Lenovo ThinkPad T420 with UEFI Only

plympton · February 4, 2016

The free slot can be for an Msata drive or WAN card. The bluetooth chip is on the right side of the palm rest. (for the t420s at least). It's a royal pain to get to, but you can swap out the BT 3.0 card for a BT 4.0 card. Also, it is very very easy to accidently not reconnect the wireless disable switch when you reassemble rasulting in no wifi as well. Hard to diagnose, so be careful there. It's the flat ribbon cable doesn't fully reconnect.

I haven't gotten bluetooth to work in El Capitan for any hackintosh, so no help from me there.

-Dan

Somez · February 4, 2016

The free slot can be for an Msata drive or WAN card. The bluetooth chip is on the right side of the palm rest. (for the t420s at least). It's a royal pain to get to, but you can swap out the BT 3.0 card for a BT 4.0 card. Also, it is very very easy to accidently not reconnect the wireless disable switch when you reassemble rasulting in no wifi as well. Hard to diagnose, so be careful there. It's the flat ribbon cable doesn't fully reconnect.

I haven't gotten bluetooth to work in El Capitan for any hackintosh, so no help from me there.

-Dan

Thanks for the instructions. At the moment it doesn't worth it for me to start experimenting but maybe in the future I'll give it a try.

idkfaiddqd · February 5, 2016

Hi there,

I am very new at this. The last time I messed around with hackintosh stuff was back in to 10.5 days.

I followed the guide in this thread to install El Capitan on my t420 this morning. Everything is working as expected, but I cannot get clover to boot from the HDD. I can boot into my system from my flash drive. I've gone back 10 or 12 pages and have not seen anything about this.

I have ensured that I am on bios version 1.46, and I am set to uefi only. I installed Clover 3746.

What should I check first?

trifero · February 5, 2016

Hi there,

I am very new at this. The last time I messed around with hackintosh stuff was back in to 10.5 days.

I followed the guide in this thread to install El Capitan on my t420 this morning. Everything is working as expected, but I cannot get clover to boot from the HDD. I can boot into my system from my flash drive. I've gone back 10 or 12 pages and have not seen anything about this.

I have ensured that I am on bios version 1.46, and I am set to uefi only. I installed Clover 3746.

What should I check first?

Fastest way is to copy the content of the flash drive EFI to the hard drive EFI.

Somez · February 5, 2016

Hi there,

I am very new at this. The last time I messed around with hackintosh stuff was back in to 10.5 days.

I followed the guide in this thread to install El Capitan on my t420 this morning. Everything is working as expected, but I cannot get clover to boot from the HDD. I can boot into my system from my flash drive. I've gone back 10 or 12 pages and have not seen anything about this.

I have ensured that I am on bios version 1.46, and I am set to uefi only. I installed Clover 3746.

What should I check first?

I was also struggling with this part and all I can tell you is that try to follow this part of the guide and do not give up

It took me a few days to understand what has to be mounted, then copied from where, etc.

Have you completed this step? If not, then do it now.

Convert the Logical volume to Physical volume

The full installer likes to make a logical volume. So for simplicity, I recommend one to revert the root volumes to a regular volume.

Run: sudo diskutil corestorage revert /

In my case I was struggling a lot with the ESP part. I had to mount both the ESP of the installed system (Macintosh HD) and the ESP of the flash drive used for install. Make sure you pay attention to correctly identify which partition is which one by using the diskutil list command.

b ) The ESP contents on the HD are now to be made exactly like the ESP used to setup the USB installer above. If the ESP is not mounted from the running Clover installer pkg, manually mount the ESP of your HD on /Volumes/ESP. (See first 2 commands below.) Then you will replace the ESP installed by Clover in the previous step. Which means you copy/replace these 2 directories /Volume/ESP/EFI/CLOVER and BOOT with the ones from the Zip file. Then just as you did for the USB, theconfig.plist is renamed from the one that matched your LCD. For a manual mount and install of the ESP bits to disk0 follow same procedure as for the USB. If you previously installed Windows, be careful to not lose the EFI/Microsoft contents.

Note:

The Clover config.plist default volume name (the volume to boot automatically) is set to OSX - meaning your new volume is assumed to be named OSX

If you use a different name, change the volume name or edit the name in config.plist to match.

sudo mkdir /Volumes/ESPsudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/ESP

test ! -e /Volumes/ESP/EFI && mkdir /Volumes/ESP/EFI

sudo cp -a ~/Downloads/T420/EFI/* /Volumes/ESP

cd /Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER

mv config.1600x900.plist config.plist

tluck · February 5, 2016

@idkfaiddqd -

did you follow the part 2 of the my (Best Answer) guide?

1) check your boot order in bios -

2) make sure the HD ESP has the clover folder properly configured

- Somez and trifero pretty much said it. the ESP Clover folder on the HD should match the ESP Clover folder from the USB installer.

so boot with your usb - follow part 2

run diskutil list to see what are your disk devices - usually HD is disk0 and USB is disk1

the new El capitan GUI Disk Utility will NOT allow you mount hidden (ESP) partitions - so you must do it on the command line.

karlamba · February 6, 2016

Guys, can someone recommend an USB WiFi card which will work even when I will wake laptop from a suspend?

I see some wifi cards mentioned in the history of this thread but maybe something changed?

tluck · February 6, 2016

@karlamba - which USB one do you have? i ran into an issue with my RTL8192 on El cap and sleep/wake on another hack box. had to add a sleep watcher function to disable/enable before/after sleep otherwise it would go to zombie state.

replacing internal wifi is the way to go IMO. For $10 +/- you can get an Atheros or Broadcom chip. it's pretty easy to replace the wifi card as it is under the keyboard. (vs BT). then you install the modded bios - which is pretty easy via windows.

karlamba · February 6, 2016

well - I don't have working wifi but I was thinking about TP-LINK TL-wn823n mini nano usb 300...

Which exactly internal wifi do you use? 1510 from dell?

Do you have a link to modded bios or I should just look into the history of this thread?

Will it be enough to just install modded bios and put new wifi card (for example the same as you have) or I need also "edit" the white list of supported cards?

tluck · February 6, 2016

search this thread for "modded bios" - here is one of many posts

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285678-lenovo-thinkpad-t420-with-uefi-only/page-58?do=findComment&comment=2036738

it was this easy for me:

install modded bios

replace wifi card

boot up and enjoy built-in wifi

trifero · February 7, 2016

well - I don't have working wifi but I was thinking about TP-LINK TL-wn823n mini nano usb 300...

Which exactly internal wifi do you use? 1510 from dell?

Do you have a link to modded bios or I should just look into the history of this thread?

Will it be enough to just install modded bios and put new wifi card (for example the same as you have) or I need also "edit" the white list of supported cards?

karlamba, if you BIOS is 83ET76WW (1.46), (you can see it pressing F1 when boot), I can send you the file needed for bypass the white list.

Allan · February 8, 2016

Please let me know the new place of this topic so we can continue there

Here: [Help] Power Nap in T420

Obrigado.

Nice!

NP

Somez · February 11, 2016

I haven't found an easy way to control the fan through the DSDT, but found a way to change the behavior of the Blue ThinkVantage button. You can change the speed at which it sets.

Scope (PCI0.LPC.EC)

{

Method (_Q19, 0, NotSerialized)

{

Name (FANS, One)

Store (HFSP, FANS)

XOr (FANS, 0x80, Local0)

If (Local0)

{

Store (0x80, HFSP)

}

Else

{

Store (0x02, HFSP)

}

}

}

The last Store(0x02, HFSP) was changed from 0x07 (I remember this from TPFanControl - 7 is the "max speed". 2 is a constant speed of 3500 rpm, which is reasonable. I'm going to set it to 1 and see what the speed goes down to, if it's normally stable, etc.

Speed 0x01 takes it down to a really really pleasant 2000 rpm. Hitting the blue button will take it to the 0x80 mode, which is auto. You could have the first item 0x01 or 0x02, and the 2nd be 0x80, and I presume that would make the default quiet, and blue be auto. probably better the other way around though. I'm running around 69-70 degC at the moment.

Hey Guys!

I would like to recap on this topic because I want to test how my machine works when I can enforce 2000 RPM with the ThinkVantage button and a 2nd press would toggle auto mode driven by BIOS. This is not how it works now in my case. Can someone tell me what file should I change and how to apply these changes for this concept to work?

Also can it be that my power management is not fully set up? How can I check that?

Thanks a lot.

tluck · February 11, 2016

@somez -

mount your ESP

edit /Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/dsdt.dsl

look for _Q19

change 0x07 to 0x01 in this function. - which means force fan to lowest speed instead of highest 0x07

recompile the dsdt.dsl with the "iasl" tool

do you have the HWMonitor.app (that is a companion item to FakeSMC etc.)

if so when you run geek bench or something to generate load you can watch the fan speed as well as processor speed step levels.

trifero · February 11, 2016

Really, guys… Theres nothing wrong with the default fan speed control.

Somez · February 11, 2016

@somez -

mount your ESP

edit /Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/dsdt.dsl

look for _Q19

change 0x07 to 0x01 in this function. - which means force fan to lowest speed instead of highest 0x07

recompile the dsdt.dsl with the "iasl" tool

do you have the HWMonitor.app (that is a companion item to FakeSMC etc.)

if so when you run geek bench or something to generate load you can watch the fan speed as well as processor speed step levels.

Thanks tluck.

ESP mounted

File updated

How do I compile the file with the iasl tool and where do I find this tool?

Thanks.

tluck · February 11, 2016

@Somez

- iasl command tool is included in the zip (utility folder)

- compile on terminal command line:

iasl dsdt.dsl

if successful, you get a new dsdt.aml file.

Somez · February 11, 2016

@Somez

- iasl command tool is included in the zip (utility folder)

- compile on terminal command line:
iasl dsdt.dsl 
if successful, you get a new dsdt.aml file.

This is awkward. I got a lot of syntax errors which doesn't make any sense as i have only modified 1 line.

Here's just a few of them:

Maximum error count (200) exceeded

/Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/dsdt.dsl 8890: ToPLD (

Error 4124 - syntax error, unexpected PARSEOP_NAMESEG, expecting ',' or '}' ^

/Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/dsdt.dsl 8891: PLD_Revision = 0x1,