I have an Asus Chromebox 3-N7068U, which has an 8th Gen. Intel i7-8850U CPU, Kabylake-R, UHD 620 IGPU, 16 GB DDR4, a 1 TB NVMe, and Broadcom WiFi/BT. I originally installed the UEFI Full Rom version 2405.1 in or about November 2024. I was successfully running macOS Sequoia latest version with a couple of minor problems which led me to updating the Chrome firmware with the UEFI Full Rom version 2512.5. I was very glad to see that major upgrades had been made to the firmware’s configurability. However, after it successfully updated (I was able to get to the rabbit logo and enter the firmware settings to confirm the new version) I was met with an immediate error from the OpenCore bootloader which is used by Hackintosh users and genuine Mac users that have unsupported/obsolete hardware.
The error I received stated that the boot loader could not load the xx.efi driver(s) - Invalid Parameter! The OpenCore bootloader is a collection of files including drivers, kexts (kernel extensions), all governed by a configuration file known as config.plist. After updating the firmware, I did not make any changes to the config.plist that worked with the earlier version of the UEFI Full Rom firmware. There is nothing in the OpenCore literature that addresses the error “invalid parameter” in the context of loading the initial .efi drivers. One .efi driver is essential to running opencore, OpenRuntime.efi. When I disabled all of the .efi drivers in Opencore, it started to load without the invalid parameter error but hung up when it couldn’t find the OpenRuntime driver.
There is something in the UEFI Full Rom firmware that is preventing the .efi drivers from loading. Perhaps the firmware has already loaded .efi drivers and will not allow any others to be loaded. I haven’t inspected the payload portion of the firmware to see what .efi drivers it loads but it clearly loads some drivers because there is a graphical interface and ability to navigate through the settings. Write protect is disabled on my Chromebox but I don’t know if there is some type of write protection built in to the firmware’s EFI folder. It could be that this has nothing to do with write protection. But there seems to be no changes that I can make to the OpenCore bootloader that will allow its drivers to be loaded in order to get to its own boot page, known as a picker.
I will continue to explore this issue because I love using my Chromebox as a MacMini. However, if there is any way possible for me to obtain the .rom or .bin file for the UEFI Full Rom version 2405.1, I think it would allow me to restore functionality to my Chromebox. Thanks for any insight you can provide regarding this issue.