Navigating Clover’s Page 4

Navigating Clover's Page 4

When you boot a legacy Hackintosh with Clover, the graphical boot menu typically offers multiple pages of options. Most users stay on the first page to select a macOS volume, then press the spacebar for verbose mode or boot arguments. However, the fourth page—often accessed by pressing the right arrow key three times from the default view—contains a set of power-user tools that directly affect SMBIOS identity and ACPI patching at runtime. For builds running macOS 10.6 through 10.13, proper use of this page can resolve sleep/wake failures, audio device recognition, and even CPU power management without editing the config.plist in a text editor.

Understanding Clover's Page Layout

Clover's GUI presents up to four pages, numbered from left to right. The first page shows volumes and the main options menu. The second and third pages vary by theme but usually contain submenus for boot entries and tools. The fourth page is reserved for override settings that are applied transiently for the current boot session. This is not a permanent configuration—it is equivalent to manually editing the boot arguments or injecting a temporary ACPI table. Because the changes are lost on reboot, page 4 is ideal for testing edits before committing them to the config.plist or a separate SSDT.

What You Can Do on Page 4

• SMBIOS overrides – Select a different Mac model identifier (e.g., MacPro6,1 instead of iMac14,2) to test compatibility with a kext or a disk image.
• ACPI table injection – Load a temporary SSDT from the /EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/ directory that you may have just compiled.
• Boot argument flags – Add or remove -v, debug=0x100, keepsyms=1, or npci=0x2000 without editing the plist.
• Kernel and kext patches – Enable or disable binary patches defined in the config.plist under KernelAndKextPatches.

How to Access Page 4

After the Clover boot screen appears, use the right arrow key to cycle through the pages. The page indicator (dots or numbers) at the bottom of the screen will increase. On most themes, the fourth page is labelled "Options" or shows a gear icon. If your theme does not display a fourth page, verify that GUI → Hide does not exclude it, and that your config.plist does not set GUI → PageCount to a value lower than 4. Some legacy builds with Clover r2xxx or earlier may lack this page entirely; consider updating to a more recent revision (r3xxx or later) that still supports your target macOS version.

Testing SMBIOS Identity on Page 4

One of the most common uses of page 4 is to temporarily switch the SMBIOS profile. For example, a Haswell build running macOS 10.10 Yosemite may work better with a MacPro6,1 SMBIOS than with the default iMac15,1, but only if the ACPI tables are patched correctly. By selecting a different SMBIOS from the list on page 4, you can test whether a new model identifier resolves a specific issue—such as missing audio output or a graphics glitch—without rebooting multiple times. After the test, take a screenshot of the ioreg output (see Using ioreg 2 for Hackintosh Diagnostics: USB, Audio, Graphics, and More) to verify that the new SMBIOS was applied to the IORegistry.

ACPI Overrides and SSDT Injection

Page 4 also provides a submenu for loading ACPI tables. If you have a custom SSDT that fixes a missing device property—for example, an SSDT-UIAC.aml to enable USB ports on a 9-series chipset—you can select it here to test its effect. The table is loaded before the kernel starts, so it behaves exactly like a permanent entry in the ACPI section of config.plist. This is particularly useful when you are building a new SSDT from scratch. For a step-by-step guide on how to interpret the output of the iasl compiler and verify the patch, refer to the article Decoding the SSDT Creation Screenshot: 2015-01-01 at 11:55:37 PM.

Practical Example: Fixing Sleep/Wake on a Sandy Bridge Build

Consider a Hackintosh with an Intel Core i5-2500K on a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard running macOS 10.12 Sierra. The system sleeps but fails to wake the display, although the system is still running. A common cause is a missing or incorrect ACPI _PTS method. To test a fix, you can prepare a small SSDT with a corrected _PTS and place it in /EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/. Then, on page 4, navigate to the ACPI submenu, select the SSDT, and choose "Load". Reboot and test sleep/wake. If the issue persists, you can discard the SSDT immediately by rebooting without loading it again. This trial-and-error workflow is far safer than editing the DSDT directly, as it avoids permanent damage to the boot configuration.

Limitations and Risks

While page 4 overrides are non-persistent, they are applied during the boot process. If you load an incorrect or corrupt ACPI table, the system may panic or hang during boot. Always have a backup bootable USB drive with a known-good configuration. Additionally, not all SMBIOS identifiers are compatible with every macOS version; selecting a MacBookPro8,1 on a desktop system may cause iMessage or iCloud services to fail due to the missing hardware identifiers. The override is purely cosmetic—it does not change the actual hardware reports—so it can confuse kexts that rely on board-IDs (e.g., AppleHDA or PowerManagement kexts).

Final Verification Steps

Once you have confirmed that a page 4 override solves your problem, you must make the change permanent. For SMBIOS, edit the SMBIOS section of your config.plist. For ACPI tables, add the SSDT filename to the ACPI → DropTables or ACPI → SSDT list. For boot arguments, modify the Arguments key in the Boot section. After saving the plist, reboot without the page 4 override to verify that the settings are applied automatically. Use the ioreg command to inspect the device properties and confirm that the ACPI patches are active. A detailed walkthrough of reading ioreg output for USB, audio, and graphics is available in the guide Using ioreg 2 for Hackintosh Diagnostics: USB, Audio, Graphics, and More. Always keep a backup of the working config.plist before making permanent changes, and test each override individually to isolate any side effects.