Tips on Upgrading to El Capitan on a Hackintosh

Unlike a conventional Macintosh, Hackintoshes (aka CustoMacs) require more effort than just “click and install”. Upgrading from Yosemite to El Capitan was surprisingly less crazy than I expected it to be. I successfully performed the upgrade this past Friday. Contrary to what I was expecting, I did not have to reformat and install El Capitan from scratch.

I started with the TonyMacx86 guide to installing El Capitan, using Unibeast to create a bootable USB thumb drive with the OS. Macbreaker.com’s guide to installing El Capitan offered additional details that helped me with its detailed step-by-step approach.

The upgrade involved switching the boot loader, from Chimera (legacy BIOS based) to Clover (UEFI based). UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, and defines a software interface between an operating system and a platform’s firmware. Based on some digging around, Clover has two big advantages: 1) it makes updating the OS on your CustoMac much easier (like a real Mac) because it automatically patches kernel extensions. 2) It offers faster boot / shutdown times. The total time invested in the install was approximately 2 hours.

Here are a few tips that helped me with the install:

1) If your display is connected to a dedicated GPU card (instead of onboard video on the motherboard), make sure to set the Clover boot flag arguments to nv_disable=1 so that your Unibeast USB drive will boot. After El Capitan installs and reboots, you will need to use the nv_disable=1 flag again until you install the appropriate GPU drivers.

2) Make sure to save a copy of your previous MultiBeast settings (from Yosemite) for reference when performing the El Capitan post-install process. Also, it’s not a bad idea to save out your El Capitan Multibeast settings once they’ve been properly configured.

3) I did not need to affect the BIOS settings one iota from how they were configured when I installed Yosemite.

4) Unplug any internal / external drives, especially if you have other OS’s loaded onto them.

El Capitan runs significantly faster on my CustoMac. I can confirm faster boot / shutdown times. All in all, it was an easier upgrade than I thought.

-Krishna