Tl;dr: I can get Catalina installed and booting without the installer USB, but any and every change I make post install completely breaks the install, the ability to boot from USB, and even the USB itself. Yes, I have to re build the installer every time this happens.
Specs:
- Gigabyte AORUS WIFI Pro, F10 Bios
- i9900k
- 2x16g Ripjaws DDR4
- Samsung 950 Pro 256g
- Sticking with iGPU HD 630 for now.
- - - Current working install is using the currently available Catalina Beta, this basic guide and the config.plist mentioned in said guide, as well as FakeSMC.kext per the guide as well. BIOS settings are the standard recommended ones: Other OS, CSM disabled, vt-d disabled, XCHI Enabled - - -
First off this is my third Hackintosh. None have been this difficult/frustrating. I've managed to get it installed and booting from the installation without the usb by simply copying the EFI folder over and installing clover. Everything is running fine except for the obvious lack of functional I've yet to implement and a weird graphics glitch (tabs in finder and safari are blacked out/glitchy but I'll worry about this later).
The problem then is that literally any change I make (installing kexts or modifying config.plist) breaks the install and doesn't even let me boot from USB after the fact. It starts to load and then I get the 🚫 symbol. I've reinstalled ~15 times now (each just to try a single different post install modification) and each has broken the install including the ability for it to be booted from USB, AND the USB itself AND required me to login to my windows install (separate drive) and wipe the Mac install drive. Yes its required me to rebuild the installer USB each time this happens (which is blowing my mind as to how/why this could be happening). You could imagine how frustrating this is and how many hours I've sunk into this. The topper is that when this happens and I'm in verbose mode, the text is scrambled and unreadable. BUT, like I said before, the initial installation runs perfectly fine and is bootable without the USB...
At this point I'm assuming there's something basic I'm missing in the initial kexts that won't let anything else work besides the base system. I've tried every possible ethernet kext (as that is the first functionality I'm trying to get going), in 3 different locations (clover/kexts/other, s/l/e, l/e), 3 different versions of clover, multiple system ids, etc, etc. One strange thing is that I recently bought a USB 3.1 stick to make this constant reinstallation process faster (which it has immensely) but once the installation is complete the stick is no longer recognized. The previous USB 2.0 stick I was using would stay recognized after install. The obvious thought here is that USB is not functioning correctly but anything I've tried to get that going has the same effect of breaking the install all together.
I've read multiple guides on Mojave and my motherboard but none specific to Catalina as they don't really exist yet, google search yields hardly anything and is super anecdotal single case situations (as is a lot of Hackintosh testing obviously). I'm about to give up and try a Mojave install but the fact that I can get Catalina installed and booting is keeping me going (and I don't think it should be too fundamentally different anyways).
I'm currently back on a fresh, unmodified, bootable install, waiting for someone smarter than me to give me some other suggestions before wasting anymore time with this. Any ideas or suggestions or even thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated lol.
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