OC on Asus Prime Z390-P: Success with SATA-SSD, strange macOS Utilitities crashes with M.2 EVO 970

[Eradian]

Hello,

 

this is my 5th Hackintosh build, but the first one using OC 0.5.7 on Asus Prime Z390-P with Samsung M.2 EVO 970 1TB, and no, not the EVO 970 PLUS.

 

I followed https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/ to the letter, first attempting 10.15.4, and was rewarded with a nicely booting USB install medium. Trouble started at the beginning of the actual installation process, with the program "macOS Utilities" crashing and triggering display of "Installer Log". From there I could invoke "Disk Utility" to initialize the M.2 with APFS and launch "startosinstall" from "Terminal" but that only resulted in a reboot. Then I tried 10.15.3 and also 10.14.4, always using gibMacOS and createinstallmedia as per the guide, but again, "macOS Utilities" invocation would be followed by a reboot or the selection buttons of this program not doing anything. These failures were reproducible with both iGPU and Radeon RX580 driving my monitor via DP. I also briefly tried another USB install medium I had prepared with Clover for my previous build on another ASUS Z390 board which also got to "mac OS Utilities" only to freeze exactly there. 

 

When I was really at wit's end, I dismounted the EVO 970 M.2 and hooked up an SATA EVO 860, and much to my surprise, the 10.15.4 install completed without any further hiccups.

 

Now I could just shrug and keep the SATA SSD, but I'd like to learn/understand what could possibly go wrong with the M.2 SSD and how to properly investigate this. Should I try to switch to the DEBUG version of OC 0.5.7 and enable a lot of logging? Not sure, as the failure seems to happen after the installer boot is finished and the "macOS Utilities" failures appear to happen in user space, at least in 10.15.4 there is the installer log indicating an array bounds violation.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

 

Eradian

 

PS: I could attach my EFI here, but its built following the vanilla guide Coffee Lake secition, plist.conf passes the on-line config checker and exactly that EFI works fine with the SATA SSD. So I'm rather looking for advice on how to investigate/provide useful input here.