Mac Mini-esque build... what am I missing

[mizznfizz]

So oddity I noticed last night... when the system is booting to the clover bootloader screen, I do not have bluetooth at that point, so i have to plug my keyboard in to ensure I have it boot from my macOS drive vs. something else (like the Vault or Preboot Bootloader). I need to go through and rearrange my boot items so that it always boots from last used (still running verbose mode so that adds to boot time). 

[mizznfizz]

On 1/19/2019 at 4:25 PM, mizznfizz said:

So oddity I noticed last night... when the system is booting to the clover bootloader screen, I do not have bluetooth at that point, so i have to plug my keyboard in to ensure I have it boot from my macOS drive vs. something else (like the Vault or Preboot Bootloader). I need to go through and rearrange my boot items so that it always boots from last used (still running verbose mode so that adds to boot time). 

So looks like this ends up being a continuity issue with Bluetooth. What I didn't realize from Rehabmans Broadcom thread is that while the Z2 wifi/bt chip is supported it is not NATIVELY supported, so looks like I will have some other work to go through and get BT continuity working properly. 

 

Ok ran into some other issues last night with an ACPI error that would not let me get into safe mode or anything. Not really sure what I did but I couldn't get macOS to load so I reformatted and started again. Getting everything else working first (USB ports, Ethernet, WiFi/BT) then I will worry about the iGPU. 

 

Here is the weirdest thing, there are two builds on another forum that use same board, same processor with slightly different other items and installing Mojave and/or High Sierra and both were able to get their setups working right away. Not sure where I am going wrong.

Mobo- ASRock Z370m-itx/ac with 3.10 BIOS (I believe, need to verify in BIOS tonight and looks like there is an updated bios with minor fixes)

CPU - Core i5 8400

Monitor is an Acer k272HUL IPS display connected via Display Port (has 2xHDMI ports available as well)

 

Oddity that I noticed last night and believe it is associated with the USB port fix that needs to be done, is that while the board has two gigabit lan ports, only one works for me. I had the second working at one point but not working OOB like I thought. Have installed IntelMausiEthernet.kext to resolve ethernet issue in the clover>kexts>other folder.

 

Really starting to wonder if there is something up with my board too. Get an oddity, will have to take a pic with my phone, when booting into the boot device selection screen where I get all kinds of graphical artifacts. I did end up winning an old bid I put in on a Dell OEM Radeon R7 350x low profile card that should fit my case and that will be here on Friday. But the bid in before I realized that there may be some compatibility issues with the card OOB (great another thing to mess with) but that will at least give me an idea of there is something else going on here. 

 

[mizznfizz]

Ok so finally got everything working again and started trying to get the framebuffer taken care of to get graphics acceleration. 

Attempted using a "general" framebuffer guide as the Framebuffer Patching via WEG guide just isn't making sense to me and I am not getting any framebuffer dumps when using the two boot arguments.

 

So here is where I am at. tried using a different guide that has been updated as of a few days ago from another site that had a similar board to mine. I am now stuck at a kernal hang. I get hung up on AppleACPICPU for multiple "Busy" signals then I will go into the Apple logo (quickly and very broken) and I get a black screen. Can't get past this even in safemode to get to my config.plist to swap it out for the previous settings. 

 

Any ideas how to get back to the system desktop to get this fixed?

[mizznfizz]

Finally was able to get past the ACPICPU error, realized that I had not changed my boot order so I was still attempting to use the UEFI partition for the drive to boot instead of the bootable usb thumbdrive. Got past that and was able to replace the EFI folder with my back-up that I created before I started messing with the integrated graphics. Now I can boot into the system with everything working except the integrated graphics which is fine for the moment as I will work through that.

 

Also got the R7 350x card only to find out that the system recognizes it as an r7 250 card but same as the integrated graphics I get no graphics acceleration. Spent 3hrs messing with different injections, framebuffer patches in clover, etc. to get no graphics accelerations. Biggest bummer is while this card is TINY (only 15.9mm wide from back of pcb to front of fan) it literally pushes up against the side mount of the wesena. I would have to gun into the wesena to remove the standoffs that hold the side mount piece to get it to have enough room (which would afford me about another 9mm) but with this card seeemingly not supported I am stuck.

 

So I am at a hard spot now.. Either I got to figure out what is needed to get the integrated graphics working properly or I need to return the card, sell the case and possibly the psu and replace those three with something similar but that is OOB supported. My less than $700 build is suddenly causing me issues.. BLEH!!

But serious thanks to @millusions @Allan for attempting to help me so much over other threads. 

[mizznfizz]

Well I am finally up and running completely and stably. I was still having trouble with getting full graphics acceleration when a user in another thread recommended using a clover folder from someone else's build that he was able to get functioning.

Well I gave it a shot and sure enough I have everything up and running perfectly now. I will probably take the next week to make little tweaks here and there to ensure everything is stable, then upgrade to Mojave. Once that is done and stable I can call this complete!

 

I still need to go through the other users Clover>Kexts>Other folder to see what was different and also their clover settings.