than the original posters. First, where in BIOS did you "enable DEP and disable VT-d and VT-x" ? I do not seem to have these options unless they are described differently. My BIOS is v1.46 (latest).

So, for me, the installer loads (and very fast too) but I am stopped at not having my hard drive that I want to install to recognized.

Unlike the original poster, I cannot boot to the installer unless I have AHCI+RAID enabled. But then, all I see in Disk Utility is the USB boot drive.

When I enable "separate IDE controller" then the installer boots to a black screen.

My system consists of the following:

HP xw8600

Dual 3.0GHz Xeon X5450 processors

12GB DDR RAM

500GB HD on built-in SATA

NVidia FX 1700 graphics


I am using the latest Unibeast at the time of this writing.


Any boot options recommended to try??

 

[jdryyz]

Correction, my experience is becoming very much like the original posters, but it only happened after I applied some of the Multibeast additions. Namely, FakeSMC + Hardware monitor, 3rd Party SATA and Intel SATA, Mac Pro 3,1 SMBIOS, Basic Boot, and Chimera.

Prior to that, I was booting from the Hard Drive using USB and only had to use the Graphics Enabler=Yes to get to the Finder. I had other trouble, though. When I went to open any hard drive volume, the Finder would reset and close the window. Strange.

Perhaps I will try to reinstall Yosemite again but be careful with what additions I install.