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