Jump to content

[GUIDE] Dell XPS 15 (9550) Mojave 10.14 / 10.15 Quick Installation


Krim404
 Share

1,806 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

Hey @golimpio, I've noticed that you're using a WD Blue SN550. Did you have to format this drive to 4kB sector size before use? I'm trying to move my hackintosh over to the 2TB variant, and on first boot it works fine but afterwards I get container corruption errors on boot, and so it only works one time after every time I transfer it.

 

I'm guessing it's because it came out of the box setup with 512B sector size, which is surprising. Funnily enough, my current NVME (Samsung PM951 that came with the laptop) is also 512B and I've never had any problems.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Rajveer86 said:

Hey @golimpio, I've noticed that you're using a WD Blue SN550. Did you have to format this drive to 4kB sector size before use? I'm trying to move my hackintosh over to the 2TB variant, and on first boot it works fine but afterwards I get container corruption errors on boot, and so it only works one time after every time I transfer it.

 

I'm guessing it's because it came out of the box setup with 512B sector size, which is surprising. Funnily enough, my current NVME (Samsung PM951 that came with the laptop) is also 512B and I've never had any problems.

 

Hi @Rajveer86, at first I've installed macOS Catalina on it with the original 512B sector size, but I just boot it a couple of times to get some data about the disk performance. After I got the numbers from the benchmark, I've formatted it to 4K and have been using it this way since then.

I can tell you that it works well with 4K, but unfortunately I didn't test it enough with 512B to confirm the issue you're having. With 4K, I even turned on FileVault 2 and never had any issue.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, golimpio said:

 

Hi @Rajveer86, at first I've installed macOS Catalina on it with the original 512B sector size, but I just boot it a couple of times to get some data about the disk performance. After I got the numbers from the benchmark, I've formatted it to 4K and have been using it this way since then.

I can tell you that it works well with 4K, but unfortunately I didn't test it enough with 512B to confirm the issue you're having. With 4K, I even turned on FileVault 2 and never had any issue.

 

Awesome, thanks for confirming that you're not having issues with 4k. I've gone ahead and switched to 4k also, cloned again and so far it looks like it's all working, booted up 5 or so times now without issues :)

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/9/2021 at 8:16 PM, Rajveer86 said:

 

Awesome, thanks for confirming that you're not having issues with 4k. I've gone ahead and switched to 4k also, cloned again and so far it looks like it's all working, booted up 5 or so times now without issues :)

It's probably worth to mention that I had some issues at the beginning, when I was trying to install Big Sur for the first time using this SSD (even with 4k). At first I thought that it was because Big Sur (or OC) wasn't stable enough yet (I don't remember exactly what version I was trying to install, but I believe it was one of the latest betas, before the final release).

The issue I had: macOS was freezing randomly, and it happened every time. I never found out what was causing it, I just assumed that it was related to the SSD somehow, because when I tested it with the original SSD, I had no issues.

After Big Sur was stable and probably with a different OC than the one I tested before, everything was pretty stable, it still is.

I've forgotten about it until yesterday, when I tried to updated to Monterey beta (it was supposed to be a very smooth update). The update itself was very easy, just one change to the kexts and OC config (bluetooth can't be injected the way it is in Big Sur).

The normal update process took a while, but I had Monterey running on XPS 15, at least for a minute or so :), after it, it froze, the same way it was freezing when I first tried Big Sur. I will try in a different SSD when I have a chance, just to confirm if this is related to the SSD we're using.

For reference about what has to be changed in OC:
https://github.com/acidanthera/bugtracker/issues/1669
https://github.com/acidanthera/BrcmPatchRAM/pull/12

It's quite simple though, just use BlueToolFixup and DO NOT use BrcmBluetoothInjector for Monterey. I believe it will be a very simple upgrade for most of us.

** Edit **


I've added an issue to the official repository, in case someone wants to collaborate or just keep tracking of Monterey on this laptop:

https://github.com/wmchris/DellXPS15-9550-OSX/issues/167


** Edit 2 **

I've tried it on a different SSD (usb/external) and it was still freezing, so this issue doesn't seem to be related to my SSD - any update to this comment will now be added to the Github issue, see link above.

Edited by golimpio
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...