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Why we don’t Support Tonymacx86 tools and how to switch to Vanilla

So through so many troubleshooting with new users on this Subreddit, I finally felt that I needed to write this damn guide explaining why we don’t support Tonymacx86 tools AT ALL. But instead of this all being all bashing, I thought that this post could also turn into a tutorial on how to get your Hackintosh into the glorious Vanilla master race. This guide is more to get you started instead of a full blown vanilla guide, reason for this is I don't feel like I could do it justice. So if you want an in depth guide, follow the Vanilla guide in the sidebar.

So why do we hate Tonymacx86 so much?

Well to start, we don’t hate them. There’s plenty of issues on the forum but no website is perfect, what we take real issue from are their tools. These tools, specifically UniBeast and MultiBeast, are very poor in quality for multiple reasons:

  • Outdated: They will never have the up to date clover which can cause real issues if a MacOs update requires Clover to be up to a certain version or need newer versions of a kext.
  • Stolen files: Though this isn’t a real issue anymore, these tools had stolen files from other developers in the Hackintosh community who they didn’t credit to. This makes it hard to really trust them even today with that kind of track record, but that's more of a moral gripe than anything.
  • Missing important parts: This is probably the thing that has given me the most headache when helping others with their Hackintoshes, they’re missing so many important files or portions of their config.plist that can be essential to making a hackintosh work. And because of this, it can be quite frustrating even finding out where to start to fix your system, plus incomplete Config.plist's can result in Blacklisted iCloud accounts.
  • Not Knowing what your doing: This is the number 1 biggest reason why I personally hate Tonymacx86 tools and even their platform, in general, is that their users have not a single clue on how their Hackintoshes work or even where to get started on troubleshooting. Hackintoshing requires a lot of work on the user and skipping out on these kinds of parts just by running some program you downloaded is only making the issue worse. Do you know how many comments I get asking what is a SMBIOS when I’m trying to help troubleshoot? It’s absolutely ridiculous how the simplest things are considered too much work for some.

Switching from Tonymacx86 to Vanilla

“Alright, you done talking Slav? Now show me how I can achieve enlightenment before I revoke your green card ass.”

So you’re ready to achieve enlightenment but don’t know where to start, well you’ve come to the right place. So to get started you’ll want to make sure that all your stuff is safe by making a copy of your original Boot loader. The reason for this is that in case of an accident, you always have a working Hackintosh that’s a USB stick away.

Making a Backup

First you’ll want to pick up the following:

So what we’ll be doing is pulling the original EFI (what makes your hackintosh work) off the hackintosh and making a copy of this on a USB in case anything horrible is to go wrong in the future. This is general nice housekeeping measures in case something were to ever happen to you systems EFI (corrupted, missing, physically damaged, etc). This step is slightly redundant as we’ll need another USB with a new EFI that’ll be for testing when we’re full Vanilla but it’s always good to have a 2nd backup stored for safe keepings.

So open Clover Configurator on your Hackintosh and navigate towards the “Mount EFI” section. Here you’ll notice 2 planes, one showing every partition on each drive and the other showing the option to mount EFIs. You’ll want to find the drive in the lower pane that says “EFI on APFS Container [Macintosh HD,Preboot,Recovery,VM]” and mount its EFI. What we’re doing is pulling up the hidden partition on your boot drive that contains Clover(our boot loader) and any other important files. Now click “Open Partition” and you’ll see one folder named EFI, copy this folder either to your desktop or somewhere safe(icloud drive or some other storage service so you can access it on other devices).

Video

With this done, you may now proceed to making a recovery USB. Make sure your USB is formatted with the following settings in Disk Utility:

  • GUID Partition Map
  • Os X Extended(Journaled)

Now open Clover’s install package and follow the steps until you get to the “choose device” option, make sure to choose the USB and not your Mac/hackintosh. After everything is done, you will likely see a new drive with the name “EFI”(if not, open clover configurator and open the EFI drive). With this drive, you’ll wa`nt to replace the EFI inside it with ours(make sure not merge, but replace). With this done, you now have a backup USB!

Video

Actually getting started with Vanilla

So I could easily make a sloppily thrown together guide but honestly I could never do it justice like u/corpnewt did with his Vanilla guide located in the sidebar. It’s absolutely beautifully written and has everything you’ll ever need with great depth. My only real recommendation at this point is make sure everything you do always has a backup, that's why we made that USB earlier.

But I'll give you guys a bit of terminology so you guys can understand a bit more of your Hackintosh for following the Vanilla guide

  • EFI: A folder sticker that organizes your files and sets up your boot loader
  • Kexts: The "drivers" for MacOs, translates the hardware to the kernel so the OS can communicate
  • SMBIOS: What we want MacOs to think of your PC, helps with power management, Apple services, ETC (ex: iMac 17.1)
  • Config.plist: Where you store all your data for SMBIOS's, DSDTs, etc
  • Clover: Your Boot loader, pretty straight forward

Final thoughts

So I hope this guide was somewhat helpful with getting people started but if not then don’t forget to downvote and remind me why I should be sent back to Ukraine. But seriously though, if there’s ever any issues or any recommendations to add on this post feel free to comment or PM me. It's just been a growing pain every time I see a Tonymacx86 issue that I just want a post to forward to people so they can understand a bit more.

Also if any moderators read this, I’d love if you guys could pin this or bring more attention to this. This subreddit really needs some clean up and a place to point to with how many Tonymacx86 issues are constantly popping up

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