darkonaut Posted October 23, 2020 Share Posted October 23, 2020 I've been trying the last couple days to get the High Sierra installer to boot on an LGA775 Gateway, with no luck. - Motherboard: Foxconn G33M05G1 with legacy Phoenix/AWARD BIOS 841P041G (Gateway OEM) - CPU: Q9300 (Yorkfield) - Chipset: G33 Express with ICH9 - Video card: MSI GT 710 2GB DDR3 (Kepler, I'm pretty sure) - RAM: 8GB, tested good - BIOS settings: ACHI mode, CPU Virtualization = disabled, 1394 = disabled, "LAN Option ROM" = disabled, DVMT MemSize Control = Auto, seemingly can't fully disable onboard graphics in BIOS, no options for HPET, Legacy USB support = enabled - USB 2.0 front ports and card reader plugged into headers, but unused I followed Hervé's USB configuration instructions for the Vostro 200 (one HFS partition, Clover in the ESP) since the Vostro is also G33/Penryn and started from his Clover pack without his DSDT, and deleted the PS2, ACHIPortInjector, and lspcidrv kexts after I started having problems because they didn't seem to affect the below result. Although my Gateway has always booted into Clover (v5125), it hasn't ever gotten to the High Sierra installer. (Or El Capitan, or Catalina...) The farthest has been a panic right after "attempting to load /sbin/launchd" > "VM Swap Subsystem is ON" that seems to backtrace to IOStorageFamily, followed by a reboot. Steps taken so far: extracted my DSDT and added a "Replace Names" patch with MaciASL; added a USB port limit patch for High Sierra; checked off a couple of ACPI settings in Clover Configurator (AddDTGP was needed for a bunch of ACPI errors even with the name-corrected DSDT, and FixRTC seemed to help with annoying CMOS resets after the panic, although I'm not really sure whether it's that one or Apple RTC that's working (or neither)); made sure to plug my USB stick into only the rear USB ports; and added NullCPUPowerManagement, newer Lilu and WhateverGreen, and AppleIntelE1000e. Booting with -x -f makes no difference. FixDarwin, FixHPET, FixUSB, FixWAK, dropping DMAR/MATS, ForceHPET, and changing SMBIOS don't seem to make a difference. I don't think I need InjectNvidia or any other option in Graphics. I don't remember whether Patch APIC did anything because that was so many reboots ago, but I think I read that it doesn't do anything if it isn't needed, and my problem doesn't seem to be power-related at this point... Could the panic be caused by my USB stick being MBR instead of GPT? USB port limit patch not needed without the USBInjectAll kext? Am I missing something else? BTW, I formatted the USB for the High Sierra installer as MBR HFS+J with diskutil, and gdisk says "Secondary partition table overlaps the last partition by 33 blocks" - not sure if that matters? I'm thinking of remaking the installer stick with a separate EFI partition, but will it matter if it's GPT or MBR? I think when I checked a 2-partition diskutil-created "MBR" stick with gdisk yesterday it said "GPT with protective MBR;" would that still be bootable by my BIOS system? The only installs on this system I could find were 10.6, pre-Clover and 10+ years ago, but I know it's possible And sorry for the bad screenshots; the scrolling after the KP is too fast for my cellphone camera to keep up with! Thanks in advance for your help! EFI.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted October 24, 2020 Administrators Share Posted October 24, 2020 I'd avoid Clover r5125 (got lots of problems on older systems with it) and stick to r5122 at the latest for the time being. Using a USB installer built on an MBR partition is not an issue at all. I've looked at your patched DSDT but, unless I missed something, I could not find any difference to the vanilla BIOS table. If that's confirmed, it's useless and you can remove it. You may try this slightly revised config and remove NullCPUPowerManagement of course; it's not required. config.plist.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darkonaut Posted October 25, 2020 Author Share Posted October 25, 2020 I tried that config.plist on my USB stick with r5122, r5107, and the r5093 from your guide, no luck. Still panicking. Tried formatting the USB as GPT, no luck (booted into Clover fine, but still a kernel_task panic pre-installer). Tried using a USB hard drive instead of the thumb drive, no luck (ditto). Tried installing HS onto my SSD with Clover and booting directly from SATA, no luck (ditto). The panics aren't even fully repeatable. Sometimes they're right after Lilu loads (I tried the latest version of Lilu and the one from your download pack), sometimes while establishing some system kext's dependencies; sometimes, it just hangs during the kext debugging part. I also get inconsistent boots ("6" will show on the boot loader but it won't start loading Clover, or it'll throw an X64 exception with a wall of red text). Maybe the BIOS is buggy or the board is on its way out. At any rate I'm going to try a Windows 7 OEM key I have to see if I can install Windows 10 and move on to hacking something with UEFI. Clover setup on my HP 8300 USDT showed me how easy this could be and if I'm suffering through trial-and-error I want it to be while learning OpenCore. EDIT: HOT DANG!!! So I went to install Windows 7 and the installer was hanging at the "loading files" progress bar. I decided to check the RAM sticks. Popped out three of them and it booted immediately into the Windows installer. Curious, I put back in the SSD with High Sierra and only FakeSMC, Lilu, and WhateverGreen in Other and...it booted fine!!! (There were a couple of non-fatal errors I'll get to later. Something about DVMT and one or two others.) So... SUCCESS with that config.plist!!! And folks, don't make my mistake and assume that cheap used memory bought on Offerup is still good Thanks again Hervé!!!!!!! Catalina here I come!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darkonaut Posted November 3, 2020 Author Share Posted November 3, 2020 I got Catalina installed with iMac14,2 SMBIOS then switched to MacPro3,1 (it just felt more correct), got iMessage working with an Apple support call, and everything was working fine except for random freezes/reboots. Console seemed to show a cascade of "logd" crashes preceding each freeze/reboot ("Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by x seconds"). I saved the EFI file for later. I would be exceedingly (!!!) interested in anyone else's experiences with Hervé's suggestions, installing either High Sierra (which is what I'll probably start with if I try going back to macOS on this machine) or Mojave/Catalina. Perhaps I have a dying video card/PSU/motherboard/RAM? But I ran Memtest86 in Windows 7 while prepping for Win10 and got no errors in many passes, and none of the Win10 errors have seemed Nvidia-related... The enduring mystery of hardware for those of us who aren't fully electrical engineers... If anyone wants the EFI file I saved, please let me know! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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