Lenovo ThinkPad T420 with UEFI Only

[Somez]

if you are seeing weird/glitchy menu colors on LCD when using 2 external monitor.  i think the answer is to use a modified EDID to remove non-RGB profiles. i will post a new zip soon with the EDID modified for T420 LCD.  working for me!

 

@Somez - Not intentional to avoid your query on T460.

 

short story: After a rocky start with El Capitan on the T460, recently over the last month with Sierra the box came together for me. These problems are all history. Now in fact I replaced my tried-and-true trusty T420 and docking station with the T460 and its docking station. Bottom line - and time will tell - it is pretty solid. The ClickPad is nicer than and the TrackPoint is reliable. I really like the USB3 ports on the Dock so now i can truly just click it out the dock and go without a lot of hassle. with my T420 i was using a FL PCI for USB3 etc etc.

 

Other TP sites and references

 

T430

- site: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/293762-thinkpad-t430-mavericks-109x-yosemite-1010/

- may be somewhat neglected - but has some good 430 specific info

 

T440s

- ludacrivsp and others have a good thread on this on another hack site

- i tested one out recently but decided to return it - but it worked ok.

 

T450

- shmillee site: - https://github.com/shmilee/T450-Hackintosh

- a great repo on GitHub which was a huge bonus to me to get the T460 going

 

T460

- http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/315451-guide-lenovo-t460-macos-with-clover/

- i originally posted a "work in progress" guide last September to solicit help

- and now with luck, encouragement, and some work from a small band of T460/T560 user and enthusiasts,  we have a pretty solid guide and zip file now!

 

Awesome job!

I personally have chosen the T420 for hackintosh because this guide was the easiest to understand and the price was also one of the main drivers

I plan to start learning iOS programming so hopefully this machine is enough to run Xcode.

 

My wife also wanted to have a hackintosh but she hates the look of the T420 so I bought her a HP 8470p which has an El Capitan guide from Rehabman on "another site". I still worry about upgrading the 8470p to Sierra and potentially breaking her work machine. Do you think I can use Carbon Copy Cloner with another HDD and clone her system drive so if something breaks then I can easly clone the system back. I'm not sure if I can copy the EFI partition with it as well, and as I understand so far that's where the magic happens

 

Thanks again for your help.

[tluck]

sure. i use CCC to replicate my SSD to a backup HD.  i use a custom script to replicate the ESP. but its is nothing more than mounting each ESP and copying from one to the other.

[Somez]

sure. i use CCC to replicate my SSD to a backup HD.  i use a custom script to replicate the ESP. but its is nothing more than mounting each ESP and copying from one to the other.

 

Cool! I might write a bash script on my own too. It's been 10 years I've written anything in Bash lol.

Thanks.

[superkwn]

@tluck, I am using VoodooPS2Trackpad.kext from your folder actually on my w520. The only problem is that the trackpoint is too sensitive and moving too fast. I have set the tracking speed to Slow, but it feels still a little fast. Is there a way to config VoodooPS2Trackpad.kext to slow it down? Thanks.

[149113]

Ran into a bit of an issue with my T520 this am... On my Clover menu I have two boot options: Boot from Macintosh HD or Boot Recovery. No matter what option I choose I am booting into recovery. The config.plist file is unchanged since 11/15. What's causing it to boot to recovery only? This was working fine yesterday and I have not changed anything lately.

[tluck]

@superkwn -
probably you are using the default profile in VoodooPS2TrackPad? i created a T420 profile to fix/improve the TrackPad character. you can look at the T420 values and make them default or add a property in PS2K to define a profile for your box. this should give you more control vs just the Pref Panel. see the T420 DSDT for an example - see _DSM in PS2K device. 

ioreg -l
...
| | |   "device-properties" = {"RM,oem-table-id"="T420","RM,oem-id"="LENOVO"}

 

@149113

i wonder if you have a logical volume? that is confusing clover? if you boot into Recovery - you may be able to see this with diskutil on the command line etc.

if so revert from the logical volume by something like this:

 

diskutil cs revert <diskNs2> 

 

where diskNs2 is your Mac HD.

[superkwn]

@tluck,  Thanks for the advice.  looked at my dsdt and there is no device PS2K, but KBD. So what I did was replace the whole device KBD by PS2K from your dsdt. It seems the problem is solved. Interesting. One small issue not related to the sensitivity of the trackpoint. Sometimes (actually quite frequently), when I did cold boot of the laptop, the trackpoint is not responding. The issue is usually gone by 2-3 reboots. But I want to have the issue addressed if possible. Do you have any idea?

 

@superkwn -
probably you are using the default profile in VoodooPS2TrackPad? i created a T420 profile to fix/improve the TrackPad character. you can look at the T420 values and make them default or add a property in PS2K to define a profile for your box. this should give you more control vs just the Pref Panel. see the T420 DSDT for an example - see _DSM in PS2K device. 

ioreg -l
...
| | |   "device-properties" = {"RM,oem-table-id"="T420","RM,oem-id"="LENOVO"}

 

@149113

i wonder if you have a logical volume? that is confusing clover? if you boot into Recovery - you may be able to see this with diskutil on the command line etc.

if so revert from the logical volume by something like this:

 

diskutil cs revert <diskNs2> 

 

where diskNs2 is your Mac HD.

[tluck]

same issue here with TP on occasion. a reboot often works but sleep/wake is 100% working TP on wake. i dont know why it works sometimes. the same kext works 99% on my T460.  the TP thing is a long standing issue. never could understand it. 

[superkwn]

Thanks for the quick note. I guess I will just live with it. For your T460 package, do you think it will also work for T460s, X260 and x1 carbon 2016, just like your T420 package works wonderfully with X220 and W520?

 

same issue here with TP on occasion. a reboot often works but sleep/wake is 100% working TP on wake. i dont know why it works sometimes. the same kext works 99% on my T460.  the TP thing is a long standing issue. never could understand it. 

[tluck]

yes i expect other Skylake models to just work or require some minimal mods. in contrast to the T420 with custom DSDT work hard(er) to replicate, the T460 zip has the tools i used to create a custom ACPI files (DSDT/SSDT) from scratch. in fact the DSDT is lightly modified and  most of the heavy lifting as far as ACPI modifications go, is done with SSDT. For example, a T560 user did just that. 

[superkwn]

Temping to upgrade.

yes i expect other Skylake models to just work or require some minimal mods. in contrast to the T420 with custom DSDT work hard(er) to replicate, the T460 zip has the tools i used to create a custom ACPI files (DSDT/SSDT) from scratch. in fact the DSDT is lightly modified and  most of the heavy lifting as far as ACPI modifications go, is done with SSDT. For example, a T560 user did just that. 

[149113]

@superkwn -

probably you are using the default profile in VoodooPS2TrackPad? i created a T420 profile to fix/improve the TrackPad character. you can look at the T420 values and make them default or add a property in PS2K to define a profile for your box. this should give you more control vs just the Pref Panel. see the T420 DSDT for an example - see _DSM in PS2K device. 

ioreg -l

...

| | |   "device-properties" = {"RM,oem-table-id"="T420","RM,oem-id"="LENOVO"}

 

@149113

i wonder if you have a logical volume? that is confusing clover? if you boot into Recovery - you may be able to see this with diskutil on the command line etc.

if so revert from the logical volume by something like this:

 

diskutil cs revert <diskNs2> 

 

where diskNs2 is your Mac HD.

I ended up mounting the EFI volume from my bootable Win 7 instance and then reapplied the config.plist and all is well now. Strange but glad it's working again.

 

Side question... what idle temps are most folks seeing on their T Series? I am at 48-50 idle with an i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz. On boot for the first 25 seconds after the screen comes up it gets to 75-80 but then settles in to the low 50's. I replaced the fan unit in the last 6 months from the original and that did make a difference. It was idling at 58-60 before that upgrade.

[tluck]

those temps sound about right as compared to my T420. 

[goodguess]

@149113: Same here for startup and idling.

This is what HW-Monitor tells - the Intenso SSD sensor is wrong though, as the hardware can hardly be below ambient temp (21ºC).

 

 

[heyadrien]

Hello guys, thanks for your amazing tutorial, Sierra work (almost) flawlessly on my T420 but I have only one issue, I can get the bluetooth to work. There is something I can do the enable it ? I installed the kext, checked the bios and the System Information app show "No information found". 

 

Thanks! (and sorry if my english is bad i'm french)  

[trifero]

Hello guys, thanks for your amazing tutorial, Sierra work (almost) flawlessly on my T420 but I have only one issue, I can get the bluetooth to work. There is something I can do the enable it ? I installed the kext, checked the bios and the System Information app show "No information found". 

 

Thanks! (and sorry if my english is bad i'm french)  

 

Probably you will have to enable it via a Windows installation, or a Live Linux distro. Once enabled, next time you boot again in Sierra it will be there.

[scoobaspeaz]

This is working out great on my T420.  So far I have not ran into any really bad issues that the howto hasnt been able to provide a workaround for.  Im using this to see if my 11 year old son likes using a mac (he has been using swift playgrounds on his iPad to learn coding on) to use to continue his learning with XCode.  

Only one thing I cannot seem to find a solution for is using an Apple USB keyboard with it.  I plug in my Apple USB keyboard model A1243 and the laptop doesnt even attempt to see it.  I can plug in any PC type of USB keyboard and i instantly get a keyboard notification to set it up.  

Any ideas on how to get an Apple USB Keyboard to work with this or is it even possible?

[tluck]

@scoobaspeaz - i have an A1243 keyboard and it works without issue on my systems.

so i wonder why it doesn't work on your system.

have you tried the keyboard on other systems?

what FW level? - there was an update a long time ago.

 

Apple Keyboard:

  Product ID: 0x0220
  Vendor ID: 0x05ac  (Apple Inc.)
  Version: 0.69
  Speed: Up to 1.5 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer: Apple, Inc
  Location ID: 0x1a112000 / 6
  Current Available (mA): 500
  Current Required (mA): 20
  Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

[trifero]

This is working out great on my T420.  So far I have not ran into any really bad issues that the howto hasnt been able to provide a workaround for.  Im using this to see if my 11 year old son likes using a mac (he has been using swift playgrounds on his iPad to learn coding on) to use to continue his learning with XCode.  

 

Only one thing I cannot seem to find a solution for is using an Apple USB keyboard with it.  I plug in my Apple USB keyboard model A1243 and the laptop doesnt even attempt to see it.  I can plug in any PC type of USB keyboard and i instantly get a keyboard notification to set it up.  

 

Any ideas on how to get an Apple USB Keyboard to work with this or is it even possible?

Mine works great. Odd.

[lolxapple]

Need some help guys, after a fresh install, I install Clover, then I go through the Post installation steps, but when I restart, I hang on ATH Tunables: pullmode [1] txringsize[256] tx... and I get the stop sign.
Thanks

SPECS

i7-2620M
1600x900
AR9280 WiFi
 

[tluck]

@lolxapple

can you boot from the USB installer?

did you install kexts on HD?

what do you mean install Clover - do you mean copy the ESP folder to the HD ?

[lolxapple]

@lolxapple

can you boot from the USB installer?

did you install kexts on HD?

what do you mean install Clover - do you mean copy the ESP folder to the HD ?

Booting from USB installer does the same thing.

I installed kexts using ./_kext-install.command

Installed clover as in grabbed the newest version off Github then moving the EFI folder from your zip to /ESP/EFI

 

EDIT: Solved by removing MausiEthernet kext

[nhoc_maruko9x]

Will this config automatically make my T420s VGA port to work? I tried both plugged the cable before boot and/or press "Detect display" in System Preferences but nothing works. I also try other AppleIntelSNBGraphics patches without any successful.

[vusun123]

Will this config automatically make my T420s VGA port to work? I tried both plugged the cable before boot and/or press "Detect display" in System Preferences but nothing works. I also try other AppleIntelSNBGraphics patches without any successful.

Revert to stock AppleIntelSNBGraphics framebuffer and use the config in the pack

[nhoc_maruko9x]

Revert to stock AppleIntelSNBGraphics framebuffer and use the config in the pack

Turned out it's the cable problem. I replaced it with another cable and it worked now.