Upgrade a Hackintosh from High Sierra to Catalina
October 2, 2020
October 2, 2020
As an owner of a NVIDIA GTX 1060, I’ve never been able to use macOS Mojave, or more recently, Catalina on my rig, as they don’t support the NVIDIA Pascal architecture natively, and the last macOS driver that NVIDIA published was for High Sierra.
This is the reason I stuck on High Sierra for years, hoping that eventually we get updated drivers for latest macOS version, but this didn’t happen is likely not happening anytime soon.
While I love my NVIDIA card, I eventually decided to switch to AMD to be able to upgrade my system, so I bought a RX 580.
This was literally just, taking out the GTX 1060, putting in the RX 580. It worked out of the box on High Sierra, and worked as well after the upgrade to Catalina.
Form there, I uninstalled the NVIDIA Web Driver. You can do that form the driver preferences which features an uninstaller.
I followed this guide on tonymacx86 to perform the upgrade, then I followed the post-installation procedure of the guide specific to my hardware.
The main difference here was that in MultiBeast, “Remove XHCI USB Port Limit” was systematically failing, so I didn’t put it in the end, and the latest MultiBeast didn’t include “FakeSMC Plugins”, only “VirtualSMC” and “VirtualSMC Plugins”.
I tried VirtualSMC, but this caused a reboot loop, like in the middle of the boot loading bar, it would just reboot again, and that over and over.
So I manually downloaded FakeSMC from tonymacx86 and added it to the Clover kexts, and this worked out.