Enabled FileVault on your “Hackintosh” CustoMac and can’t boot any more? Follow this guide!
Ideally you’ll want to follow this guide before enabling FileVault to avoid headaches. ;) If you already broke things, you’ll have to boot from either the Mac OS Recovery or a Linux install (can be live USB too). In that case you might have to download and unzip the drivers on another machine (or OS) that has internet and still works, first.
Why doesn’t it work?
The reason FileVault doesn’t work by default, is that certain drivers are required. So first, you’ll need to download a package with drivers from here. And yes, it needs to be this particular version (2.0.9) as it’s the last one that comes bundled with AppleUiSupport.efi.
Once you downloaded it, unzip it as normal and remember where you put it.
Mounting the ESP or “EFI Partition”
Next thing you’ll have to do is to mount the ESP, which is usually the first partition of your system disk. If you only have one internal drive and no external drives connected, it should be the first partition of disk0.
If you’re not sure where the ESP is located, open a terminal and run diskutil list and look for a partition that is of type EFI and name EFI in the list. You’ll want to know the IDENTIFIER from the list. In most cases you’ll see disk0s1.
Now to actually mount the partition we run (in a terminal)
sudo mkdir -p /Volumes/ESP
sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/ESP
open /Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER
A finder window should have opened with a bunch of folders inside.
Installing the drivers
Now go to the folder you downloaded and unzipped earlier. Inside should be two folders: Drivers and Tools.
Now copy the files from Drivers folder into the drivers64UEFI folder.
Then copy the files from the Tools folder into the tools folder.
Reboot and that’s it.
Some notes
I tested this on my CustoMac with Mojave 10.14.6 (18G95) and I’ve had no issues so far. You can also use this guide from within Linux to fix a CustoMac that doesn’t want to boot any more after enabling FileVault.
Perhaps avoid upgrading to Catalina on your production machine right away, as the drivers may or may not be compatible with Catalina. You should test it first on a non-production machine. If I get it to work with Catalina I’ll upgrade this post but I’ll likely stick to Mojave for some time because of 32 bit support.
Known issues
If you have issues entering numbers with your numpad at boot (FileVault password prompt), use the top number row on your keyboard instead.
