This is more just an FYI in the event anyone runs into the same issue, I have an old iMac I was gifted some time ago, it’s a 2013 iMac that has been opened up by myself some time ago to have its horribly slow mechanical hard drive removed and replaced with an SSD and of course as the title would suggest its running Sonoma via OpenCora Legacy Patcher which has been phenomenal thus far.. honestly no issues at all other than having to reinstall root patches every other update to get hardware acceleration up and running its been great.. until Sonoma 14.1
This release seems Apple has tinkered with something so it never fully booted locking up about halfway, the best solution I have found is to boot into safe mode
hold shift after chime (on boot) and wait.. it’ll take about 4-5 minutes depending on your machine specs, Once safe mode has booted then reinstall open core and everything should be good again…
I am kinda lazy in this regard so I reinstalled opencore, dismissed the option to reboot and installed the root patches for hardware acceleration then rebooted - making sure to hold option and select EFI then my physical disk to complete the install process
The only oddity I noticed was the OpenCore app was reported it was damaged after reboot and could not be run, so redownloaded and installed - make sure you check this .