Updating to Sierra
October 14, 2016
While Sierra came out over a week ago, I just experienced installing it recently. I must say it went fairly smooth the second time around. The first time was just amateurish mistakes I made trying to get the installer working. That was just me having the flash drive plugged in to a USB hub rather than directly to the motherboard which resulted in the installer getting hung at "11 minutes remaining". What's the saying again? "Don't meet your heroes"? haha...
There have already been a handful of noticeable changes in the installation process. While the installation for UniBeast is unchanged, Clover is a different story. With El Capitan using my GTX 960 video card and i5-2400 processor, I had to use the flag "npci=0x2000" to get to the installer. Now that Clover and Sierra are more advanced than their previous versions I do not need to enter this flag. Better news for users of (some) modern video cards is that you shouldn't need to enter any special flags for Nvidia cards either. You can simply double-click the hard drive, go to the EFI folder location, find the playlist, double-click it to open it and edit the parameters. TonyMac's site has a good write-up of it here:
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/new-method-for-enabling-nvidia-web-drivers-in-clover.202341/.
Clover's default SMBIOS setting, which dictates the default machine type, is no longer "MacPro3,1" ad they are no longer supported but rather "iMac14,2". Luckily I was able to use the latest version of MultiBeast to set the machine type to my tried-and-true SMBIOS, iMac13,1. One of the default flags is "nvda_drv=1" but it's necessary to use Clover Configurator to remove this flag from always showing up when booting to Clover (easy fix). Like previous versions with Yosemite and El Capitan, the Nvidia drivers are necessary and requires a few reboots and selecting the drivers in OS X.
When installing a few packages, OS X now provides you with the option to delete the installer automatically upon the completion of a software installation. This is actually a nice little step as it saves you from having to do it manually. I can see using this occasionally, but usually with updates and new packages I copy them to another internal hard drive for later use. This has come in handy with older versions of software that are no longer supported or available.
Because I still use WiFi as my primary networking method, I'm still in the dark when connecting to the web and accessing the App Store. Perhaps one of these weekends I'll drill down through the living room and run a cable down to the basement so that I can have a dedicated Ethernet line.
As I progress throughout the install process I'll post more here, most likely replacing this text with tips and tricks to help assist you getting Sierra on your Hackintosh.
While Sierra came out over a week ago, I just experienced installing it recently. I must say it went fairly smooth the second time around. The first time was just amateurish mistakes I made trying to get the installer working. That was just me having the flash drive plugged in to a USB hub rather than directly to the motherboard which resulted in the installer getting hung at "11 minutes remaining". What's the saying again? "Don't meet your heroes"? haha...
There have already been a handful of noticeable changes in the installation process. While the installation for UniBeast is unchanged, Clover is a different story. With El Capitan using my GTX 960 video card and i5-2400 processor, I had to use the flag "npci=0x2000" to get to the installer. Now that Clover and Sierra are more advanced than their previous versions I do not need to enter this flag. Better news for users of (some) modern video cards is that you shouldn't need to enter any special flags for Nvidia cards either. You can simply double-click the hard drive, go to the EFI folder location, find the playlist, double-click it to open it and edit the parameters. TonyMac's site has a good write-up of it here:
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/new-method-for-enabling-nvidia-web-drivers-in-clover.202341/.
Clover's default SMBIOS setting, which dictates the default machine type, is no longer "MacPro3,1" ad they are no longer supported but rather "iMac14,2". Luckily I was able to use the latest version of MultiBeast to set the machine type to my tried-and-true SMBIOS, iMac13,1. One of the default flags is "nvda_drv=1" but it's necessary to use Clover Configurator to remove this flag from always showing up when booting to Clover (easy fix). Like previous versions with Yosemite and El Capitan, the Nvidia drivers are necessary and requires a few reboots and selecting the drivers in OS X.
When installing a few packages, OS X now provides you with the option to delete the installer automatically upon the completion of a software installation. This is actually a nice little step as it saves you from having to do it manually. I can see using this occasionally, but usually with updates and new packages I copy them to another internal hard drive for later use. This has come in handy with older versions of software that are no longer supported or available.
Because I still use WiFi as my primary networking method, I'm still in the dark when connecting to the web and accessing the App Store. Perhaps one of these weekends I'll drill down through the living room and run a cable down to the basement so that I can have a dedicated Ethernet line.
As I progress throughout the install process I'll post more here, most likely replacing this text with tips and tricks to help assist you getting Sierra on your Hackintosh.