My Path Towards Building a Hackintosh
From Part 1 I explained all about updating with Clover Boot Drive and the issues I had. This Blog will provide my experiences with Opencore. Right from the start I needed to know if my system would accept Big Sur and I did not want the problems I had before on installing over my internal hard drive. So, I bought a cheap external hard drive to install Big Sur and to boot up from here. However, at this stage I was in the dark on how to tell the computer to boot from the attached USB external hard drive, rather than the internal hard drive.
Resources
There are loads of Opencore tutorials but the following helped me a lot.
Dortania (Main Opencore website)
Everything Tech (YouTube)
Studio 3B (YouTube)
Ziggy Puppy Productions
OCAuxiliary Tools (Main App for creating EFI)
I downloaded the following Apps but was confused why I needed these. In the end I just used OCAuxiliary Tools.
OpenCore Configurator
ProperTree
Hackintool
MountEFI
Issues
After a long period of time watching and reading tutorials I managed to create an EFI onto a USB stick. I plugged in my external hard drive and USB stick and switched on the computer. Initially, I just switched on the computer and I think pressed F8. I wanted to get to the Opencore screen but somehow it just went to Clover. However, I quickly thought to press F2, get into BIOS and switch to the USB stick. All was good so far.
Then I encountered another problem. The other issue was getting stuck on the Apple logo and the installation just stopped. Cutting a long story short, I managed to get to the Opencore screen, formatted the external hard drive and started the process of installing Big Sur. However, the main issue I experienced was the stuck Apple logo and nothing happening. This occurred every time it shut down and did a boot up. I had to turn off the computer and start again. It was so frustrating!
The next day I thought maybe I had to tell the computer to read from the USB stick. So, every time it shut down at installation stages, I pressed F2 and switched to the USB. This seemed to do the trick and the installation completed and I had Big Sur on my external hard drive. I then shut down the computer, took away the USB stick and did a boot up from the external drive. My heart was in my mouth but it worked! YES!
Internal Hard Drive Installation
I was so happy this worked. I went ahead and did the same process of using the USB stick but this time selected my internal hard drive. However, something weird happened. The Apple logo did not get stuck. It was a smooth installation. So, I am thinking it might have been Clover interfering in some way. I didn't care and I did not have the energy to research to find answers. All seemed to be working now.
Updating Big Sur
According to the Dortania website, it was best to install version 11.2.3. Dortania kindly provided a download for this version. When I successfully installed Big Sur, Apple notified me to upgrade to 11.7.10. I decided to go through the normal Apple upgrade process. I thought, if it broke I could simply reinstall version 11.2.3. After Apple updated Big Sur, a message came up saying some files had been altered and Apple left some weird stuff on my desktop. I have no idea what these were, so I binned them and everything was still working great.
Installing Hardware and Software
Now I had to install all my software and connect my printers and scanner. My sound was coming out of my Dell USB sub bar, not from the motherboard sound card. This was OK for me and I have not plugged in speakers to the back of my computer. I suppose I needed to do something that Dartania recommended with sound, together with USB mapping, but I bypassed all this technical stuff. All that concerned me was that all my software, printers and external Drobo hard drive are all working great. Even my very old Epson scanner is working when I installed the drivers.
Boot-up Time
I am so happy everything is working great, even the time it takes to boot-up is fantastic. Before Clover literally took ten minutes to boot-up. I have another Mac and I decided to turn on both Hackintosh and Mac to see which was fastest to boot-up. The Hackintosh won by a few seconds. It was unbelievable!