Z77X-UD5H - trouble with clean install of High Sierra

[BHuij]

[SOLVED]

It was a dumb problem, I was trying all the front ports in my tower instead of using the USB ports that are directly sitting on the motherboard. As soon as I removed all other USB peripherals and just plugged in the keyboard, mouse, and install stick into the back side of the tower, everything worked fine.

Hey everyone--

TL;DR: Can't get my computer to recognize the Install High Sierra bootable USB stick I made with UniBeast as a boot option. System specs at bottom of post.

I've been running Sierrra for the past 18 months or so on my old-ish Hackintosh which I originally built in early 2013. I had a small SSD with the OS and had relocated my Home folder to a 2TB HDD because I do a lot of photo and video work that takes up more space than I want to try and fit on SSDs.

Well that 2TB drive finally bit the bullet (no worries, I have backups of everything). I figured since I'm replacing that drive, why not just go to High Sierra so that my desktop and laptop can be running the same OS? I don't want to go to Mojave specifically because I'm still using my Adobe CS6 programs, and they have some significant incompatibility reports with Mojave.

Because my SSD has gotten a bit cluttered, and because my build of Sierra had some minor annoying issues (sleep wasn't working, for example), I decided to just do a clean install instead of running the updater.

So I jumped through a bunch of hoops to find and download the "Install High Sierra" app since it's no longer properly available on the app store, and even if you can find it there, it's usually the ~19MB truncated version that will download, rather than the full 5GB file. Finally I got the full installer, and started following the instructions here.

I've done basically these same steps every time I've updated my OS, so from 10.8 --> 10.9 --> 10.10 --> 10.11 --> 10.12. While initially the move from Chimera to Clover was a bit rough, I thought I had it more or less figured out and running stable since El Cap. So I downloaded the proper versions UniBeast and MultiBeast, formatted my flash drive, and used UniBeast to create the bootable install drive. Made sure that was plugged into a USB 2.0 port and restarted, hitting F12 to get to the boot options.

The only one showing up is the SSD with my Sierra install on it. The USB doesn't show up at all. I've tried rebooting, testing different ports, etc. When I'm booted into Sierra, I can see both the "Install High Sierra" drive and its EFI partition, so the computer is recognizing it. But for whatever reason, it isn't showing up in boot options.

The only thing I can think is that maybe something about how I configured it with UniBeast didn't produce a Clover bootloader file on the EFI partition that my motherboard can work with? I wonder if the defaults included there are intended for less ancient hardware Truth be told I'm way over my head about the nuts and bolts of how this all works, I'm just good at following TonyMac guides

System Specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
Processor: Intel i7-3770 3.40 GHz (Ivy Bridge, I believe?)
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 (actually I have 2 of them in SLI, but only my Windows boot recognizes the SLI, per my understanding)
Ram: 16 Gigs of DDR3 (2x 8GB sticks)

Can anyone think of why my F12 menu would not be including the install USB drive, or has troubleshooting steps to recommend, I'm all ears. Thanks!

 

[BHuij]

As an update, I tried as many combinations of different options as I could think of. 2 different flash drives (one is USB3 and one is USB2), tried in 3 different USB ports on the motherboard (2 are USB2, 1 is USB3). Tried formatting as Master Boot Record before running through UniBeast, as well as GUID Partition Table. Tried both Legacy and UEFI presets in Unibeast. Nothing showed up. All of them showed up on the desktop in my Sierra boot when plugged into any port.

I have to think there's something wrong with how the EFI partition is set up, or with some BIOS setting, which is making the motherboard unable to recognize the install stick.

I tried resetting to optimized defaults on the BIOS and turning off the normal stuff (like Vt-d). The only hard drive connected to the motherboard right now is the Sierra SSD. Now I get a single beep from the motherboard upon startup (normal), and the Gigabyte splash screen (normal), but it doesn't respond to any of the buttons for accessing the boot options list (F12) or the BIOS setup menu (DEL). It just gives me that beep, sits there, gives me the beep again after 15 seconds or so, sits there, and repeats this 4 or 5 times. Then it blacks out all 3 of my monitors and quietly boots from the Sierra drive. Monitors remain black (on, but displaying only black) until booting is finished and suddenly I'm looking at the desktop.

I tried unplugging the SSD so the mobo wouldn't have any boot options, and it does exactly the same behavior, except now instead of booting Sierra, it just eventually lands on a black screen/white text that just says "M."

Is it time to manually clear my CMOS?