Hackintosh Day 2: BIOS and Install Attempt

I am following the instructions found on Tonymacx86.com for setup and installation. So far I have created the boot drive with Unibeast for Sierra install, and Multibeast for later boots. I decided to go with the UEFI boot mode, but that may be a mistake. Since my board is old, and even thought it indicates I have UEFI, I might need to make a legacy boot stick.

I have only made 1 change to my BIOS, which was to change the PCI ROM Priority to EFI Compatible ROM, but this may be a mistake. If things don’t work right away I’ll come back and reverse this change. Everything else is Optimized Defaults.

Rebooting the computer shows this was a mistake, so time to remove the battery from the motherboard to reset everything and start over. With that complete, I noticed that I should also disable the Serial IO port, so we’re now back to optimized settings with the Serial IO turned off.

The UEFI boot loader didn’t work, so I reformatted the USB and used the Legacy loader instead. Hitting F9 on POST brought me to a black screen with an unblinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen, and finally to the Clover installer. First success!

Unfortunately Disk Utility couldn’t see the HDD that was installed in the machine. I swapped out a couple of drives, but nothing seemed to work, so I took one of my spare SATA drives, put it in an external drive box and connected it to the MacBook Air that has been my setup computer, and reformatted the HDD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID partition, as is required for a Mac boot drive. I have just restarted the target Hackintosh computer and Clover is re-starting the install process.

Unfortunately it’s still not working, so the only thing I can figure is that the installer is not connecting to the SATA drive, which is showing up for the boot drive selection. I’ll have to troubleshoot this problem and see what I can find.

Update [17:30]: Looking again at the BIOS, I noticed the SATA Mode Selection setting was IDE, not ACHI, so I just switched that over to see if it would help. I am trying the bootloader again. This change seems to have worked, as I can now see the HDD that I formatted to serve as my hard drive.

I have finished the initial install, but need to figure out how to get the 1050 Ti working properly as I have a lot of visual glitches, and I have to figure out which audio drivers I need. 12.5 is a bit tricky as it’s new and people are still figuring out the details, but maybe with a bit of time tomorrow I’ll get it solved.

Next tasks include understanding how to edit the config and kext files that are part of the setup. Ever onward!