Intel i5 3470 and Asus P8P67

Second build! [Work in progress. This is just a list of random thoughts for now]

This is my second build, and it is still a work in progress. Essentially I followed the steps outlined in the i7 build but had to overcome several issues which I discuss below.

Asus P8P67 motherboard (base version) has the following specs that are relevant to the build

• Realtek 8111E ethernet

• Realtek® ALC 892 audio

• i5 3470 (Ivy Bridge. Ditched my 2500K Sandy Bridge for this because the vanilla guide has pre-built config.plist files for >= Ivy Bridge)

There was a weird issue: following the vanilla guide, the MacOS installer wouldn't boot and would just hang at some "apfs_module_start 1683" error on the black screen before the installer. The 4th post of the following thread fixed the issue: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/catalina-hates-me.286452/

Basically put the referenced file into ACPI/patched folder of the EFI partition. This got Clover past the 1683 error and into the MacOS installer. After the first mandatory reboot, MacOS then ran into the "allocating 0xa00 pages at ....alloc type 2" error. This required changing the AptioMemoryFix.efi, which was a default recommended option in the Clover setup and is located in drivers/UEFI, to OsxAptioFix3Drv.efi. Erase AptioMemoryFix.efi because only one of these memory fixes can be used at the same time. (Note, there are other aptio fixes. These are all obtainable through the Clover setup under memory fixes. Try all of them one at a time until something works!)

Edit: the fix above only works most of the time. Weird. There is some memory fragmentation problem. Some people said you might have to calculate some manual "slide" parameter and boot with that parameter in Clover. But, from my experience, that parameter seems to change, so how do we set it dynamically?

The installation should work the rest of the way.

The motherboard or SSD doesn't boot from Clover as expected using the usual method of installing Clover to the internal drive. i.e., the bios would keep asking for a bootable drive even though we installed Clover onto the internal drive. The motherboard's boot settings need to be changed and Clover needs to be added to it.

According to the reddit post in the misc section, "The early UEFI BIOS from ASUS and ASRock is incomplete so there is some trouble for Clover to add itself to UEFI boot list, but we can do that manually." To do this, boot into the USB clover stick, and open the UEFI shell. In it, follow the general instructions, which are copied and pasted from step 5.7 of https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/310894-guide-asrock-z97-pro4-el-capitan-with-clover-uefi-installation/

Find bootx64.efi on HDD EFI partition with the combination of the following commands:

Shell> map fs* ➝ Show all partitions Shell> fs0: (or fs1: or fs2: ...)➝ Switch to fs0, fs1, fs2,... partitions Shell> ls ➝ List the contents of current partition / directory Shell> cd \efi\boot ➝ Change the directory to \efi\boot

Shell> ls Then:

Shell> help bcfg -b -v ➝ Get help on bcfg command

Shell> bcfg boot dump ➝ List current boot options

Shell> bcfg boot add N bootx64.efi "Clover" ➝ Add bootx64.efi from the current dir (\efi\boot) as a boot option labeled "Clover" (You will see this name also in the UEFI BIOS Boot menu boot items). N is the boot option number: 0 if you want it to be the first, 1 to be the second, etc.

Shell> bcfg boot dump ➝ Check if Clover is added

Shell> reset ➝ Restart the system

Note that with the USB Clover stick plugged in there will be two partitions with an EFI folder. Say they are fs0 and fs1. The way I differentiated was to find out which was USB and which was Sata by looking at the outputs from "map fs0" and "map fs1". For N, I chose 0 so that it is the default option. Now the computer should boot into Clover on the internal drive by default.

Note, sometimes it is useful to remove an extra with the command bcfg boot rm N, where N is the entry that you want to remove. Use bcfg boot dump to list all the entries.

The next issue is that even though the drive boots into Clover it doesn't automatically choose the MacOS partition automatically. So, go into config.plist in the configurator, go into the boot submenu, and change the timeout to something small, like 2 for 2 seconds, and add in the volume name. For me, the volume name is "CrucialMX500"; this was the name that I gave to the MacOS journaled partition in disk utility in one of the very first steps. I think you can also find the volume name in Clover; typically it will be XYZ in "Boot MacOS from XYZ" when browsing the Clover boot menu.

todo: usbmapping including mobo headers... disable mouse and keyboard and monitor detection in mobo for headless mode... check why the msi machine is using so much ram...back up EFI folder to bootable usb