NVRAM on Hackintosh

“Your Mac stores certain settings in a special memory area even if it is turned off.  On Intel-based Macs, this is stored in memory known as NVRAM”

—-from Apple Support site: About NVRAM and PRAM

But on Hackintosh, there is no compatible NVRAM can be utilized by OS X. Thus, some functions will not work properly, such as:

1. Save current backlight-level for next boot/wakeup.

2. Keep “Find My Mac” working after system reboot.

3. For Clover & EFI users, NVRAM also contains boot-args which can be read and set during the booting stage.

To simulate NVRAM on Hackintosh, we can just do as following:

 

1. Save current NVRAM data to a file when system shutdown.

(If you use Clover as boot loader, then this step had already been done. No need to do this again.)

To achieve this, a shutdown script can help us:

a. Open Terminal, create and edit a file in /etc called rc.shutdown.local

$ sudo vim /etc/rc.shutdown.local

b. The script should be like this:

#!/bin/sh
nvram -x -p >nvram.plist
echo NVRAM Saved!

2. Set NVRAM form saved file right after system boot.

(This step is necessary even if you are using Clover)

Create a LaunchDaemons plist file:

a. Open Terminal, change to /Library/LaunchDaemons

$ cd /Library/LaunchDaemons

b. Create & edit a plist file, name it as you wish:

$ sudo vim com.delta.nvram.set.plist

c. Edit file like this:(Sorry for the bad format)

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.delta.nvram.set</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>nvram</string>
<string>-xf</string>
<string>/nvram.plist</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

or download this file from HERE.

d. Fix file permissions:

$ sudo chown 0:0 com.delta.nvram.set.plist

Reboot, NVRAM simulation is done. Your backlight level, “Find My Mac” status should be saved and restored automatically.

4 thoughts on “NVRAM on Hackintosh

  1. Google Chrome 24.0.1312.57 Google Chrome 24.0.1312.57 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17

    Hi,friend,I have my dell 1420 installed lion 10.7.4,but I can’t make the graphics and ethernet work.
    graphics:intel GM965 chipset (x3100),{primary 0x2a02_8086,secondary 0x2a03_8086}
    net: bcm5906m, 0x1713_14e4
    sound: STAC9228,I can’t remember the device ID.
    There is an annoying problem is that after I shut down or reboot the Mac,I could not get into the Mac via select chameleon and boot the lion hard drive.
    after I boot the hard drive with -v,the system log (chameleon hfs code) swip the kexts,at the end of the TMSafetynet.kext,the chameleon stops few seconds and then the laptop reboot itself,to the bios (DELL logo) again.sorry,I know little about English.

    Then I need to enter windows,open the lion hard drive through macdriver,enter Extra file and find the nvram.**.**.pilst,delete the plist file,then reboot,-v,so I can enter the Mac.I don’t know why that file come out and how.
    I google it for days,till somebody told me that that plist file concerned about the power management and home??,then I thought about it maybe linked with the boot flag restartfix=yes in chameleon ,I revise it to no,then,it is ok,works fine.
    But there is another problem,when I shut down or reboot the Mac ,there will be a page come out to say that I need to enter my password with the reboot/shutdown options below,I can hit the shut down directly without entering my password ,but the nvram.**.plist file come out ,I need to delete it in win and then I can enter Mac.
    Anybody has ideas about that?

  2. Firefox 22.0 Firefox 22.0 Mac OS X  10.7 Mac OS X 10.7
    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0

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  3. Google Chrome 46.0.2490.80 Google Chrome 46.0.2490.80 Mac OS X  10.11.1 Mac OS X 10.11.1
    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.80 Safari/537.36

    Does this method still work in OS X 10.10.11 – I seem to be having intermittent issues with Find My Mac being able to find my hackintosh – what’s the best way to get this up and running reliably?

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