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Lenovo ThinkPad T420 with UEFI Only

K0gen

By K0gen,
in Installation Guides

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aetherTom
aetherTom
Posted
Posted

@plesho

 

I feel so lucky because it was literally three days ago I decided I wanted to find out if I could put my spare T420 to use and now here I am tapping away on it like it was made for Mac OS X all along. This thread has been excellent for me as there hasn't needed to be any major messing around (just a silly backlight thing).

 

tluck has done a very, very good job with this thread!

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tluck
tluck
Posted
Posted

@plesho et al,

 

I appreciate the approbation. I try to give at least as much as I get. I started on the Hackintosh path about 4 years ago on a Thinkpad 510. Now i have 6 wintel boxes running OSX. My 3 kids can dual boot their laptops to Win 10 or OS X -- but they use OS X a lot more. And it's a cheaper to give my kids a $300 laptop vs $1000 Mac. (Although my wife has a real MacBook Pro - she is brutal on  equipment. ;)

 

@aetherTom - i will have to do a bit more testing but I recently put OS X on a Dell laptop and it would not pair with my iPhone either. but i was able to pair the 2 hacks and transfer files etc. weird  

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gromalle
gromalle
Posted
Posted

Hey, tluck! Thank you for installation method. I have successfully installed the Mavericks/El Capitan on my T420 1366x768.

 

Here is some corrections:

 

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USB --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app —nointeraction

we need: --nointeraction (not —nointeraction).

 

 

Hit the spacebar on your boot selection (OSX) to start up without kext caches to make sure it loads all the custom kexts just installed.

In Clover menu we have: Boot Mac OS X without caches.

 

 

In El Capitan they go in /System/Library/Display/Content/Resources/Overrides

 

In El Capitan 10.11.1: /System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides

 

Thanks again for your fantastic work!

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aetherTom
aetherTom
Posted
Posted

I have more questions for the the Hackintosh folks.

 

Currently running El Capitan 10.11.0 and I got an email from Apple to let me know that the latest beta 10.11.1 is out.

 

However it's not appearing in the App Store. Instead there's an update named 'MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.7'. I installed the update (only 4.1MB) and the T420 restarted. When Mac OS X came back up everything worked as expected and I checked to make sure Clover hadn't been affected which it hadn't. The only issue is that the App Store showed another update, when I looked at it it was the same update again. I installed it again (same size again - 4.1MB). Restarted and yet again another update - THE SAME ONE AGAIN!

 

All in all, I have installed this update five times (as per my updates tab on App Store) and I have it there again waiting to be installed.

 

Has anyone else had this? Is it expected as the T420 isn't a real Mac? Does anyone know of a way of removing the pending update and getting my laptop to move forward to 10.11.1?

 

Also, is the Dell 1510 the only known WiFi card that will work with Mac OS X in the T420? Or are there some other known variants?

 

Thanks!

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tluck
tluck
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@gromalle - thanks for pointing out the typos etc. fixed in the guide.

 

@aetherTom - i am on the public beta track so have not tried the 10.10.1 dev ver. i can only wonder if its trying to install stuff in the ESP? /EFI/APPLE folder.

i am using Atheros AR5BHB92 aka AR9280. other the iPhone thing works great for my mouse/keyboard. connects at 300Mbps. there are a few other sites that list all the WiFi cards that work OOB on OSX.

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vusun123
vusun123
Posted
Posted

Good guide. I proposed a friend to buy an used T420 for Linux and OS X and it's great. However, El Capitan is about to be released, so you might want to prepare to update the guide, mainly how to fix the USB ports. As my friend's T420 is for work, I can't do some experiments on it, but it should give you a hell lot of reworking

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gromalle
gromalle
Posted
Posted

i am using Atheros AR5BHB92 aka AR9280.

 

with modded bios? Because I tried to install AW-NB037H (Atheros 9285) but received message about "Unauthorized network card" with system halt without ability to boot.

El Capitan is about to be released, so you might want to prepare to update the guide, mainly how to fix the USB ports.

 

OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 (15B17c) -- all (USB2) ports on T420 works fine as they should.

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tluck
tluck
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@vusun123 - I agree that the 420 is a great OS X platform. i use one for work and then i bought a used one for my 7 year old.

 

the current DSDT (included in the guide) is already updated for El Capitan. i am using 10.11.0GM in production. Let me know if there is something specific missing in the guide for El Capitan

 

@gromalle - yes with modded bios. search this thread and i think is was tetonne that posted a link for a whitelisted bios (same as i used.) ... And glad that 10.11.1 is working for us still.

 

@aetherTom - now on IOS9, my iPhone just says Tom's Mac is not supported - when i try to pair it.  i have not researched this at all.

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entrixo
entrixo
Posted
Posted

@Polishapple, rather quickly thanks to the SSD. I think it takes about 15 seconds on AC power. It obviously boots slower on battery power since I've set my T420 to Battery Optimized in the UEFI and it takes about 25 seconds to boot.

 

@gromalle - you need to flash the modded BIOS. I got a DW1510 and I had to flash a modded BIOS to even boot up the system.

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paolo.marco
paolo.marco
Posted
Posted

 

 

  • Copy Mavericks (10.9.x) and Yosemite (10.10.x) to USB installer
  1. Download latest Yosemite or Mavericks - they are free in the Apple App Store
  2. Partition an 8GB (or larger) USB formatted with GUID Partition Table 

    - use the Partition Options... menu to change from MBR to GPT

    - Name the partition USB 

    - Use format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

     

    Note: if you have a larger USB (say 16GB) you can split into 2 8GB partitions, so you can have 10.9 and 10.10 installers on the same USB key

     

  3. Run this command (if Mavericks, the replace word Yosemite with Mavericks):

    sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USB --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app --nointeraction

  • Put Clover installation on USB

  1. manually mount the ESP of the USB and copy the entire EFI folder (from the zip) onto the USB ESP

    For example, assuming the USB is disk2:

    sudo mkdir /Volumes/ESP-USB

    sudo mount

    -t msdos /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/ESP-USB

    sudo cp

    -a ~/Downloads/T420/EFI /Volumes/ESP-USB

    Note: run "diskutil list" on the command line to find your USB disk

           

  2. Setup configuration files to match your LCD resolution in /Volumes/ESP-USB/EFI/CLOVER:

Rename config.1600x900.plist to config.plist or rename config.1366x768.plist to config.plist

 

 

When I do the reboot on the T420 machine I don't obtain anything else than the window in which is asked from what device I would like to boot even if i select the usb key....

 

It boots for less than a second, few messages and after returns to the bios menu asking where I want to do the boot from...

 

Thanks to everybody 

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paolo.marco
paolo.marco
Posted
Posted

@paolo.marco

 

is your system set to allow boot from UEFI?

is your USB formatted MBR OR GPT?

 

UEFI set

USB is formatted GPT 

 

Now after doing the same operation again I come to an UEFI window which it says:

 

BOOT OS X Install from Install OS X Yosemite

 

I hit ENTER

 

A White APPLE appears and after few seconds the process start again !

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Manwe150
Manwe150
Posted
Posted
> Actually the list of what is working seems to be endless - the build is so solid that I've even managed to plug an external Nvidia GTX 760 GPU (through ExpressCard slot) ...

 

this sounded really interesting, so I decided to give it a go myself.

 

BoM:

 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8RU3967552(PE4C-EC060A V3.0 - eGPU PCIe x16 interface for ExCard x1 connecter)

 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500384(ZOTAC GeForce GT 740 ZT-71006-10BB 2GB 128-Bit DDR3 PCIe 3.0)

 - random 20pin ATX power supply I had from an old computer

 

after a few initial missteps, I realized the DSDT edit mentioned above was to revert the change of the expresscard port of SLOT -> XHC1, and instead replace the name SLOT with GFX0. then everything just worked OTB.

 

initial benchmarks with Diablo III seems to show that this eGPU runs at ~50 fps (at high graphics settings), vs. ~20 fps with HD3000 IGPU (with low graphics settings).

 

 


thanks @plesho!

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plesho
plesho
Posted
Posted

after a few initial missteps, I realized the DSDT edit mentioned above was to revert the change of the expresscard port of SLOT -> XHC1, and instead replace the name SLOT with GFX0. then everything just worked OTB.

 

Yes, indeed you need to revert back the changes for the USB3 XHC1 controller, but for me everything is working even with default configuration with the name set to SLOT. I start to wonder if there would be any benefits of changing it to GFX0 (for example I'm missing the audio-over-HDMI).

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plesho
plesho
Posted
Posted

guys can i update from 10.10 to 10.10.4..

 

If you followed this guide - there is nothing special to do - just go to App Store and hit Updates - I'm not sure though how to update exactly to 10.10.4 as the latest version is 10.10.5 (most probably you would need to go through each update up to 10.10.4 and then stop there - do not apply the next one)

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