NB: Kernel Panics as mentioned in the title is irrelevant, this was due to a bad EFI config attempt.

Well, I decided today was the day I'd upgrade from 10.12 to 10.13; I knowingly (and without regrets) decided to do a clean install by wiping my installation drive with Disk Utility first; so I can't go back to any previous state. Oh well. The guide I initially followed to get 10.11 and then 10.12 working was this one on tonymacx86.

I've had a number of errors today — so I'll just start by describing my build, my configuration, and what errors have occurred.

Build

• Gigabyte Z170N-Gaming 5 ITX motherboard
• Skylake i7 6700K
• Maxwell nVidia GTX960 GPU
• 32GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RAM
• Replaced the default networking card on the MB with a Broadcom card from that of an iMac.
• USB3.0 drive as the macOS installer.

Configurations

BIOS

I'm happy to look for more BIOS settings, but this is pretty much every option I have minus CPU/RAM voltage/frequency prefs:

• Extreme Memory Profile: Disabled
• Fast Boot: Disabled
• Windows 8/10 Features: Other OS
• LAN PXE Boot Option ROM: Disabled
• Storage Boot Option Control: UEFI
• Other PCI devices: UEFI
• Network Stack: Disabled
• Legacy USB Support: Enabled
• XHCI Handoff: Enabled
• USB Mass Storage Driver Support: Enabled
• Port 60/64 Emulation: Enabled
• VT-d: Disabled
• Internal Graphics: Disabled
• IOAPIC 24-119 Entries: Enabled

config.plist

Please find my config.plist as attached here. It was created by following the Skylake specific components of this guide by /u/corpnewt. Thanks for that.

Clover, other EFI settings, kexts, etc

To create my EFI profile, I followed the guide as outlined here on tonymacx86 for creation of a bootable USB for 10.13, using Clover 2.4r4259.

This involved selecting the options as marked in that guide during the Clover installation, and the installation of the following kexts in Other/. I have checked that all these kexts are the latest versions and are up to date.

• FakeSMC.kext
• USBInjectAll.kext
• Lilu.kext
• NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext

As well as dropping the latest copy of apfs.efi into drivers64EUFI/.

Boot args

dart=1 nv_disable=1

Errors & What I've tried

Following all of the above doesn't even get me to the High Sierra installer, instead, I get a prohibition sign like this one (not my image), with no useful error data, despite selecting the verbose boot argument.

I've tried multiple USB ports to run the installer from with no difference in success.

Many thanks to /u/xXDisco_TitsXx for helping me out a great deal here by providing varying other EFI configurations, sadly without success.

Summary

So, if anyone has any ideas — I'd be so so grateful. If you feel like I've missed anything, let me know and I'll be happy to report back.