DSMOS has arrived freeze/restart woes.

[Insidious622]

Motherboard: MSI H81M-E33

CPU: Intel Core i5-4570

GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 960

RAM: 8GB DDR3-1600

Install medium: 16gb SanDisk USB stick with Clover and a vanilla OS X El Capitan image, created with latest BootDiskUtil.

 

Quick description of problem: System boots all the way to "DSMOS has arrived" and then reboots, or freezes, depending on what I do.

Long story follows.

I'll start out by saying I have basically no idea what I'm doing beyond having extensively googled things, read various walkthroughs, read the wikis, and generally poked around. I haven't spent time getting a  Hackintosh running since 10.5. All this bootloader stuff, all the stuff with DSDTs, is all basically completely new to me. Back when I was doing things it was all modified kernels and boatloads of kexts.

 

I started out with it just getting about 10 seconds into the boot process, with -v showing a row of plus signs and then rebooting into POST immediately.

Tried nv_disable=1, no dice, tried screwing around with settings, no dice, tried following various walkthrough (many seemingly out of date, or, and I mean this community no offense, written in very poor english that I had a hard time understanding), no dice.

 

I ended up finding a forum post  where someone suggested moving your display to the integrated graphics and putting your bios on "initialize IGP" instead of "initialize PEG", and that got me much, much further into the process already.

However, I then got a kernel panic. I couldn't figure out why for a bit, until I tried clearing out the "FakeCPUID" field in Clover. Seems one of the walkthroughs I'd tried to follow had had me set that to something (306A0 or something like that?) and it was causing problems with ACPIPM. That got me to where I am now. Which is, it gets seemingly most of the way through the boot process, gets to "DSMOS Has Arrived", and then a few seconds later, the computer resets into POST.

Effects of tinkering:
Enabling "IntelGfx" DSDT: Kernel panic (too fast to see what exactly, it reboots immediately afterwards, but its very early in boot)

Enabling Safe Mode: Kernel panic (see above, exact same results)

Enabling nv_disable: No effect (still resets)

Disabling all DSDTs: No effect

Disabling Intel injection: DSMOS Has arrived and then a freeze instead of a reset.

Setting Intel Injection FakeID to 0x99999999 to try to force VESA: DSMOS has arrived and then a freeze.

Removing OsxAptioFix2Drv-64.efi from drivers64UEFI: Freeze after row of plus signs.

Replacing OsxAptioFix2Drv-64.efi with OsxAptioFixDrv-64.efi: Reset to POST after plus signs.

Booting Clover in BIOS mode: Freeze after row of plus signs

 

About the only things I haven't tried that I actually think/have the knowledge to think might help are: 

Removing the nVidia card from my PCI-E slot
Trying a different OSX install image (I don't have a dmg/hfs on hand for anything else, my Mac is resting in pieces.)

 

I will happily zip up and post the contents of my EFI partition if that would be helpful in diagnosing my issue.

I've been working on this on my own for 12 hours and while I'm happy I've gotten as far as I have, this is the point where I realize I need help.

 

I have tried looking for DSDTs for the H81M-E33, and found one "pack" that said it was for the H81M-E33 but was A. meant for 10.10 and B. suspiciously named "H71M-E33" in the actual download, and another that was I think also for 10.10 that was a dead link. I also found stuff on the wiki that implied that the H81M-E33 "doesn't need DSDTs" for El Capitan, thus why I tried disabling all of them (Clover seems to have quite a few enabled per default)

If it's worth noting, I get a bunch of frankly slightly amusing errors in bootup that basically seems like developers yelling at other developers to stop using deprecated crud (stuff like, paraphrasing, "OnDemand is deprecated, please use KeepAlive" or "HopefullyExitsLast no longer useful, please replace" or whatever) none of which seemed to be actually vital, and a few errors about the USB headset I have plugged in, my internal audio, and the NTFS volumes on my Windows drive not mounting due to being dirty and having a 2.0 instead of a 1.1 logfile. Nothing else of note.

 

EDIT: Someone in chat suggested to disable "CFG Lock" in my BIOS under CPU Features because it's apparently locked by default on this board. Am rebooting and testing to see if that does anything as we speak.

EDIT: CFG Lock disable brings default state from "Reset to post at DSMOS has arrived" to "Frozen at DSMOS has arrived"

[Insidious622]

Decided to try with nVidia graphics again (instead of integrated), with nv_disable=1, only one display connected, and using the default downloadable El Capitan "recovery disk" image provided by BootDiskUtil just as a test to make sure it isn't a problem with my image. It booted into a UI!

Going to try restoring my install image again and doing the exact same thing that got the recovery disk image working. S'going to take an hour to write the install image back to my USB stick again but I'm hopeful I might get somewhere now. Wish me luck.

 

I think the difference from earlier (wherein using the nVidia card at all, nv_disable or no, would cause immediate reboot) is a combination of bringing it down to 1 display (I had two connected at the time, which in retrospect seems like a bad idea), using AptioFix2, and whatever other little tweaks I've done to the config. 

 

The UI of the recovery image did say something about having no internet connection so my Ethernet is probably not working, so that'll be fun trying to get that sorted, but this is a lot more progress than I had yesterday.

[Insidious622]

So for anyone who happens to find this and it helps them, I am now happily running OS X El Capitan on this machine. Steps I took that worked: Made sure I only had one display plugged into my nVidia card. Did *not* end up using my Intel Integrated for installation (that just caused freezes, even though it initially seemed to work better). Used OsxAptioFix2Drv. DSDTs set at 0x00000000 (nothing checked). Args set at "-v nv_disable=1". No fake CPUID. That's it, everything else worked when left on its own. Most of my issues seem to have come, and admittedly this is a guess, from trying to boot the system with two displays connected to my nVidia card.

As far as getting the nVidia stuff working after install, I just google "geforce 960 os x" and got to a site that had the right drivers to download for whatever version (10.11.0 in my case) and installed them, and clover seemed to automatically add "nvda_drv=1" to my bootargs. 

 

Only remaining woes are, well, less a woe and more a question of sorts. As I said above I kind of am from the old dark ages of 10.5 and 10.6 where hacked kernels were a thing. Is it still the case that installing updates is dangerous, or with this boot loader stuff can I update to the latest version of 10.11 with impunity? I'll probably ask this in chat too because this thread seems to have gotten few replies, but really in continuing to reply I'm mostly thinking of anyone in my same situation finding this post on google and hopefully it helps them out.

 

Oh, also, my USB headset seems to cause "Assertions" during boot which worried me for a bit but it seems to work anyway? Whatever, I guess.