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[GUIDE] Acer Aspire 7720G El Capitan Legacy Clover


Damx
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I have got an old Acer Aspire 7720G from a fellow. Since it took me a while to figure out how to make a working system I have decided to share this experience with somebody who may have similar setup.

 
The specs are:
  • CPU: T7500
  • Graphics: nVidia Geforce 9500M GS
  • Display: 17''WUXGA 1920x1200
  • Ethernet: Broadcom
  • Sound: Realtek ALC268
  • WiFi: Intel 4965 AGN (not working)

Finally I got almost everything working (Ethernet, sound incl. mic, camera, etc) which work without issues. Two things which I could not make natively function are WiFi and sleep.

 

Create installation media:

  1. Use 16GB USB stick, formatted via Disk Utility as FAT32 and MBR partition scheme
  2. Install Clover to USB in Legacy mode with the following settings:
    • post-1621577-0-90524500-1448231103_thumb.jpg
  3. Remove all subfolders in EFI/CLOVER/kexts except /Others
  4. Place required kexts in EFI/Clover/kexts/Others.
    • FakeSMC.kext
    • NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
    • VoodooPS2Controller.kext
  5. Replace VBoxHfs-64.efi with HFSPlus.efi in EFI/Clover/drivers64 and EFI/Clover/drivers64UEFI
  6. Place standard config.plist with nVidia settings in EFI/Clover (see attached config.plist.zip)
  7. Copy El Capitan installation to USB using Terminal (assuming you have already downloaded El Capitan from Apple store):
  8. sudo "/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia" --volume /Volumes/USB_NAME --applicationpath "/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app" --nointeraction
    

Install OS X:

  • Boot from created USB and use Disk Utility to format your hard drive as Apple HFSJ+ and GPT partition scheme.
  • Finish the install, takes about 45 min with two reboots regardless of '1 minute' showing. This will also create the Recovery partition.

 

Post Install:

  • Install Clover to your HDD with the following settings:
    • post-1621577-0-95279400-1448231099_thumb.jpg
  • Mount EFI partition if not yet mounted
  • Repeat steps 3 to 6 from above procedure when creating installation media
  • For ALC268 place the patched AppleHDA.kext into S/L/E replacing the original one (see this thread if you need more details). Note that you will have to repeat this step each time you install an update from Apple.
  • Add other kexts to EFI/Clover/kexts/Others:
    • BCM5722D.kext for Ethernet (search for this kext) - required to set up iMessage
    • HDAEnabler3.kext for ALC268
  • Disable SIP, repair permissions, clear caches and reboot from your HDD.

 

Other issues & solutions:

 

1. I had an issue with booting from HDD because the old BIOS doesn't boot the GPT disk when none of partition is set active. If you get 'No bootable device' error or similar then boot from your USB again and use fdisk in Terminal to set the active flag:

  1. sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
    p
    f 1
    w
    y
    quit 

WARNING: This method may break your Windows installation if you have it installed on the same GPT drive.

 

 

2. The walkaround with WiFi is to use external USB dongle, like cheap D-Link 140 with BearExtender-R515 driver. But I personally decided to replace my wireless card with Atheros 9280 and forget about wifi issue forever (you can use any of natively supported cards, they are widely available at eBay).

 

 

3. If for some reason you do not get the full 1920x1200 resolution in Clover boot screen you should set EDID in Clover config using the procedure below:

  • Get your EDID from Terminal
  • ioreg -l | grep IODisplayEDID 
    
  • Paste the output into CustomEDIT section of your config.plist.
  • Optional: Set PatchVBios to true.

 

4. You will have to generate your own SMBIOS values as well as ROM & MLB to get iMessage and other Apple services working. Use Mac3,1 or Mac4,1 depending on your CPU and video.

 

UPDATE 1:

 

5. If you want your battery to show correct values you will have to patch DSTD. Get instructions and my patch from RehubMan.

 

 

UPDATE 2:

 

Acer 7720G will not work with Sierra or later, unless you have upgraded your CPU to at least T9300 and changed SMBIOS profile to Mac4,1 or higher.

 

Good luck! 

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