br0adband

I myself haven't had any issues with getting the basic OS itself installed meaning El Capitan using the guide by Jake Lo here (you may be talking about the same guide, for the record) - for my specific E6420 I had to make use of the DSDT.aml for the dual-link because I have a 1600x900 panel (Intel HD 3000 GPU, hoping to acquire an Nvidia based motherboard replacement at some point in the near future). I created the USB stick from inside an El Capitan 10.11.3 VM actually, followed the steps as listed, jumped to the bottom to get the vanilla EFI folder then dropped the E6420 content inside it to customize it, moved that folder to the EFI partition on the stick as instructed, and it went directly into the installation without any problems after that on a spare hard drive (I keep my primary OS as Windows even now). I've never encountered any issues with the USB ports, and I keep my E6420 on a dock so I have access to more (the internal NIC on this E6420 is damaged and non-functional at the actual port for some reason; the NIC on the dock works fine however since it's just a passthrough). Only thing i can suggest is perhaps redo the USB stick again, making sure you put those E6420 files in the proper folder (I messed that up twice till I figured out my mistake) and you do replace the EFI folder on the USB stick with the modified one - don't just try and merge them. Delete the one created by the Clover installer when you install it to the USB stick and replace it with the modified one entirely. Other than the Wi-Fi issues I've noted in posts above (which seem to have worked themselves out for the moment) and the Bluetooth (I don't use it so I just disconnected the adapter entirely) and the SD card reader (will work on getting that functional later) I haven't had any major hassles with anything else. Obviously since you have a 1366x768 display you'll need that DSDT.aml which is in post 2 of that guide by Jake Lo, but I'm guessing you're already aware of that. I believe you can use the E6220 one for your particular resolution as I don't see one specifically for the E6420 with 1366x768 resolution - I don't know if you have the Intel HD 3000 GPU or the Nvidia GPU, so I'm sure you'll figure out which one is appropriate as needed. My suggestion: back up whatever Yosemite data you have and do a proper clean install of El Capitan if possible. I attempted a Yosemite upgrade myself a few months ago and it failed every time so I stopped mucking around with this stuff for a few months but a little over a week ago I came back to it, found that guide by Jake and I've got El Capitan working very well at this point as I'd hoped with 10.11.4 (upgraded using the combo updater on top of 10.11.3). Good luck...

Ok so, yet another follow-up and a strange one at that. I have a Dell DW1390 (Broadcom 4311) card so, I yanked out the DW1515 (Atheros 9280) that was giving me the issues noted above. Rebooted back into 10.11.4 with nothing else changed and of course the DW1390 works but since it's just an 11bg card that's all I could see but I was able to click the menu bar icon and see what I expected to see: roughly 40 APs around me including the ones supplied by my apartment building's wireless service. So, I played with it for a few minutes, did some speed tests (disappointing actually, not sure why it was so slow, barely 7 Mbps connected to my regular AP) but it was working. Shut down, remove the DW1390, put the DW1515 back in, restart, get back into OS X and, well, for whatever reason now I am showing more than 3 APs around me - in fact I can see about 40 APs as expected. I haven't changed anything else in this setup: all I did was swap the two cards for a few minutes to test the DW1390 then removed it and put the DW1515 back in and suddenly it's working as expected. Of course I haven't rebooted yet to see if it'll continue working as it should but this definitely gives me hope, I just wish I could figure out what the hell changed by inserting the DW1390 even just for a few minutes. Don't know if anyone knows about it but I discovered a nifty Wi-Fi scanner built into OS X (random Google hit turned it up, wasn't even looking for it, honestly). If you hold the Windows key (Command) and then click the Wi-Fi menu bar icon, you'll get two additional entries: Create Diagnostics Report On Desktop and Open Wireless Diagnostics. If you then Windows on the menu bar you get more options, select Scan and you'll get a traditional Wi-Fi scanner display showing what's going on around you, pretty damned nifty and I didn't know it existed (just getting back into OS X recently so I know there's a lot of stuff I'll be finding along the way). I don't suspect I'll report on this anymore unless something breaks, just wanted to pass along the info from my experience(s) with this little wireless issue. I'm going to do more research and find out what the most recommended Wi-Fi card is for OS X on the E6420, I think it'll end up being something that's Broadcom based, perhaps with Bluetooth as well on a combo card. I disconnected the stock Bluetooth card in this laptop (Dell 375) because I just couldn't get it functional at all, not even connecting to my iPhone 6 at this point. Also, the SD card reader still isn't functional but that's a back-burner item at this point. Aside from those two issues everything seems to work just fine.

So I finally had a chance to redo this E6420, installed 10.11.3 clean again then instead of mucking around with anything else I just went straight to installing 10.11.4 before doing anything else (installing Clover to the hard drive, installing kexts to the hard drive, not even adding sound yet) and it's the same thing as mentioned above, same setup, and again it's just showing 3 networks on Wi-Fi both from the menu icon and also in the network preferences pane as well. I can live with it, sure, but it's just odd and I have no idea what might be causing it. I'm going to presume it's a change in the IO80211Family kext or something someplace. I checked the info under Wi-Fi for the system report and under Software Versions at the top the only difference between things are these two items: 10.11.3 Original Wi-Fi Software Versions: Menu Extra: 11.0 (1110.33) System Information: 11.0 (1100.1) 10.11.4 Updated Wi-Fi Software Versions: Menu Extra: 11.0 (1121.34) System Information: 12.0 (1100.2) So I'm going to guess it's something there causing this issue for me and my particular hardware configuration, I might try swapping out the 10.11.3 IO80211Family.kext and see what happens. Edit: Well that proved fruitless (swapping the kexts) - while the swap was successful the results are the same so, apparently it's an issue on my config not caused by the kext, crap.

General question for anyone on an E6420: I just did the update to 10.11.4 (on top of a clean 10.11.3 installation that had no issues at all that I could detect) and oddly since the update when I look at Wi-Fi networks using the Wi-Fi button on the menu bar I only see 3 networks listed - with 10.11.3 I'd see over 30 of them since I live in an apartment building in the downtown area (I can detect about 50 from my apartment alone). It's never showing me more than just 3 of them at any time, and there's another thing as well: The Wi-Fi adapter is only working in 11n mode, it's not picking up anything on 11b/g at all - my apartment building offers Wi-Fi service (which I don't use) but their mesh network has no 11n support at this time. From my apartment I typically can see 7 of the APs on the mesh network - my iPhone here and my BlackBerry Z10 both show the other networks so it's not like they just up and disappeared. Trying to figure out why this is currently happening after that 10.11.4 update I did a few hours ago. That's the only change in this system so far (working bare metal install with Clover v3368 (the latest version). I haven't changed anything else since the update in terms of anything that could be relevant - earlier today I was able to easily see all the Wi-Fi activity around me but now it's suddenly just vanished and it's only showing me 3 at a time off the menu bar button. I did check the System Report for Wi-Fi and it's showing a lot more info as expected as well as about 30 11n networks but it's not showing the building Wi-Fi at all on 11b/g even though the report info obviously shows things working: Just curious to know if anyone else might be seeing this kind of behavior with 10.11.4 (if you've updated) or if it's probably just something on my particular E6420 that got itself borked during the update. And here's what the network pane shows: Obviously there's something a bit weird going on. I'm going to install 10.11.3 again to a spare hard drive so I don't pooch what I've got working now and do some testing. I do know that booting into the Recovery HD and looking at the network access (upper right corner) shows me a bunch of them, but for whatever reason in 10.11.4 itself it's not so, kinda baffling me at the moment.

Well no, that DSDT is for the dual link version meaning 1600x900, sorry about that. The DSDT for the 1366x768 resolution would be the one that's 33,853 bytes in size so the one that comes inside the E6420 boot pack designed for that resolution. I never used the E6220 boot pack myself since the E6420 version(s) exist. I haven't been able to get the EFI booting properly so I gave up and just went with the regular method which is working for me now.

I had the issue of it going into hibernation until I put the proper DSDT.aml file in the proper location in the EFI partition - once that file was in place it booted just fine to the login screen and wasn't an issue anymore and I mean the DSDT.aml for the E6420 with 1600x900 resolution which I found in another thread, the one that comes with the boot pack doesn't work - at least it didn't for me personally). The DSDT (which is needed for the 1600x900 and the dual link aspect) I'm speaking of is in this post: https://osxlatitude.com/index.php?/topic/8686-newb-install-help-e6420-el-capitan/&do=findComment&comment=56396 Can't say it'll help you in your situation but that got me past the hibernation issue. You do have to rename it to DSDT.aml from the filename it uses. Here's my full EFI setup (doesn't include the SSDT stuff, this is what's on my installer stick only), you're welcome to try it. I have an E6420, Core i5-2540 CPU, 8GB, Intel HD 3000 graphics, and this folder for the EFI partition is what works for me now every time - it took me two damned days to get it working for my machine so maybe it'll be of some use to you. I just looked at your EFI folder, the DSDT.aml file you have is the wrong one, it's 33,853 bytes - the proper DSDT.aml for the E6420 with dual link 1600x900 Intel HD 3000 graphics is 33,882 bytes. That's how I noted you're using the wrong one. The EFI folder I'm sharing here should be used on the USB stick only because you'll need to add the SSDT.aml for your specific E6420 to the EFI folder on the hard drive after you install Clover on the hard drive - that SSDT.aml file isn't needed on the USB stick, at least I don't think it is as mine doesn't have one. Anyway, good luck, I hope this helps somewhat. EFI.zip

Yah, it's working now, started over for like the 12th time and just gave up on the EFI aspects, so far no issues noted. Installed VoodooHDA and aside from it not respecting the volume control in the menubar (which I think I just discovered a fix for with the plist edit) so, it's all good.

I installed the latest VoodooHDA and yes it did help with the volume but on some occasions the sound will just "die" totally for no reason I can figure out but it's an improvement and just another baby step I suppose. My issue now is getting it to boot from the hard drive, still doing research but after a dozen attempts now I'm starting to get somewhat pissed. - boots from the USB stick fine without any issues (F12, USB stick, boot El Capitan (from the hard drive) = success every time - installed Clover v3354 as instructed in the guide, copied the EFI folder intact from the USB stick's EFI partition to the EFI partition on the hard drive - verified that the EFI partition on the hard drive is FAT16 since the E6420 can't see it otherwise - attempt to boot the laptop from the EFI partition on the hard drive - never works I'll keep trying and changing things a step at time but, it sure does seem rather problematic at this point. I know Herve mentioned something about Enoch but I haven't done anything related to that method yet, guess I'll get there at some point. And yes, I've followed those instructions on how to get it to look for the file in EFI/BOOT/ but still nothing, it just hangs and then pops up the error about no bootable device found, ugh. So I suppose now is as good a time as any to just flat out ask this question: Can the E6420 boot from the EFI partition on the hard drive with Clover, or must I look for an alternative method like Enoch - if Clover can work and I just haven't put the pieces together yet then I'll keep at it, but if this is not going to work at all then I'd appreciate knowing if anyone has that info. I'm going under the assumption that yes people have their E6420 laptops working just fine booting from the hard drive, no USB stick required anymore.

Will look into it later, I'm just using the "defaults" from that guide so far which appears to use the AppleHDAIDT.kext from the boot pack, if VoodooHDA can improve things then I'll definitely want that one, thanks for the info.

Bleh, everything I said (in the post that I just edited/deleted) was a mistake on my part, my apologies. Herve, what you said is completely accurate: the DSDT.aml was just to address the fact that I have a 1600x900 panel, nothing to do with the CPU. I don't know why a GPU issue was pushing my E6420 into hibernation but it doesn't matter at this point as it's working with that Dual Link aspect. Aside from the low headphone volume things are going well.

Ok, got most everything working on my E6420/i5-2540/8GB/etc, still working on Clover on the hard drive to boot (I'll live for now using the USB stick), but after doing some more research it appears our issue with the low volume through the headphone output isn't something that is going to be resolved at some point. I did the "trick" to put the laptop to sleep/wake it up but it made no difference on my particular E6420, perhaps I'll continue trying various things and maybe something will help. I noticed even in Windows 7 using the stock Microsoft "high definition" audio driver or the actual Dell supplied driver (the Intel IDT one) always tended to be low but not this low as it is using El Capitan (not sure Mavericks or Yosemite would be any different at all, probably not) - but curiously under Linux (Mint, Ubuntu, etc) the volume can get rather excessively loud, even to the point of being able to totally blow out a pair of headphones I had a while back (was testing the volume and went just a wee bit too far, cracked the transducer in a set of Koss KSC-75 earclips). So, it's always been an issue for me that the actual sound hardware in the E6400 I have as well as my current primary laptop, the E6420, is capable of some pretty serious output volume but the Windows drivers just don't allow for it. Ah well, I'll survive, I've got audio and I'm ok with it, just wish it was louder like many others.

Eureka!!! Progress indeed, I went back and thought about it, did more research and read that other thread (Newb Install Help - E6420 El Capitan) and noticed that person has a similarly configured E6420 (only 4GB of RAM however) but most importantly he/she is using a Core i5-2540 like I am so so so... when I saw that Jake had shared a DSDT for the i5-2540 I grabbed it, replaced the one on my USB stick (in the EFI partition EFI folder) and voila, first attempt got me installed (yes, the 4th full clean install - I'm picky like that) now I'm on the machine making this post. So far so good, some things didn't/don't work just yet, I haven't gotten to the additional steps in the installation guide (starting with the EFI-Mounter step just before step 8) but I'm rather happy to have made it this far finally. After releasing the world's first generic DVD installer for OSx86 back in 2005 it's been a long time since I've had any real fun with OSX overall. It runs fine in a VM on this same laptop without issues but of course the performance is lackluster at best and no QE/CI in the VM but it appears to work well so far as I can tell on the bare metal hardware. Yes I wish I had the Nvidia GPU in this E6420 but for now things are great. Had to get rid of the Broadcom Wi-Fi/BT card, didn't get recognized so I put in an Atheros 802.11n I had laying around and it works fine so far as pictured below. Audio hardware shows up in the hardware info, but of course it's not actually functional at the moment so, more work to do. Still booting off the stick to the hard drive for the moment, working on getting Clover installed to the hard drive but, at least I know it's working. As someone that's been part of The OSx86 Project since almost day one I have to say it's pretty cool how things have progressed over the years, and I offer my thanks to those that are far more into things here at this forum for Latitude owners like myself (my preferred brand and model of laptop for a long long time now) as well as those at other locations that continue to keep "OSx86" in the limelight making it useful for those of us that just don't care to own "a real Mac..." for whatever reasons we have. One question if anyone can answer it: I see two updates on the App Store, one is the Digital Camera RAW Update that shouldn't cause any issues but the other one is a MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.7 that could seriously wreck things on a Hackintosh like this one just getting started - anyone know if it's "safe" to install that or should I just hold off. I'd hate to get things set up nicely and working then trash everything and have to start over again. I suppose I could do a full backup here in a bit to another hard drive, probably will considering the effort I've expended just to get this far but if anyone knows for sure I'd appreciate a nod in the right direction. As for switching to some other method, well, I just got success and it wasn't because of Clover - it was because I hadn't found (at least not at that point) the proper DSDT for this E6420 of mine because the overwhelming majority of people have the i5-2520 and I and maybe one or two other people appear to have the i5-2540 so, it mattered. Since I've had some success now I'll look into other methods and see how things work if I need to. Right now I just need to get the remaining components functional and I'm good to go. Never even heard of Enoch before your post, so don't blame people for trying to learn new stuff - that's where the mastery comes from.

Well it's been awhile and I gave up on OSX on my Latitude E6420 but of course sooner or later I get the itch to try again and here's where I'm at: Same laptop from the OP of this thread, only thing that's changed is I put in a Broadcom BCM43228 802.11abgn Wi-Fi card w/Bluetooth 4.0 support, everything else is the same (original Wi-Fi card was the Intel 6300). I'm using a spare 60GB hard drive for testing this and I'm stuck. I followed the Dell Latitude/Inspiron El Capitan Clover Guide by Jake Lo, made the USB stick without any issues using the El Capitan 10.11.3 installer (just downloaded from Apple earlier today). No issues creating the stick, and I chose to use Clover v3320 because that's what the guide stated - yes I realize there's a newer version I haven't tried yet but I'm not sure the issue I'm having lies with Clover itself. Anyway, I'm using Legacy mode to boot (not UEFI) as the guide states, I did take note of the additional info in the bootpacks section - the first time I tried to do the stick I was just getting the basic black background from Clover and after redoing things and putting the boot pack files in the proper place (kind of confusing until I re-read it twice and then decided to put the files in where I felt they should be) and after that when I booted the Clover screen showed the Dell Latitude background so that was progress. I chose to boot from the USB stick as expected, everything went fine albeit slow since it's a 5400 rpm 60GB drive that's maybe 7-8 years old or something close to it. It booted to the OSX installer fine, Disk Utility was used to set up the drive (single partition of course) and then the installation process went fine. After that was done, it rebooted as expected and as the guide said I hit F12 to choose the stick again, chose to boot from the hard drive (named El Capitan) and it went fine until the screen went black, for like 2 minutes with a ton of hard drive activity going on and the USB mouse I had attached was still powered on. After about 2.5 minutes the mouse powered down, the hard drive activity stopped, then I noticed the power button on the laptop was flashing - it went into hibernation and I don't know precisely why. I did more reading, found something about Slide=0 as a boot argument and Inject Intel so I rebooted off the stick and checked the Clover options which already had those options/boot arguments and tried again (I did a complete reinstall once more, didn't want to have any issues with the potentially hibernated system). Again, same issue: I get the Apple logo, I get the progress bar, I get power to the USB mouse, I get lots and lots of hard drive activity, and then when the screen goes black I get a lot of hard drive activity with the mouse still powered on - this time I moved it every 20-30 seconds hoping it might keep the system awake so it wouldn't hibernate, of course that didn't work either. Tried a 3rd time (yes, 3rd full clean install) but chose verbose to see what was going on but once it gets to the point where the screen blacks out I obviously can't see anything at all. So it's going into hibernate mode for some reason and I'm clueless. I used all the BIOS settings that Herve listed in another thread, a perfect match, the only difference is I have an E6420 with an i5-2540 while most people seem to have the Core i5-2520, I don't think that should be causing this issue. I am taking a break from it to make this post hoping someone might help. I've done searches about the E6420 (and the E6220) regarding hibernation like this during the installation and setup process but I haven't found any useful info. Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Months ago I could never get even this far - the USB sticks I created never worked, always got KP's like crazy but this time at least I can (apparently) get the files copied over to the hard drive and then I get stuck because of this power/hibernate issue. Thanks... ps I'm using BIOS A23 from January 2016, don't think it'll matter but who knows.

Thanks for the responses and info, will do more research and then give one of those methods a go.

Well I've been away for some time (started with The OSx86 Project way back in 2005 so it's been a decade now since this all got rolling I suppose) and I've got that old itch again to get involved. I own a Dell Latitude E6420 (duh) but at the moment it's a non-Nvidia GPU model with the following: - i5-2540m CPU so it has the Intel HD 3000 GPU - 8GB of RAM - 500GB Hitachi 7200 rpm hard drive (want an SSD but that has to wait till I hopefully get an Nvidia GPU-based mobo) - 1600x900 panel - I have several wireless cards I can make use of, both Broadcom (with BT integrated) and Atheros so I'm guessing one of them should work (factory Intel 6300 but it's removed at the moment in favor of an Atheros) The rest is the basic hardware I'm sure you're all familiar with. Now, having said that, here's what I'd like to see if I can get on this machine and be as functional as possible: OS X 10.11 El Capitan I don't care about any of the older releases, most especially not Yosemite. My fave version was probably Mountain Lion - disclaimer: I can and currently do run Mountain Lion and El Capitan (the GM candidate build 15A282b) in VMware Workstation Pro 12 without many issues but of course it's performance that's subpar compared to what the bare metal hardware would be capable of providing. I know that getting Core/Quartz acceleration could be a problem (meaning it might never work) on the Intel HD 3000 GPU but I'm hoping I can get something out of it. Since it'll be some time before i can swap out the mobo for one that has a native Nvidia Quadro NVS 4200m I figured I might as well spend it with the work needed to see just how possible things are with the Intel GPU and start taking notes and doing the research now. Anyway, I did a few searches for e6420 and capitan (since "el" is only two letters and doesn't seem to work as a search term) and came up with zip, nada, nothing. Seems unbelievable so, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask if anyone else might be working on such a combination. I know that El Capitan isn't finalized yet (the GM build is a candidate one that could end up being the actual Gold Master but there's two weeks left to catch any showstoppers) and that some things could change between now and whenever and I'm fine with that. I like El Capitan, it has some features that I find very appealing and I'd really like to give this a shot to see what might happen. Like things were a decade ago, it's something interesting to do with respect to pushing the limits of what my hardware could be capable of. I don't necessarily care about a dual boot situation (Windows 7 Pro is still my primary day to day OS but I do run several Linux distros in VMs and a dual boot with Linux Mint presently). If anyone has any advice, experiences (with using El Capitan on an E6420), or suggestions I'm going to check in on this thread daily for a while hoping there's another kindred spirit that might be interested. Had a chance to get a nearly brand new E7440 maxed out (seriously) in a pawn shop recently for $250 and I just couldn't get the money together, that would have been a great machine to own and I regret missing out on it, but this E6420 is and has been rock solid in the time I've owned it so I know it should be capable of a bit more with respect to El Capitan. Guess I'll see what happens...