MacOSX :: Catalina quick install on GA-H51M-DS2

My son's personal computer consistently experiences performance issues while running Roblox. Initially operating on the Windows 10 platform, it exhibited significant lag. The cause of this lag remains uncertain; it may stem from either the operating system or the hardware components.

The system specifications are as follows:

Motherboard: GA-H61M-DS2

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU): Initially an RX4700 8GB DDR5, later replaced with Nvidia GT640

Random Access Memory (RAM): 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3

WiFi Card: TL-WDN4800 N900

Ethernet (ETH): RTL8168E/8111E

Solid State Drive (SSD): T-WOLF 120GB

In an attempt to resolve the performance issues, I employed an EFI package obtained from https://github.com/nongbin/Gigabyte-H61M-DS2-Hackintosh, utilizing a High Sierra USB boot installer. Although this facilitated booting into the installer, the system continued to exhibit lag.

Subsequently, I replaced the GPU with an older model, specifically the Gainward GT640, and proceeded with the installation process. However, it became evident that the installer was corrupted, halting progress after partitioning to HFS.

Efforts to utilize Monterey and Big Sur proved futile as they were incompatible with the aforementioned EFI package. Consequently, I resorted to Catalina, presuming compatibility based on the package's apparent association. I created a USB installer from the Catalina image and proceeded with the installation, integrating the EFI package.

Of paramount importance, it became apparent that Catalina necessitates the use of the APFS file system. Initially setting the disk format to HFS+ in Disk Utility resulted in repeated installation failures. Upon discovering the requirement for APFS, I adjusted the disk format accordingly, enabling successful installation.

Post-installation, it became evident that the TL-WDN4800 network card, utilizing Atheros technology, would not function. Fortuitously, I encountered guidance advising the utilization of Hackintool from https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/62265/hackintool/download to patch the necessary kernel extensions (kexts) for Catalina compatibility.

Following the download, I accessed the tool's utilities from the top menu and executed the prescribed sequence of actions as depicted in the accompanying image.

The initial click swiftly disabled the gatekeeper and facilitated mounting the disk in the read/write mode, marking an expedient commencement.

Subsequently, with another decisive click, the patch to reinvigorate the TL-WDN4800 was installed, heralding a pivotal moment in restoration.

Behold, I find myself exhilaratingly updating this post from the freshly minted Hackintosh environment.

GA-Z77-DS3H with Intel Core i7-3770k 3.4 GHz Ivy Bridge Running High Sierra [Success]

This is an update I am supposed to publish like almost a month ago.

Yes, I managed to finally run an El Capitan on my machine. Successfully! But I took the challenge to get High Sierra. The usual installation method, Verbose mode, setting all those switches during the reboot didn't work at all. I read some articles telling to remove Signature & MATS section in the config.plists in the EFI partition. I did but to no success.

I had almost given up attempting when I purposely wanted the installation to fail when I let the USB installer run by itself; without turning on any boot switch and I didn't even want to see the Verbose messages.

Surprisingly, it gets to the loading bar, flickers, calibrates the screen and proceeded with the loading bar till it loads the installation screen?

That easy??? That's it. I just proceed to install High Sierra from that point and kept a backup in case things went wrong.

Details

OS: Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.3 64 bit
Processor: Intel Core i7-3770k 3.4 GHz Ivy Bridge
RAM: 8 GB Corsair RAM 1600 MHz x 4 = 32 GB
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA Z77-DS3H Rev 1.0 with latest bios f11a
Graphics Card: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 2GB DDR3 RAM Rev2.0
Optical: ASUS DRW-24D3ST
Storage: Western Digital WDC WD30EZRX-00D8PB0 3 TB
Power Supply: Corsair RM Series 850W

Downloads

• Unibeast
• High Sierra Installer
• multibeast 5.4.3 (for audio only)
• Latest clover installer for EFI boot loader

config.plists
There's a part in the config.plist in the EFI/CLOVER folder which I removed

APCI
DropTables

 
    Signature
    MATS
 

Graphics - works OOB. No configuration needed. I have it running with 2 monitors connected through DVI ports. I have 1 more port for HDMI and the other for VGA, unused. 

Audio
1. Installed ALC887/ALC888 Current driver from multibeast 5.4.3 
2. Run audio_cloverALC-130_v1.0s10.command and restart

Sleep - Works with keyboard delays. It will respond after 3-4 minutes. 

Boot - I copied the whole EFI content of my USB bootloader to the Hard Disk bootloader. Easy peasy.

I just needed those things to work. In fact I disabled the sleep function so I don't have to deal with the delays after waking up. 

Thank you @Apple! This is the easiest installation ever. 

Goodbye Mountain Lion, Hello El Capitan...!

When your GAZ77DS3H desktop failed to start

My Mountain Lion hackintosh had been running smoothly and very stable for the last three and a half years. Even though it runs superbly, many things has gone outdated and no longer receiving updates.

Most apps work like nobody's business but I admit that some crucial features like security and apple compatibility had becoming unfavorably pain in the ass.

I have this kind of habit to download any of the Mac OS new release if they are available for download. Previously I had Maverick, and after a while Apple Apps Store allows me to download El Capitan Installer.

Having that, I did install Maverick but I didn't proceed with the settings as it doesn't differ much from my Mountain Lion. My father wanted a new PC so he bought a machine and I managed to run Maverick on that machine; stable and without issues.

Things started to get itchy when Chrome is no longer getting updates from Google. That was when I was looking into getting new Mac OS to run on my machine and I had been On and Off doing it on that Z77DS3H machine of mine.

Just recently, I managed to buy 3 USB flash drive from Lazada, just for the purpose of doing this upgrade. I might want to

1. Install El Capitan
2. Upgrade currently running Windows 7 to 8 so I can do UEFI installation

I even bought a 1TB flash disk, aside from the 3 flash drive. I hope I was scammed but amazingly I'm not. Imagine a 1TB flash drive priced at RM50?? *Update: Yes I was scammed - The disk displayed 1TB but after certain threshold, it's no longer able to be updated.*

So for the past few days, I managed to setup the USB installation disk for El Capitan and installed it a few times. Tested out many things; including software updates and multiple device installation. Mostly failed especially sound device till I found this solution to

1. Install ALC887/ALC888 Current driver from multibeast 5.4.3
2. Run audio_cloverALC-110_v1.0s10.command and restart

The audio works like a charm. The only thing left is the IDE LAN i bought which is supposedly working with OSX but work with none of the OS except when I accidentally run Maverick version one day. So i must figure out how.

The only thing was, I cleanly reinstalled and gets all the available updates from Apps Store, and rerun the sound solution.

Teeeeet-tet-tet

My GT640 cards become undetected. Damn. I rebooted a few times and it is still undetected until I decided to reset the BIOS numerous times, reinstall the new f11a BIOS for my mobo and still undetected. That was for 4 hours.

I tried to recall to set the graphic card to

1. Set Peg to Gen1
2. Initial display set to PEG
3. Disable the internal graphics card

and did that for many many times till I almost give up. I went to the kitchen and started to help my wife with the house chores until I remembered why I had 2 graphics cards last time.

I had to set the graphics card settings as above and get another card as a dummy, let it detect the other graphics cars, run the OS, shutdown, and swap with GT640.

Walla it works!!!

There goes 6 hours of time which I should have spent with kids, and perhaps to spent this superb time with my wife when all the kids already went to bed.

Perfecting my Hackintosh Build

I have just upgraded my Snow Leopard to from 10.6.0 to 10.6.6 successfully yesterday. It begins with the upgrade for iTunes. I was holding the Mac OS update due to the fact that I will lose all my sound settings.

As expected, after upgrading to 10.6.6, I lost my sound. My Hackintosh is muted.

The reason why I'm scared to upgrade is due to the fact that I might have lost the sound kext for my hackintosh. I have also forgotten what sound card that I'm using. Thanks to my previous post of the Hackintosh which stated my Sound Card was actually ALC 1200. I thought it was ALC888 or ALC889.

The main resource for ALC 1200 is at http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=161430. There are 2 kind of fix provided in the page. Last time I did use the fix without having to edit DSDT from this page as well. As I didn't understand a thing in DSDT, I opted for HDAEnabler and no DSDT editing as I didn't know anything about DSDT.

All this while I didn't understand DSDT editing at all. All the guide over the Internet did not properly state what exactly needs to be done after compiling the DSDT. It was quite simple actually. Heck to those saying that DSDT editing is hard and confusing. Reading it that way made me think that it's hard.

It was known that by using the HDAEnabler, once the OS is upgraded, you will have to do the sound all over again. So this time, I'm opting for the DSDT editing. I have a few things to fix as well; eg. CMOS reset problem.

Actually DSDT editing is easy. After compiling, what do you really need to do is just to compy it to root folder and restart. As easy as that :)

DSDT Editing:

The easiest way to do DSDT editing is by using DSDTSE, which can be downloaded from http://www.osx86.es/FArchivos/FDSDTSE.zip.

1. Extract and install DSDTSE package
2. Once installed, browse through "/" folder and double click on dsdt.aml. A new window will be opened with an extract from the DSDT file. 
3. HDEF fix
4. insert this code to dsdt file
5. Device (HDEF)
               {
                   Name (_ADR, 0x001B0000)
                   Method (_DSM, 4, NotSerialized)
                   {
                       Store (Package (0x0A)
                           {
                               "built-in",
                               Buffer (One)
                               {
                                   0x01
                               },
   
                               "codec-id",
                               Buffer (0x04)
                               {
                                   0x88, 0x08, 0xEC, 0x10
                               },
   
                               "layout-id",
                               Buffer (0x04)
                               {
                                   0x0C, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00
                               },
   
                               "device-type",
                               Buffer (0x11)
                               {
                                   "Realtek ALC1200"
                               },
   
                               "PinConfigurations",
                               Buffer (One)
                               {
                               }
                           }, Local0)
                       DTGP (Arg0, Arg1, Arg2, Arg3, RefOf (Local0))
                       Return (Local0)
                   }
               }
6. Some board may have DTGP error while compiling. Please insert this code at the beginning of the file after the first {
7. Method (DTGP, 5, NotSerialized)
       {
           If (LEqual (Arg0, Buffer (0x10)
                   {
                       /* 0000 */    0xC6, 0xB7, 0xB5, 0xA0, 0x18, 0x13, 0x1C, 0x44,
                       /* 0008 */    0xB0, 0xC9, 0xFE, 0x69, 0x5E, 0xAF, 0x94, 0x9B
                   }))
           {
               If (LEqual (Arg1, One))
               {
                   If (LEqual (Arg2, Zero))
                   {
                       Store (Buffer (One)
                           {
                               0x03
                           }, Arg4)
                       Return (One)
                   }
   
                   If (LEqual (Arg2, One))
                   {
                       Return (One)
                   }
               }
           }
   
           Store (Buffer (One)
               {
                   0x00
               }, Arg4)
           Return (Zero)
       }
8. To fix my CMOS reset, I used this fix. The one in bold Red value was 4 before. So I changed it to 2.
9.                 Device (RTC)
                   {
                       Name (_HID, EisaId ("PNP0B00"))
                       Name (ATT0, ResourceTemplate ()
                       {
                           IO (Decode16,
                               0x0070,             // Range Minimum
                               0x0070,             // Range Maximum
                               0x00,               // Alignment
                               0x02,               // Length
                               )
                       })
10. I keep recompiling after every fix to ensure no error in the codes. After all this fixes, the compile successful with a warning. It was the _WAK warning which was fixed using this code at the end of _WAK paragraph.
11. Method (_WAK, 1, NotSerialized)
        {       
            ............................
            Return (Package (0x02)
            {
                Zero,
                Zero
            })
        }
12. Then my compile was successful without error and warning at all.
13. Backup the old dsdt.aml in "/" folder and replace with the one you just compile. Normally after compiling, DSDTSE will open a new finder window with direction to the compiled DSDT.aml

AppleHDA fix:

I downloaded the AppleHDA fix with DSDT patch file from http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=80281. You mus register before you are able to download this file. Extract this file and install.

Final thing to do is, RESTART. After restart, I have no more CMOS reset and the most important thing is, I got my sound back!

Retail Snow Leopard on my desktop

Finally, after buying the Snow Leopard installation CD for quite sometimes (I think I bought it last year), only now that I managed to get it installed to a PC and get it fully running. Tried with so many methods, then I decided to buy an almost compatible to Apple setup CPU.

The spec of the newly bought PC is as below:

Intel Quad Core 8300 2.5GHz Processor

Gigabyte GA EP43-UD3L motherboard bought from Lowyat

MSI n9500 GT 1GB PCIe Display Card

8GB RAM

1 TB HDD

I first tried the Kakewalk Installation method which is pretty easy to be done but I have to choose the GA EP45-UD3L method instead as it doesn't have any support for EP43-UD3L, so that was the closest I can pick. The installation was easy, except that the display card didn't work Out Of the Box (OOB), of which I have to use lookup for the nvflash utility, setup a bootable Dos USB flash and run the nvflash to get the ROM file. The using the OSx86 tools to inject the EFI string using the NVCAP string obtained from the nvflash utility.

Unluckily, my sound card is not as advertised in the website, which is reported to be using the ALC 888 codec. Mine was using the ALC1200. Using Kakewalk installation method, it was kind of messing up with my HDA kexts and installing the Kext for ALC1200 downloaded from the Internet was not a success.

Then I tried using the Snow Boot Loader installation Method. Good thing was:

Display work OOB. Even though I have to change the resolution, it goes blank blue and I restarted. It goes well after that.

ALC 1200 was installed with success. It works like a charm!

But I'm not pretty sure whether it is running in 64 bit or otherwise. I will have to check.

Will put a snapshot in the next post. Cheers :)

Passion

Beside doing photography and starting to be actively playing music again, my passion towards 1 and 0 has never been off.

Even though lately I thought I'm already bored with computers, the actual thing was I just needed something new, just to fire up my interest again.

Legally not correct, but the challenge of doing it the right way and getting it to work is definitely a 'yes-yes' stuff to me.

I've started off with this project since quite some times ago, starting by buying the SL install DVD of which I've had never got it to be running on any system yet ever. Tremendous hours spent on the Net and RTFM will definitely not getting me to anywhere yet.

I've posted some screen shot on Facebook, whereby I managed to get a Leopard 10.5.2 to be installed and running on my Desktop and an Acer laptop as well. What I hated most was, I wasn't even able to get it running on my very own Asus Laptop with that HD LCD screen, of which, if it's ever going to be running the Mac OS X on it, it will definitely be as good as the Macbook display, at least at par.

As for now, I even manage to get it to be running on my other desktop and I'm planning to get it running on my other Acer Laptop, which currently I believe to be having the hard disk problem.

Buying a Mac book at the price of 2 laptops is definitely a pain in the ass. In terms of performance, with the same amount of money, I can build a super duper powerful Mac Custom system. How much is it to buy a Mac with a Quad Core processor, or even an i3 or i5 processor or even an i7 (owh am I dreaming too much), and imagine it having at 4 GB or 8 GB to be safe, and a TB of hard disk.

Keep on dreaming as it will cost you at least one and a half, of an EVO 6 half cut.

For about 2.5 k, I can get a decent Quad Core or an i5 processor with 8GB memory and 1TB hard disk, with an HD monitor linked through the HDMI cable.

And running the latest SL!