Acer ES1-572 laptop hackintosh

[Ace2213]

Hello everyone. First time poster, first time hackintosher.

My interest in hackintoshing began years ago, but my hardware at the time was not compatible so I forgot about it. My new laptop however does seem to be fully hackintoshable, from what I've researched, so I read a ton on the process and here's what I did, in painful detail:

First thing I did is set up macOS High Sierra in a VM using a pre-built VMK. I followed one guide for the VM part and another guide for setting up the boot drive, which told me to first format the USB drive in Disk Utility was macOS (journaled) and choose the partition table, but I didn't see an option for choosing the partition table so I just formatted it. Then I went to download the system image through the App Store. I was unsuccessful- only got the 20mb stub, so I relied on a 3rd party "Patcher" tool to download the full 5.2GB image, which worked.  I then proceeded to set up the boot drive using the terminal command but just before the end, it failed, with no real indicator as to why. I tried again with the same result. I then tried Diskmakerx, which failed from the very beginning, telling me that my installer "may not be the complete version. Please download it again from the App Store." At which point I nearly gave up entirely, because I was certain that I had the full version. I gave the terminal command one more shot and it worked. My boot drive was ready.

Next I downloaded Clover. During the installation process, I was too focused on the driver part of the process to notice the "change installation location" button, so it was installed on the internal EFI partition (something I did not notice until after configuring Clover and downloading additional kexts). So I installed it again, this time to the USB drive. I copied the same config.plist file over, after verifying that it still worked (because apparently that location does not offer permanent storage, whatever that means). I downloaded FakeSMC, USBInject and a few other kexts that seemed like they might be helpful (for my network card and a generic PS2 keyboard one, etc) and plugged them in the right folder. At this point I thought I was ready, so I shut down the VM, split my C partition in two to accommodate the new OS, and rebooted into BIOS. I disabled secure boot and TMP, the only configs I could change, and set USB at the top of the boot order list. Rebooted, nothing. Straight into Windows. I rebooted again holding down F12, and the only boot device that showed up was "Windows boot manager-HDD" which must be my SSD. Windows tells me it cannot use the USB drive without formatting, but that's to be expected I suppose.

What did I do wrong? All I can think of is from what I've read about dual booting macOS with Windows is that the best practice is to first format the disk inside the macOS installer, then reboot and install Windows, then reboot and install macOS. However this method requires having two flash drives at hand, each ready with the installer for its OS, which I do not. I could either emulate a partition on my HDD to act as an external boot drive to serve the purpose of the Windows installer, or simply clone my current Windows installation onto the HDD and once everything is done, clone it back. But that not only sounds tedious and far too overcomplicated, it also requires the USB drive to be detected by BIOS/preboot.

My system specs are in my signature. If you need any additional info I'm happy to provide it. I've grown quite desperate of the scattered info and having to follow 2-5 guides simultaneously which are often conflicting or not relevant to my hardware/situation. I decided to finally post (after not finding any guides for my device anywhere) to get some specific, unified advice. Thanks in advance.

Edited April 28, 2019 by Ace2213

[Cyberdevs]

9 hours ago, Ace2213 said:

Hello everyone. First time poster, first time hackintosher.

Before I go any further and spill my guts to you about my frustrations with this process, I have to ask. Do you have any issues with the use of Clover? VMWare? Or anything that could be considered "illegal"? Because I was just banned from tonymac86 with no warning after only my initial post which was like 10 pages long for "blatant disregard of forum rules regarding piracy and the use of VM". I'm sorry, but I'm operating under the assumption that ALL hackintoshing is illegal and a form of piracy.

If I broke a rule, kindly inform me and/or censor my content, but don't prohibit me from getting help after I came to you in desperation and spent half an hour telling you my story just because you don't like a step I took. Yes I know that we all pretend that everyone reads EULAS, but I think we also all know that nobody ever does except maybe lawyers. I've already read far too many articles, blogs, tutorials and how-to guides before and during this process, most of which doesn't even apply to my case, so I'm all stocked up on reading material that probably won't ever be of any use for me. Which is why I'm here, seeking specific, unified advice. 

Edit: I just noticed that I posted this in the wrong forum lol. I have an Acer laptop and not a notebook. Oh well, this post is useless anyway. I'll just make another over there once my doubts in this one are cleared up.

Dear Ace2213,

 

Welcome to InsanelyMac.com

 

As far as I know we don't have rules against using Clover or VMWare but we have other Rules which I invite you to read them carefully before posting further. Each community has certain set of rules that if a member breaks them will be warned or banned. Duplicating a post is one of them which I suggest you don't do that. If you need your topic to be moved to another section just ask one of the moderators or supervisors to do it, so please don't create another topic.

 

Please update your signature with your hardware specs so people can help you easier when they need to know what they are dealing with.

 

On InsanelyMac we don't support TonyMac's tools or methods and we don't discuss how they conduct their business so if you have an issue with them please take it up with them and please do not brag about it here.

All of us here trying to learn new things and help each other whenever someone needs it so I hope you find your answers and good luck on your Hackintosh experience.

 

Cheers

[Ace2213]

Thank you Cyberdevs. I have updated my signature to include my system specs. Let me know if there's anything else I need to do.

My intention was not to brag about my incident with them, but I see how it can seem that way. I simply didn't want to venture into another highly verbose post only to end up getting banned again without a single warning or response of any kind.

Yes, I would like to have my post moved to the appropriate forum please. I will completely edit it explaining my situation, as it serves no purpose in its current state.

[Cyberdevs]

Dual booting windows and macOS on a single HDD/SSD usually is a bit painful but try the following steps.:

 

1. Make sure that the USB disk for macOS is formatted with GUID partition scheme and the disk is formatted as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)

2. Create the USB Disk using the Creatinstallmedia method or Terminal commands

2. install the latest Clover

3. Install Clover on your macOS USB installer disk in UEFI mode unless your Laptop boots in legacy check the BIOS to make sure

4. Install macOS and then install Windows (That's how I used to install macOS and Windows on a single HDD/SSD)

5. Make sure that you have the correct Config and Kexts in EFI folder in USB disk.

 

For more info you can use the following link on osxlatitude.com 

 

[Ace2213]

I've seen that thread, and there's some major differences between his model and mine:
1. His Wifi module is Intel, which isn't supported. Mine is Atheros AR956X, which I've seen success cases with on other laptops.
2. His touchpad is Elan, mine is Synpatics/Windows Precision

But yes, other than that, it's as close of a thread I've found for my laptop.

But more importantly, his problems seem to be post-install. He is able to successfully boot the installer media. I'm not, so I'm not utilizing that thread as of now.

As for your instructions, I've done all of that except for the partition scheme, because I couldn't find that option in Disk Utility. Also, after formatting in Disk Utility as macOS X Extended (Journaled), doesn't using the createinstallmedia command re-format it anyway? Or does it not touch the partition table? 

I'll try to find a way to properly format the partition table. Perhaps the guide I was using was for an outdated/changed version of macOS/Disk Utility. 

With regards to the installation order, I will clone my current Windows partition to my HDD as a backup and proceed with the process: formatting my SSD through the install media (once it successfully boots up), installing macOS, then cloning my Windows partition back from the HDD to the SSD, and hopefully everything will go back the way it was.

Thank you and I'll let you know how it goes.

[Cyberdevs]

Well for formatting the USB disk you can follow these instructions: (if you haven't found it already)

 

1. Open Disk Utility

 

2. Click on the small icons on the left like in the picture:

 

3. Select Show All Devices

 

4. Select the name of the USB disk vendor (In my case it's a SanDisk Ultra....)

 

5. Then you can use the Erase Button to erase the disk and change the Partition Scheme like in the picture below:

 

 

Once that's done you are ready to use the Creatinstallmedia command. As far as I know the Createinstallmedia command doesn't change the partition scheme so if you partition it in MBR it won't be changed to GPT to GUID, the command will erase the existing partition and then copy the installer files into it.

 

 

[Guest ricoc90]

Did you install Clover UEFI or legacy? I used to have an Acer that would block UEFI booting for anything other than the pre-loaded Windows. 

[Ace2213]

1 hour ago, ricoc90 said:

Did you install Clover UEFI or legacy? I used to have an Acer that would block UEFI booting for anything other than the pre-loaded Windows. 

UEFI. I don't think that's my case because mine came with UEFI out the box. 

 

2 hours ago, Cyberdevs said:

2. Click on the small icons on the left like in the picture:

 

3. Select Show All Devices

 

This is what I was missing. I did that and it booted successfully. 

 

I was expecting to have to wipe my SSD, but I noticed that its partition table was already GUID, so I tried to only wipe the partition where I intended to install macOS, but it froze at "unmounting disk". I had to restart and after that, the partition was greyed out and nothing I did would ungrey it. I tried to boot back into Windows to see if I can format it, but I got the "no boot device" screen when I removed the flash drive. I'm not sure why that happened, but at that point I knew I had to push through. 

 

I wiped my SSD and installed macOS Majove. Inside the installer, my touchpad didn't work but my keyboard worked, at first. After a bit it just stopped registering my key input. Then once macOS booted up, it seemed like the arrow down key was stuck, which forced me to choose "this computer does not connect to the internet", even though Ethernet was available (Wi-Fi was greyed out). So I proceeded to download some kexts to try to achieve basic functionality, but my flash drive decided this was a good time to {censored} itself. No big deal. I'll plug my HDD into my work computer. But just when I went to do that, the work computer stopped turning on. It's been shutting off due to a failing PSU, but it never refused to turn on until now. 

 

I'm not saying the gods seem to be conspiring against me and joyfully kicking me while I'm down, but I am going to get some rest. There's another work computer I can try and hopefully by the time I wake up this curse thing will have passed. 

 

Thank you Cyberdevs for the detailed instructions that helped me find my mistake, and thank you for accompanying my misery ricoc90 and trying to help. 

Edited April 29, 2019 by Ace2213

[Cyberdevs]

I'm glad that we got passed the first issue and you're welcome

We will overcome the other issues as well.

Just keep in mind that macOS High Sierra and Mojave will convert the SSD to APFS format which will make windows installation pretty hard if not impossible. I haven't done it and I don't no anyone who did.

 

For the issues in with the trackpad and the keyboard you might need to check the kexts for that but to be honest I haven't done many laptop hacks so...

[Ace2213]

7 hours ago, ricoc90 said:

 

 

8 hours ago, Cyberdevs said:

 

Yeah from what I've read, Mojave only supports APTFS, so I didn't even fight with it. I just formatted my drive in APTFS. Why is it more difficult though? I 

[Ace2213]

Ok so I've successfully booted up the secondary computer and connected my HDD to it and copied over the files. 

 

What I just remembered though is that I had turned off my laptop, meaning I won't be able to boot back into macOS since I never installed clover on the internal SSD. 

 

I'm in the process of creating a Windows install boot partition (or at least trying to figure out how to do so under UEFI since I can't just mark the partition as active). Is it possible to do the same for clover? My secondary machine is a Windows machine, so would it be possible to set up clover on a partition on my HDD natively in that machine? Or would I need to set up a macOS VM again just for that purpose? All I really want to do is boot into macOS on my laptop. Once that's done, I have the clover.dmg on my HDD to install it, along with all the kexts. 

[Ace2213]

So my USB drive magically came back to life! Yay!

 

I successfully installed clover on it through Windows using Rufus, planning to simply boot macOS and later simply copy the kexts and clover installer over and then worry about installing Windows. 

 

What I just learned is that Clover doesn't simply boot an OS just because it's installed. You need to configure it first. The only option Clover is showing me is "boot Windows", which doesn't exist, so it just reboots. 

 

The Rufus boot drive creator doesn't include all the options of the Clover installer, like RC. I'd copy those over manually but now Windows is telling me I don't have permission to access this drive. 

[Ace2213]

Is there any way to configure Clover from inside Clover itself? By tweaking the configs and boot options to make it find and boot the macOS installation? 

 

I've found a program to configure Clover in Windows but it requires the Windows installation to be UEFI, which isn't the case for my work computer. 

Edited April 30, 2019 by Ace2213

[Ace2213]

Update: I repeated the Rufus process except with MBR/UEFI instead of GPT/UEFI like I had previously done and now I was able to access the drive. So I manually installed all the drivers and kexts I could, and now Clover shows my Mojave installation! among other boot option. However it doesn't boot into it. I select it and it goes to boot but it stops soon after and then it just restarts. With boot argument - V, I'm unable to catch what it says. Upon reboot, it shows some lines above the Acer logo that I am able to read, but don't seem to contain anything critical. 

 

The same thing happens when choosing recovery and filevault. Choosing prebooter gives me a blocked/forbidden symbol and then just freezes there until I manually reboot. 

Edited April 30, 2019 by Ace2213

[Cyberdevs]

5 hours ago, Ace2213 said:

Is there any way to configure Clover from inside Clover itself? By tweaking the configs and boot options to make it find and boot the macOS installation? 

 

I've found a program to configure Clover in Windows but it requires the Windows installation to be UEFI, which isn't the case for my work computer. 

You can use the "Gear icon" or the "Option" in clover's GUI before you boot into macOS to adjust the setting temporarily the changes won't be added to the config.plist though. For adding the permanent changes you need to either use Clover Configurator or TextEdit or any other plist editor apps.

 

Send me a screenshot of the verbose log when you choose -v flag, the lines that you are talking about are most likely the APFS messages, but once I see the screenshot I can tell for sure. If you can't upload the image just use a 3rd party site and provide the link here.

[Guest ricoc90]

6 hours ago, Ace2213 said:

However it doesn't boot into it. I select it and it goes to boot but it stops soon after and then it just restarts. With boot argument - V, I'm unable to catch what it says.

Use debug=0x100 keepsyms=1 -v as bootflags, which should prevent the system from rebooting in case of a kernel panic (if that's the issue).

 

I always make a video recording of my screen so that if anything goes wrong, i can play back the video to see what happened.

Edited April 30, 2019 by ricoc90

[Ace2213]

18 hours ago, Cyberdevs said:

You can use the "Gear icon" or the "Option" in clover's GUI before you boot into macOS to adjust the setting temporarily the changes won't be added to the config.plist though. For adding the permanent changes you need to either use Clover Configurator or TextEdit or any other plist editor apps.

I meant full-on configuring Clover, as in to emulate the function of the Clover Configurator.

 

 

17 hours ago, ricoc90 said:

I always make a video recording of my screen so that if anything goes wrong, i can play back the video to see what happened.

My phone's camera isn't working for some reason. I know, I have the perfect set of circumstances!

I ended up performing the whole process again. Set up a macOS VM on my work computer, redownloaded the system image, reconfigured the USB flash drive with Clover and the kext. 

Plugged it in, hoping to bypass the install process by simply booting into the existing Mojave installation, but it failed. I then tried to reinstall macOS, but got stuck at the same point.

The Clover Configuration was pretty minimal in the guide I was following this time around (basically just set some properties for igfx) so I also enabled some options to enable the injection of kexts. I couldn't find the original guide I followed with the thorough Clover Configuration. Could this be relevant?

One of the boot flags I must have set in the Configurator are now causing the process to stop indefinitely so I can actually read the logs. I typed them out:

 

Start
Start OSName
Start InitDeviceTree
Start InitDeviceTree
End InitDeviceTree
Start InitMemoryConfig
End InitMemoryConfig
Start CheckHibernate
End CheckHibernate
efiboot loaded from device: Acpi<
efiboot file path: \System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi
Start OpenVolume
End OpenVolume
Start ProcessOptions
End ProcessOptions
RegisterRestartDataProtocol: called. 0x79285f18
RestartData protocol installed successfully.
Start SetConsoleMode
End SetConsoleMode
Start ReadKernelCache
End ReadKernelCache
Start UncompressKernelCache
End UncompressKernelCache
Start CalculateAdler32
End CalculateAdler32
Start LoadKernelFromStream
Emd LoadKernelFromStream
Start InitBootStruct

root device uuid is ´
End InitBootStruct
Start LoadRAMDisk
End LoadRAMDisk
Start FinalizeBootStruct
Start RandomSeed
End RandomSeed

******************************************

Edited May 1, 2019 by Ace2213

[Ace2213]

It seems that Clover/Windows is corrupting my flash drive somehow. After every time I plug it into my laptop, to attempt a boot/install, the capacity drops to 64-67MB. I leave it for a day and then suddenly it's back to normal.

I just plugged it back into the VM on my work computer to reconfigure Clover with a more thorough guide and macOS tells me it cannot use this drive so I click initialize, it opens Disk Utility, and it's back down to 67MB.

Is there a way to write-protect it? So I can perform this process on my laptop without any of the files on it being affected? Because something seems to be messing with it. 

[Ace2213]

It was indeed a misconfigured Clover. I set it up correctly as per the other guide and now everything is back on track. 

 

Trackpad, keyboard, Ethernet and Wifi still don't work. Haven't gotten around to testing anything else yet but these are the main things I need to fix to at least stop relying on external mouse/keyboard/computer. 

 

I installed Clover on the SSD, copied over the config.plist file, installed a few kexts via Kext Wizard but it doesn't seem to have changed anything. 

 

I should note:

1. During the initial setup of the OS, my built-in keyboard was stuck with the down arrow key pressed (and still is, even though it's working fine in Clover). As a result, I was forced to choose "This computer does not connect to the internet". Under Network in System Preferences, I only see Bluetooth. Trying to add a PPoE connection shows a drop down menu titled "Ethernet", but clicking on it does nothing. 

2. Due to the keyboard problem, I have disconnected it from the motherboard so that it doesn't interfere with usage, until I'm able to fix its Kext. 

3. During boot, there's a iGPU problem that it keeps "retrying", but it eventually boots successfully. Everything is working fine though. About this Mac shows "Intel HD Graphics KBL CRB 1536MB". The memory seems about right, considering my total system memory is 4GB (another 4GB sodimm should arrive tomorrow. Hopefully vram increases accordingly automatically) 

4. System performance isn't great. It's not painfully slow, but it does take a second, particularly when Finder is trying to access files on the USB drive. It doesn't seem to have hickups with my internal SSD or HDD.

5. /System/Libraries/Extensions has a TON of kexts, most of which I have no use for, including some Nvidia drivers. Now, as I understand it, macOS automatically installs/runs all kexts in that folder, right? If that's true, then I should remove most of these as to not cause conflicts. If not, I should install the ones in there that I do need. Might be helpful. 

[Cyberdevs]

I strongly suggest to live the kexts in the Extensions folder alone don’t touch the system folder and you don’t need to install the 3rd party kext in the /S/LE you can simply add the kexts in clover’s EFI folder under /EFI/Clover/kexts/Other this way you have a vanilla MacOS and then you can easily add or remove the kext without damaging macOS.

[Ace2213]

1 hour ago, Cyberdevs said:

I strongly suggest to live the kexts in the Extensions folder alone don’t touch the system folder and you don’t need to install the 3rd party kext in the /S/LE you can simply add the kexts in clover’s EFI folder under /EFI/Clover/kexts/Other this way you have a vanilla MacOS and then you can easily add or remove the kext without damaging macOS.

Ok but that's not working. Either I'm not installing kexts properly, or all of the kexts are being successfully installed but aren't working. I'm not worried about damaging macOS. I can simply reinstall it. Making my hardware work is much more important. 

 

I even tried /L/E, with some sudo commands for permissions. Nothing. It seems that my L2c touchpad will require patching the DSDT and my wifi card also requires very specific instructions to work under Mojave, but the keyboard and Ethernet kexts should work with no additional tinkering required. I really think I may have accidentally disabled all connectivity options for my device during setup. 

 

It's also not working on battery. Only on AC power. 

 

I've installed Windows on the second partition for now and will read up on DSDT patching. 

[Cyberdevs]

About the DSDT and SSDTs you can ask @MaLd0n for help. You can also attach your current EFI folder or folder or config.plist so we can take a look.

[Ace2213]

https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-guide/config.plist-per-hardware/kaby-lake

 

I followed this guide to the T, so my config.plist should be identical. With one exception. It's for desktops, which use Intel HD 630 graphics. Since I'm on a laptop, I chose the igfx platform for 620.

 

I also chose a serial number of a verified iMac18,2, confirmed valid on the Apple website. 

config.plist.txt

Edited May 1, 2019 by Ace2213
Uploaded the file.

[Ace2213]

These are the kexts I've been trying to install.
And these are the installed drivers, in case it's relevant.

[Cyberdevs]

Give this config a try and let me know how it works. Make sure you have a backup of your existing working config.plist just in case. You can rename this file to something like config-2.plist and copy it in your EFI folder and select it from Clover's GUI and to do so all you have to do is to select "Options" from Clover GUI and then under the Config you can select the new file and boot from it, so if that fails you can simply reboot the system and then boot normally with your original config.

 

 

config.plist.zip