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(10.10.2) GT 630 2GB (Fermi, not Kelper?) - Black screen unless nv_disable


Alec J
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Alright.  I have a PNY GeForce GT 630 as stated in title.  I got the card a few weeks ago and switched from a Radeon 4450 (or 4550.. doesn't matter).  Naturally, I had to remove the GraphicsEnabler=Yes flag and the computer ran great.  Eventually I installed the CUDA driver and it seemed to do its thing correctly.  All was good.

One day, I booted to a black screen in the morning.  I wasn't sure why, so I tried again and manually added GraphicsEnabler=No.  It booted fine.  ...ok!
For almost a week the machine would boot just perfect if I did a "restart" (as opposed to power-off shut down) and sometimes would boot fine if I shut it down and turned it back on promptly.  Otherwise, I would have to manually enter the GraphicsEnabler=No at my Chameleon prompt.  When I checked Chameleon Wizard's bdmesg, it showed that I was booting with GraphicsEnabler=No TWICE at this point (I had added it manually to the .plist and then, as stated, would have to manually type it in a boot in the mornings, etc).

Eventually this stopped working and I was magically able to limp along with the same methods except adding PCIRootUID=1 every boot.  Adding this to the .plist, just like GraphicsEnabler, would show that the machine booted with the flag but it would only work if I manually inputted it into Chameleon when selecting the drive upon booting.

 

A few days after that, I was absolutely unable to boot no matter what.  Black screen.  I could VNC into the machine and see the desktop.  According to Kext Wizard, the nVidia kexts are in fact being loaded.  In System Information > Graphics/Displays, my card shows up as "Nvidia Chip Model", device ID 0x0f00, 128mb.  I don't know if I have any hardware acceleration at this point since I'm only VNC'ing into the machine and it's a little slow and crappy anyway.  I don't seem to get any glitching that would be apparent when I booted with nv_disable.

Oh yeah, nv_disable will boot fine, as you might expect, with the subsequent crappy graphics performance and glitching and all of that.  Of course this makes sense as the nVidia drivers are not loading.

I currently run the machine on my old ATi 4870 which works just great with GraphicsEnabler=Yes.  A little old for my needs and also gets hot and sucks a lot of power (I think it's around a 200w card or something silly!)

 

I have tried nearly every combination of the following boot flags
GraphicsEnabler=No (and Yes)
PCIRootUID=1 and 0
PciRoot=1 and 0

npci 2000 and 3000 (whatever those were)

I made a flash drive with Clover on it and was able to boot to the same black screen.
I kept my Yosemite USB stick and never touched it after I first successfully installed, back when I was using the Radeon 4450.  I cannot boot from this USB stick using any combination of the above flags either.  I plan on making a Mavericks stick with MyHack soon and seeing if I can get that to boot. 

There is a thread on Hackintosh.Zone (I hope it is ok that I link to there) where a person has the EXACT same problem with the same comptuer (well, Precision T3400 at least) except the thread was never resolved (heck, nobody but him/her replied) and they stopped posting at the point where the boot flags seemed to be completely random as to which one would work any given day.
https://www.hackintosh.zone/hackintosh-topic/2474-must-always-type-graphicsenablerno-to-boot-even-though-its-in-plist/
They, however, were using an old Nvidia Quadro 1700 which was based on the 8600GT - very old card, completely different drivers as far as I am concerned.  I assume they were running Mavericks (april 2014). 

Any ideas!?  This seems to be an undocumented problem, I've been searching around for over a week now while banging my head against the desk or giving up and using my old Radeon. 


My computer:

Dell Precision T3400

Intel X38 chipset
Xeon x3363 (with 771->775 conversion)
6gb DDR2
Yosemite 10.10.2
 

Everything ran totally perfect, as I mentioned, for a while.  I have looked through my BIOS and found no settings that would seem to hint toward solving the problem.  There are no onboard graphics and the only video settings in BIOS are to make it prefer PCIe or PCI (both options of which I have tried).  I reset the BIOS many times.  The BIOS clock does set itself to GMT time (I think, 6 hours ahead from my USA Central time which is -6GMT I beleive) whenever I shut the computer off.

The ONLY thing that I can remember changing during the genera time period when it first stopped booting was that I added a second hard drive (main is 500GB and additional was another 500GB) so that I could run a 100% Time Machine backup. 

I am so lost.

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Hello!

 

Which SMBios are you using?

 

Have fun.

I used MacPro3,1 up until a few hours ago, when I tried 4,1 (resulted in me finally removing appletymcedriver.kext) and 5,1.  Of course, nothing different (except the expected kp on first 4,1 boot).

 

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Hello!

 

MP 3,1 SMBios should be fine for you and is matching the Nvidia gfx. I don´t know if the device ID of your card is supported by Clover/Chameleon. I think there is no need to change the default values PCIRootUID or npci.

 

Try to boot with GraphicsEnabler=Yes (Inject NVDA with Clover). If you get The Black Screen connect over VNC and let the device sleep. Look if the gfx card starts working after rewake.

 

Get the latest versions of Chameleon (Enoch) or Clover from Downloads here and install one of them.

 

For  solving your gfx issues you could also look here: http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=276

 

 

 

If your Yose install is a vanilla one, there should be no problem. If you really want to install Mav you should not use MyHack. Follow this guide to do a vanilla install: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/280756-guide-the-all-in-one-guide-to-vanilla-os-x-including-chameleon-dsdt-for-beginners-updated-for-yosemite/

 

If you plug back your NVDA card don´t forget to boot by ignoring caches at first boot and ever then, when you have made changes on the system.

 

Have fun.

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Hello!

 

MP 3,1 SMBios should be fine for you and is matching the Nvidia gfx. I don´t know if the device ID of your card is supported by Clover/Chameleon. I think there is no need to change the default values PCIRootUID or npci.

 

Try to boot with GraphicsEnabler=Yes (Inject NVDA with Clover). If you get The Black Screen connect over VNC and let the device sleep. Look if the gfx card starts working after rewake.

 

Get the latest versions of Chameleon (Enoch) or Clover from Downloads here and install one of them.

 

For  solving your gfx issues you could also look here: http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=276

 

 

 

If your Yose install is a vanilla one, there should be no problem. If you really want to install Mav you should not use MyHack. Follow this guide to do a vanilla install: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/280756-guide-the-all-in-one-guide-to-vanilla-os-x-including-chameleon-dsdt-for-beginners-updated-for-yosemite/

 

If you plug back your NVDA card don´t forget to boot by ignoring caches at first boot and ever then, when you have made changes on the system.

 

Have fun.

 

First I just tried GraphicsEnabler=Yes (haven't in a while) and this time it booted to a white screen.  I think I'd seen this before last week but I don't remember the circumstances (probably the same?)

This time, I could not VNC into it and I was unable to blindly shut it down like usual (hold power button for a couple seconds, hit Enter - no response)

 

You mentioned letting it sleep (or, I guess, making it sleep) and then trying after wake.  You know, I think that totally worked one time.  I think I gave up on it one late night and forgot to shut it off when I went to bed.  In the morning I noticed it was in sleep (at this point I hadn't VNC'd into the machine so I wasn't sure if it was actually running behind the black screen) and it came back just fine, graphics working great (takes a couple minutes sometimes with this thing, but I digress). 

Anyway, I tried that again later after VNC'ing into it and putting it to sleep, but it didn't work.  It came back but no video (but was still able to get in over VNC as usual).  

 

But anyway...!

 

Just had some HUGE success.  

 

I decided to then look Clover again, notably you mentioning NVDA injection.

Using my USB drive with Clover on it (which is a completely "vanilla", unconfigured clover install, and by default has some generic config that totally is unusable for me), I went into the Options menu and then DSDT Fix Mask and unchecked EVERYTHING in there (most was checked by default) - this has allowed it to boot from this flash drive in the past on this machine, so I did it again this time.  

Then I went into the Graphics Injector Menu and noticed the Inject EDID option.  I hadn't ever really heard of that, and upon a quick Google search, I found this post on hackintoshosx http://www.hackintoshosx.com/topic/20664-guide-edid-injection/ (again I hope it's alright to link to other sites! if not, feel free to edit me) stating that this injection would help if:

 

 

  • Your graphics framebuffer kext is correctly loaded, but you receive no image after boot messages (aka black screen);
  • Your display seem to work fine only randomly;
  • You have blinking screen or many artifacts.

Well, I've had two of those problems.  Sounds good so far!  I marked that option in Clover and booted my drive.

 

I am on my Dell like normal with the 630!..........  The only problem I see so far is that it recognizes my card as a 1GB instead of 2GB.  

 

I've never really used Clover before, but have only refrained from doing so because I couldn't get it to work at the time.  

Does this mean that I can get everything fixed with a Clover conversion and proper config.plist for it?  

Is injecting an EDID literally me saying my card is something else, thus circumventing my issue?  Maybe I need to do this?

 

Is there anything else I'm missing here?  Looking great so far.

Or perhaps I am basically doing a work-around and not fully solving the actual mistake/problem?

 

 

Thanks!!!!

-Alec

 

EDIT::::::::  

I just made a config file with Clover Configurator and I'm able to boot without the EDID option, at least it seems.  

I guess I'm still pretty confused (since I know Clover didn't work a few days ago...) but I guess I can't complain.

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Thanks for all your help.  I think I made a good Clover config this morning by looking around and then playing with Clover Configurator some more.  Seems to be totally rock solid so far! 

I installed and enabled the nVidia web drivers and they are loading correctly.  I can only assume they're doing their thing - I enabled CUDA and it appears in Premiere Pro now (though being just a GT 630 the performance boost is minor :P )

Not exactly sure if my card is just appearing as a 1GB on the System Info app (and actually running with full 2GB available) or if it is limited.  I seem to remember people saying that their cards, despite being recognized (in Sys Info) as the wrong VRAM amount, were utilizing the full amount elsewhere/anyway and it was just a little cosmetic detail.  I could be wrong.

Cheers!

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Hello!

 

Nice to here, that you have got it working. To test the performance of your card, you could run the same version of Cinebench on OSX and Win. On OSX you get some frames less then on Win. This is normal, but framerate should not drop down more than 10 - 15 %.

 

Wrong vram size should be only a cosmetic problem, that you could repai easyly. Set the vram key in config.plist. Here you go: http://clover-wiki.zetam.org/Configuration/Graphics#Inject-/-NVidia

 

If AGPM.kext is loaded and working, everything should be well with your gfx.

 

Have fun.

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