Setting up a Hackintosh
2 February 25
10 minute read
I recently setup a new Hackintosh build and I wanted to share some of the issues I faced and how to overcome them. I expected that the process would be fairly straightforward as I had done it a few times before and this time I had a much more compatible build. Also, hackinosh documentation has come a long way since the Clover days and Dortania’s OpenCore guide is very comprehensive and easy to follow. However, there was just a few steps I needed to do differently to get everything working.
Builds can be very specific and tied to the hardware so this is the specs of my build:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-9700
- GPU: AMD Radeon VII GTX
- Motherboard: ROG Z390 Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi)
- MacOS: Sequoia 15.2
Installation issues
The first issue I encountered came when trying to boot into the installer. It would boot partially and then panic with a stop sign with a link to support.apple.com/macsetup. The debugging messages weren’t very helpful but I saw that just a few lines before it was related to USB. Searching online, I found that a few people suggested to disable XhciPortLimit in the OpenCore config.plist. The Dortania docs specified to enable this option on macOS 11.3+, which is why it was enabled. But it appears this is a common issue when not having a proper USB map. After disabling this, I was able to boot into the installer and complete the installation. As a note, the documentation recommends to create a USB map so it is best to do that after installation, if you do not have access to a windows machine beforehand.
Post-install issues
After installation, almost everything was working out of the box, which is expected, but Bluetooth wasn’t working, even thought it was detected in the System Information. Once again, I searched online and found some solutions. It appears that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooh stacks are tied together in this Intel chipsets and some additional kexts needed to be installed. The kexts needed were BlueToolFixup.kext, IntelBTPatcher.kext and IntelBluetoothFirmware.kext. After installing the kexts, Bluetooth was still not working but it turns out the final steps needed were to add the following values under NVRAM > 7C436110-AB2A-4BBB-A880-FE41995C9F82 in the config.plist:
| Key | Type | Value |
|---|---|---|
| bluetoothExternalDongleFailed | Data | 00 |
| bluetoothInternalControllerInfo | String | 0000000000000000000000000000 |
After rebooting, Bluetooth was working on the hackintosh.
Sleep issues
The last issue I faced was that the hackintosh would randomly wake from sleep and stay on for a few seconds before going back to sleep. While the display would not turn on, it was still not ideal that the system would wake up randomly. The first thing to check would be the power settings.
pmset -g
Make sure that the following settings are set, which you can do so with:
pmset -a hibernatemode 0
pmset -a proximitywake 0
If the issue still persists, you can check the logs to see what is waking the system up:
log show --style syslog | fgrep "Wake reason"
If you see reasons with RTC (Alaram), you should use the OpenCore config to disable RTC wake. The setting sould already be present in the config under Kernel > Patch.Find the Disable RTC wake patch and set the value Enabled value to True. Following this steps should help to resolve your hackintosh sleep issues.