[GUIDE] Dell XPS 15 (9550) Mojave 10.14 / 10.15 Quick Installation

[Deniryer]

Samsung isn't slowest. Dell sent to the possibly slowest unit because 951 reach end of life status and they try to clear out the warehouses. I've got Samsung 951 nvme from this link https://www.scan.co.uk/products/512gb-samsung-sm951-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-ssd-mlc-nand-read-2150mb-s-write-1550mb-s-300k-iops and it's exactly as it is advertised.

 

MLC NAND, Read 2150MB/s, Write 1550MB/s, 300k I OPS. I'm not defending Samsung, because they're should be sued for punished for delivering product with the same name and different specification, also for shipping drives formated as 512kb for Windows & 4k for Apple (macbooks uses Toshiba, Hynix & Samsung drives, modified of course because of the apple amazing socket) , but still Samsung it's probably the fastest nvme drive (at least pro version) at the market.

 

 

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

[Krim404]

i meant the Dell supplied ones. samsung OEM from Dell is the slowest out of the 4 vendors. :/

[gujiangjiang]

My XG3 broke down last week (burned) after using ePSA. It's a warranty replacement. May be a coincidence, but its possible that ePSA is the culprit. So i would suggest not using it anymore.

 

Sadly i got a Samsung drive from Dell (which is much slower than the original Toshiba drive) and they dont accept to deliver me another toshiba drive or anything comparable, because "the samsung drive is in working condition" and "it will work on windows, and we only support windows" as well as "you have to live with it". Also Samsung doesnt support 4Kn sectors, because switching to 4Kn on the Samsung drives is "a company secret" - they really answered with this phrase on my request.

 

And yes. the Samsung drives are the slowest in the 9550 series. up to 50-70% slower than the hynix, toshiba or lite-on.

 

See attached images i created with my other original (but only 256gb) toshiba disk vs the new samsung (btw: test is capped at 2000, it's > than 2400)

The broken can be solved by ourself.

 

And i have replaced a new xg3 from dell and i format it to 4096 through official OCZ SSD Software and works well.

 

But when i get into ePSA,the xg3 still borken.

 

Now i have saved the broken xg3 and disabled the internal ePSA in BIOS.

 

I have tried format,install osx,dirty shutdown the laptop and the ssd still works well.

 

So i have a conclusion that the toshiba xg3 is works well with 4k sector only you dont use ePSA.

 

ePSA is the origin of this ssd broken.

 

I hope you can discribe this in your post and github.it isnt the China Only brcause my xps is Australia Sold and now i found the reason is ePSA,so i sure if we dont use ePSA the 4k sector is always works well.

 

Ps:to prevent xps get into ePSA automatically,I strongly suggest to disable the ePSA in BIOS.

 

Finally,i hate samsung ssd!Samsung use tlc to trick us with mlc such as sm951 or 950pro,these are tlc but samsung said these ssd is '3bit mlc'.3bit is tlc.the mlc have 3000 P/E,but sm951 and 950pro with 3bit mlc only have 1200 P/E.and the benchmark score is the slc temp speed,it not true.

So i suggest use Intel,plxetor,liteon,toshiba or Micron but no samsung!it expensive and worth rubbish!

 

 

从我的 iPhone 发送，使用 Tapatalk

[nabeelmoeen]

Sierra in parallel to pre-installed windows

 

guys, just wanted to post a quick thank you for the awesome guide and the helpful posts. 

I just bought the 9550 last week (based on 97% mac compatibility) and had the smoothest Hackintosh install ever.

 

my config: Dell 9550 UHD touch with Hynix drive

 

I was able to install in parallel to the existing windows install, since the existing EFI (named ESP) partition was 500 MB and the disk was GPT partitioned.

Note: didn't apply the 4K patch.

1. Enable AHCI for existing windows install without reinstallation http://triplescomputers.com/blog/uncategorized/solution-switch-windows-10-from-raidide-to-ahci-operation/
2. Shrink windows OS partition to 300 GB (freeing up 200GB space for mac)
3. CLOVER installation was unable to detect the freed up space. Used Linux live CD to delete partition via gParted.
4. boot CLOVER installation again. Format partition as HFS+ journaled and completed install.
5. following post-install instructions had everything running smoothly.

 

Finally took the leap yesterday to replace the Killer Wifi with the DW1560 NGFF .. and have 100% working Mac!!

 

only question: why don't some of the touchpad gestures work, e.g. pinch to zoom and rotate? 

the 3 finger window drag works, so does the 4 finger swipe to launch mission control. 

[Raynoxis]

Why are you trying to repair your drive?

 

You have to erase (which will wipe all of the data on your target drive so do a data backup), partition it as HFS+ with GPT portion table and then attempt the installation.

 

If you want to keep your windows instalation without wiping it you will have to create a new partition formated as HFS+ along side windows (make sure that drive with the windows is partitioned as GPT otherwise you'll encounter problems hard to resolve) and on this new partition you have to install MacOS.

 

The best will be if you tell us what it is your native language (Mine is Polish, so you can pm me, English is 3th and it's Meh) because at this point it is really hard to understand what exactly you're trying to achieve.

 

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

 

Hey Deniryer ! I'm French, my english is so bad sorry. 

 

 I did everything like nabeelmoeen above. I have the same XPS 15 , with a TOSHIBA SSD. 

 

 

my config: Dell 9550 UHD touch with Toshiba drive

 

I did these steps : 

1. Enable AHCI for existing windows install. 
2. Shrink windows OS partition to 400 GB (freeing up 78GB space for mac)
3. boot CLOVER installation . Format partition as HFS+ journaled and do the first part of install.
4. on reboot, during the loading logo with apple i have this message : "macOS could not be installed on your computer. Unable to unmount volume for repair. 

I don't understand why. 

 

Thank you so much

[nabeelmoeen]

Hi raynoxis,

sorry to hear you're stuck, I guess I was just lucky to have it work on the first go

anyways, I just responded to your earlier message.

 

Btw, in my case when I try to generate a MacbookPro13,3 SMBIOS using CLOVER SMBIOS generator, I get an error saying "Mac OS does not support this platform". So I am back to using the iMac 27 SMBIOS that came with this guide.

 

 

Hey Deniryer ! I'm French, my english is so bad sorry. 

 

 I did everything like nabeelmoeen above. I have the same XPS 15 , with a TOSHIBA SSD. 

 

 

my config: Dell 9550 UHD touch with Toshiba drive

 

I did these steps : 

1. Enable AHCI for existing windows install. 
2. Shrink windows OS partition to 400 GB (freeing up 78GB space for mac)
3. boot CLOVER installation . Format partition as HFS+ journaled and do the first part of install.
4. on reboot, during the loading logo with apple i have this message : "macOS could not be installed on your computer. Unable to unmount volume for repair. 

I don't understand why. 

 

Thank you so much

 

[Deniryer]

According to what you have done so far You missed the part with creating Linux USB live pendrive and erasing the newly creating partition with gparted.

 

Get a spare pendrive, download Ubuntu 16.10 iso, create installation media with either rufus or universal installer, open gparted and erease the partition designated to install osx, don't create anything just follow the rest of installation instruction and that should sort it out.

 

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

[Zsparrow0]

Hi is someone know if there is a methode to patch Nvmd SSD Toshiba drive (4k) sector I already try with Ubuntu as said in the guide but once the dependencies installed and software i have an error who say  "unable to detect device type" when i used the command...

 

If someone know how to do that would be great

 

Thanks

[Deniryer]

Hi is someone know if there is a methode to patch Nvmd SSD Toshiba drive (4k) sector I already try with Ubuntu as said in the guide but once the dependencies installed and software i have an error who say "unable to detect device type" when i used the command...

 

If someone know how to do that would be great

 

Thanks

You must use Ubuntu 16.10 not 16.04. Nvme-cli doesn't work at all on 16.04, it doesn't detect drive no matter what.

 

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

[Zsparrow0]

You must use Ubuntu 16.10 not 16.04. Nvme-cli doesn't work at all on 16.04, it doesn't detect drive no matter what.

 

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

Thanks for your information I finnally succed to do it lol

But once finish preparing the USB (I follow everything , replace 4kconfig remove DSDT regarding hacknvme and kext )

 

I have this when I boot

 

Thanks for your help bro

Cheers Michael

CLOVER.zip

[Deniryer]

It should pass through this stage. I've looked in to your clover folder on my phone briefly and I don't know what you might did wrong. I don't own Toshiba or Hynix drive so my Hackintosh uses hacker kept and SSDT.

 

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

[Gymnae]

Just stumbled over the Activity Monitor crash. Hopefully this will be fixed, since the crash seems to also call a CrashReporter task which uses 7-9% CPU

[mr. baltazar]

Followed this guide and I was able to boot into Sierra 10.12.4 after installing clover and copying the git/clover folder over to EFI. 

However, after I used terminal to copy the kexts and ran the touch command, I am no longer able to get to the login screen. Stuck in verbose at

 

"IOConsoleUsers: gIOScreenLockState 3, hs 0, bs 0, now 0, sm 0x0"

 

If I press the ESC key I hear the system error "bloop" so I believe MacOS is running but the screen is still stuck on the verbose text.

 

Any help?

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

EDIT::: Nevermind, the terminal command for copying the UHD kexts to the 10.12 folder didn't work. Manually copied the files over in Finder and now it's all working 100%. Thank you for this guide! I was looking all over Tonymac for a good guide but it didn't exist. Glad I ended up here.

[Krim404]

Thanks for your information I finnally succed to do it lol

But once finish preparing the USB (I follow everything , replace 4kconfig remove DSDT regarding hacknvme and kext )

 

I have this when I boot

 

Thanks for your help bro

Cheers Michael

Original Question is from https://github.com/wmchris/DellXPS15-9560-OSX/issues/5 , this issue is not 9550 related so its in the wrong thread. Based on your other ticket (https://github.com/wmchris/DellXPS15-9560-OSX/issues/3) it seems like your system worked in the past. So you broke something.

 

Followed this guide and I was able to boot into Sierra 10.12.4 after installing clover and copying the git/clover folder over to EFI. 

 

However, after I used terminal to copy the kexts and ran the touch command, I am no longer able to get to the login screen. Stuck in verbose at

 

"IOConsoleUsers: gIOScreenLockState 3, hs 0, bs 0, now 0, sm 0x0"

 

If I press the ESC key I hear the system error "bloop" so I believe MacOS is running but the screen is still stuck on the verbose text.

 

Any help?

 

Thanks!

UHD fix not applied correctly.

[Krim404]

Just stumbled over the Activity Monitor crash. Hopefully this will be fixed, since the crash seems to also call a CrashReporter task which uses 7-9% CPU

Tiny workaround for this:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist
open /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app && sleep 1 && osascript -e 'quit app "Activity Monitor"' && chflags uchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist

[mr. baltazar]

Made a quick video:

 

 

Thank you for creating this guide. You've made my life incredibly easier with this project!

[kamalaggi]

Great guide.

 

I have everything working using MacBook9,1 but as soon as I switch to MacBookPro13,3 I get a kernel panic.

 

Any Ideas on how to fix?

[hitman478]

Does anyone has an fix when the Notebook was in Sleep and will be shutdown that it do an reboot instead of correctly shutdown? If the Notebook was never in sleep mode then I have no problems with shutdown.

[Krim404]

Great guide.

 

I have everything working using MacBook9,1 but as soon as I switch to MacBookPro13,3 I get a kernel panic.

 

Any Ideas on how to fix?

 

 

If you've questions or something doesn't work: first check if you've done all steps of this tutorial! If yes: please read the whole thread (doesn't matter how long it is) before asking to prevent multiple questions. Additionally do a search in google and this forum.

 

[gujiangjiang]

Today i have update the bios to 1.2.25 but cant boot into osx ever.

 

I changed osxaptiodrv-64 to v2 but still cant boot.

 

I add slide=32 64 but all cant boot into osx.

 

 

从我的 iPhone 发送，使用 Tapatalk

[joginek]

Today i have update the bios to 1.2.25 but cant boot into osx ever.

 

I changed osxaptiodrv-64 to v2 but still cant boot.

 

I add slide=32 64 but all cant boot into osx.

 

 

从我的 iPhone 发送，使用 Tapatalk

 

I've got the same problem. I had to downgrade to the version before 1.2.25 and everything runs fine again.

[Krim404]

Today i have update the bios to 1.2.25 but cant boot into osx ever.

 

I changed osxaptiodrv-64 to v2 but still cant boot.

 

I add slide=32 64 but all cant boot into osx.

 

 

从我的 iPhone 发送，使用 Tapatalk

what error comes up when you try to boot?

[gujiangjiang]

I've got the same problem. I had to downgrade to the version before 1.2.25 and everything runs fine again.

 

what error comes up when you try to boot?

 

Report Change OSXAptioDrv-64.efi to OSXAptioDrv2-64.efi + slide=168 can boot into osx with no error.

And  i have found a big change in menmap.

 

Here are the picture.

 

Left is 1.2.25 and Right is 1.2.21 you can compare the difference.

 

 

So i found some slide number and test sometimes and found slide=168 or slide=170 can boot osx perfect.

 

 

And now we can use v2 instead of v1 just replace v2 and add slide=168 or 170.

 

Good Luck.

 

If someone have more ideal you can replay later.

[goodwin_c]

Report Change OSXAptioDrv-64.efi to OSXAptioDrv2-64.efi + slide=168 can boot into osx with no error.

And  i have found a big change in menmap.

 

Here are the picture.

 

Left is 1.2.25 and Right is 1.2.21 you can compare the difference.

 

E5D6174CBAFAF9239FDB33D2B7D464A4.jpg

 

So i found some slide number and test sometimes and found slide=168 or slide=170 can boot osx perfect.

 

F4447DD79D81BE4F02E1E0BBF12F6021.jpg

 

And now we can use v2 instead of v1 just replace v2 and add slide=168 or 170.

 

Good Luck.

 

If someone have more ideal you can replay later.

 

Hi, can you attach original files with memmaps? Want to check what has been changed in new bios.

Also, regarding aptiofix v2 - it was always working, just needed proper slide. But with slide it is working not very properly - for ex., you will loose Safe Mode (as this case is not covered in aptiofix-v2, and slide parameter breaks safe mode)

[Kndtime]

Hi,

 

First of all thank you all for this amazing tutorial and thread!

I have been struggling to install Sierra on my XPS 15.

 

Can someone post a picture of his BIOS configuration?

I not really sure I have done it right..

My problem is that I can't select my SSD to format and install Sierra on..

 

 

 

Can someone help me?