Throughout my Hackintosh experience, first on an Acer V5-573G and now on an Asus ROG 552VW, one of the things I have to be careful of is when updating. Otherwise, my macOS won’t boot. Therefore, I always regularly backup the entire macOS partition on an external hard disk in case anything goes wrong. Personally, I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the backup task since I’m familiar with it, but I imagine other reputable software is also viable.
Normally, the update process should be pain-free. However, I encountered a puzzling problem when I tried updating to the latest supplemental update 2 for Mojave:
Still waiting for root deviceI retried a few times, but the same error popped up. How was this possible? I could still boot into my current macOS, but somehow I couldn’t boot the update installer. I tried looking up if other people also had the same problem with this update, but it seemed to be smooth sailing for everybody.
After racking my brain for a few days on this, it finally dawned on me that it was because of the kexts! I had moved all the essential kexts from the EFI boot partition /CLOVER/kexts to /Library/Extensions on my macOS partition, and since the OS partition is on a SATA internal hard disk, of course it wouldn’t be recognised without the proper SATA kexts in CLOVER. I then recopied back the SATA kexts and finally got passed the error. These were the missing kexts:
- SATA-100-series-unsupported.kext
- SATA-200-series-unsupported.kext
- SATA-300-series-unsupported.kext
- SATA-RAID-unsupported.kext
I might not have needed all the four kexts, but I was too lazy to find out what is the specific kext for my motherboard. And hey, it worked! I’m on the latest update.
Another interesting to note is that I had to rebuild my third-party kext cache after an update to make sure they’re properly loaded for subsequent reboots because I have this problem where the HDMI output no longer works after an update. Easy enough, I just had to run:
sudo touch /Library/Extensions & sudo kextcache -u /and reboot. All done!
Oh, and I’ll never update to Catalina unless I really really have to.
Fidele 