iATKOS | United Kingdom

Chococat Says Hi from his little yellow house

I haven't seen someone using a Z490I Aorus Ultra around here, so I thought it would be a good idea to help people with a similar setup to mine.

Here goes my hardware:

CPU: i5 10400GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics UHD 630RAM: 16Gb DDR4 XPG Spectrix 3000MHzMotherboard: Z490I Aorus Ultra (Mini-ITX in case you missed the I in front of the model)Audio Codec: Realtek 1220-VBEthernet Card: Intel i225-vWifi/BT Card: Intel WiFi 6 AX-201Touchpad and touch display devices: NoneBIOS revision: F5Mouse: Logitech G903Keyboard: Razer Huntsman Elite (US Layout)AIO: Gamer Storm Captain Castle 240EX with 2 stock coolers from the AIO

Coolers: 2 outtake coolers from NZXT (came with the case)Case: NZXT H210I

SSD: 500Gb Western Digital Black NVMe M.2Hard Drive 1: 1Tb Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 32mb

Hard Drive 2: 140Gb Western Digital Green (don't know the RPM, I salvaged it from my aunt's very old laptop) 16mb

NZXT RGB LED Strip

One thing I'd like to note is that I'm in no way capable of providing a good tutorial on how to install MacOS Catalina, but here's a few things I learned in the past two days.

1. Mind the flash drive you're using. When I first tried (and failed miserably) I was using a SanDisk Cruzer Blade 32Gb flash disk. There's nothing wrong with it, but for an installer, it would give me the "OCB: Loadimage failed: unsupported" and nothing else after selecting Install MacOS (external) during the pre-install phase (which is Boot->Bios->Boot Option (Flash Disk/Opencore) ->List of things to select). I looked for this in the guide, but it seems no one else has had this issue. My solution was to use a generic 8Gb Flash Drive.
2. Some people might find that the internet is not working after successfully booting into the installer (this happened to me). After selecting "Reinstall MacOS Catalina" and selecting "Continue" on the following page, a warning saying "An Internet connection is required to install MacOS" would appear. The fix for this was in a 3-minute video in Russian. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-OmPYc15es. Also, it will only work with the ethernet cable if you have the same mobo as mine, I couldn't get the WiFi to work.
3. Another problem I had was with audio, but this is easily fixed by just changing the layout in the config.plist file. Don't know how to do that? Well, open proper-tree, go to the part where it says NVRAM, search for boot args and add alcid=xxx, where the xxx would be your layout, depending on your audio card. If you don't know which one you have, I highly recommend you go to your motherboard's factory website and search for it.
4. During installation, the screen would go black. Idk if this happened because I am using a DP connector for my primary monitor, but just wait. In my case, the installer said it would be done in 47 minutes, so I started a timer for 50 minutes and watched an episode of The Queen's Gambit on my phone. Once I finished watching, I went back to the office and boom, there it was, my MacOS setup screen.
5. Regarding monitors, I highly recommend that you don't use more than one monitor during installation, things get mosaicyish (this word doesn't exist, but you know what I mean, the HDMI monitor shows some things and the DP one goes green and grey with some flickering).
6. I generated my SSID and other identifiers before installing the MacOS. Did it with GenSMBios in Windows 10 and added the generated ids to my config.plist using proper-tree. I see some people doing it after installing MacOS, but since the guide recommended that I should do it before, I thought "fair enough" and did it as well. Apple Account is working and I can finally enjoy some paid apps on my computer.

That's it for my experience with making my first Hackintosh. Other than the non-orthodox methods above, I just followed Dortania's guide for opencore 0.6.2, section Comet-Lake.

Thank you all, from the community, for sharing your builds, attempts, successes and problems. Thanks to all of this material I could make my own Hackintosh. I hope I was able to help some of you.

And if anyone knows the reason behind the problems I've had, I'd love to know :P

Much love from Brazil!

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PS: This is my first post on Reddit, if the formatting is wrong, <del>I'm a disgrace for learning HTML and not knowing how to format a post on Reddit</del> I beg your pardon, however I hope that you can at least understand the troubles I had and learn something from it.