A curious hackintosh issue.

Helieos · August 17, 2019

So I have been using a hackintosh based off a MSI Z87 GD65 Gaming motherboard with a 4770k for quite a while now. No major issues, works just fine, except for one weird glitch that happens every so often. All of my motherboards USB ports will stop working and stuff thats plugged into them like my keyboard and mouse act like they are not receiving enough power. The lights flicker and such. Stuff like thumb drives or my headset also stop working. Removing and plugging back in devices does not work. There is one exception though. I have a USB 3.0 hub that will continue to work after the glitch happens and I can plug stuff into it. Which is lucky because thats the only way I can plug in a keyboard to shut down the computer properly without holding the power button down or something similar. The only way I have found to fix it is to power cycle the computer. Simply rebooting does not clear it. I have also noticed that if I open the app store or the software update window the glitch will happen about 75% of the time. It rarely happens besides that.

This has never happened while using Windows and has persisted across multiple fresh installs of MacOS, various drives, Sata ports, version of mac, ect.

It does not happen enough that I don't want to use the machine under MacOS and I generally just tolerate it. But it just happened at an unfortunate moment while playing a game and compelled me to make this post. It's a real headscratcher to me. I have no idea what could be the source of it so I figured I would share and see if anyone has some insight.

Thanks.