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Dual booting on two separate m.2 drives

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@lentife,

I have two Nvme drives on my main video edit (White Knight) Build ... 2 x Samsung Evo 960 NVMe SSD's High Sierra on one, Windows 10 on the other .... rather than use a EFI partition on one of the NVMe drives for Clover i bought a 8GB SATA SSD for just a few pounds ... similar to this one:-

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SANDISK-...654959?hash=item2aa722146f:g:Iy0AAOSwNkxa3aCr

Its 8GB but 4GB or even 2GB will do just fine. I formatted it as GTP and installed Clover on to the EFI partition on that and configured the BIOS to boot form it.

The advantage is that if anything ever happens to your OSX or Clover configuration its easy to remove and and play with on anther machine ... in my case i usually connect it to my laptop using a USB to SATA adapter Y cable ....

You can use the rest of the 8GB drive as an installer and recovery drive or just a small data drive ...

This method has saved me several times in the past ... these days now that HS supports 3rd party NVMe drives its not so important but if you have spare/unused SATA controller i think booting the system from a small capacity dedicated boot SDD makes good sense.

Just thought i'd share my method
Cheers
Jay


HI Jay,

I'm currently preparing my first Hackintosh, so very little knowledge...
I intend to have two M.2 separate drives, one for OS X and the other for Win10.
I suppose I can install Win10 as if the computer was solely a Windows one. What I mean is that if I use BIOS to set the boot disk to the Windows one, it will boot directly, nothing else involved. This way my Windows would always be operational, no matter what...
For the OS X M.2 boot disk I understand that I have to use Clover anyway but I liked your idea of having Clover on a small SATA disk and boot from there to be able to choose which OS to boot with and to properly support OSX.
Unfortunately, due to the configuration for may computer I have no more SATA connections available... Can I do it based on a USB PEN (instead of small SATA Disk) permanently connected to the computer (and having the BIOS to boot from a USB device...)? I understand that might be some performance price to pay on booting but it would be and elegant and safe solution...

I already explored a lot on the site but still too much info to digest... Can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks and regards,
MarioVN
 
Can I do it based on a USB PEN (instead of small SATA Disk) permanently connected to the computer (and having the BIOS to boot from a USB device...)? I understand that might be some performance price to pay on booting but it would be and elegant and safe solution...

@Mariovn,

I can see no reason why that would not work as long as you have the ability in the BIOS to permanently set the BOOT drive to the USB key which will have clover on it ...

The only issue i could see is if you put another bootable USB in the system (EG: Linux Live USB) it may stop the BIOS from automatically overriding the default boot device as that is already set to a bootable USB Device. However this should be easily mitigated by pressing the appropriate BIOS F-Key to manually select the boot device during the boot process (hope that makes sense ;))

Cheers
Jay
 
@Mariovn,

I can see no reason why that would not work as long as you have the ability in the BIOS to permanently set the BOOT drive to the USB key which will have clover on it ...

The only issue i could see is if you put another bootable USB in the system (EG: Linux Live USB) it may stop the BIOS from automatically overriding the default boot device as that is already set to a bootable USB Device. However this should be easily mitigated by pressing the appropriate BIOS F-Key to manually select the boot device during the boot process (hope that makes sense ;))

Cheers
Jay

Many thanks Jay!

I also understand that the M.2 NVMe SSD containing W10 has to be GPT formated. In this case will it be able to boot autonomously, that is, directly from bios selection boot drive without Clover or the USB Pen? Sorry if this is so basic...

Once again, thank you very much for your support.
I’ll share my results as soon as I finish the build!

Cheers,
Mario
 
I also understand that the M.2 NVMe SSD containing W10 has to be GPT formated. In this case will it be able to boot autonomously, that is, directly from bios selection boot drive without Clover or the USB Pen? Sorry if this is so basic...

Yes should be no problem at all with a modern motherboard with a UEFI based BIOS ....

Cheers
Jay
 
@lentife,

I have two Nvme drives on my main video edit (White Knight) Build ... 2 x Samsung Evo 960 NVMe SSD's High Sierra on one, Windows 10 on the other .... rather than use a EFI partition on one of the NVMe drives for Clover i bought a 8GB SATA SSD for just a few pounds ... similar to this one:-

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SANDISK-...654959?hash=item2aa722146f:g:Iy0AAOSwNkxa3aCr

Its 8GB but 4GB or even 2GB will do just fine. I formatted it as GTP and installed Clover on to the EFI partition on that and configured the BIOS to boot form it.

The advantage is that if anything ever happens to your OSX or Clover configuration its easy to remove and and play with on anther machine ... in my case i usually connect it to my laptop using a USB to SATA adapter Y cable ....

You can use the rest of the 8GB drive as an installer and recovery drive or just a small data drive ...

This method has saved me several times in the past ... these days now that HS supports 3rd party NVMe drives its not so important but if you have spare/unused SATA controller i think booting the system from a small capacity dedicated boot SDD makes good sense.

Just thought i'd share my method
Cheers
Jay

Hi Jay, I'm planning to build something similar, with 2x M2 just like you have, I'm wondering if your method will work using a 120gb SATA SSD, since the one you bought is almost the same price as a regular Western Digital 120gb SATA SSD in Amazon. Thanks!
 
Hi Jay, I'm planning to build something similar, with 2x M2 just like you have, I'm wondering if your method will work using a 120gb SATA SSD, since the one you bought is almost the same price as a regular Western Digital 120gb SATA SSD in Amazon. Thanks!

Yes you can use any type of SATA drive and use the EFI partition as the Clover boot drive rather than the EFI on the M.2

Cheers
Jay
 
@lentife,

I have two Nvme drives on my main video edit (White Knight) Build ... 2 x Samsung Evo 960 NVMe SSD's High Sierra on one, Windows 10 on the other .... rather than use a EFI partition on one of the NVMe drives for Clover i bought a 8GB SATA SSD for just a few pounds ... similar to this one:-

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SANDISK-...654959?hash=item2aa722146f:g:Iy0AAOSwNkxa3aCr

Its 8GB but 4GB or even 2GB will do just fine. I formatted it as GTP and installed Clover on to the EFI partition on that and configured the BIOS to boot form it.

The advantage is that if anything ever happens to your OSX or Clover configuration its easy to remove and and play with on anther machine ... in my case i usually connect it to my laptop using a USB to SATA adapter Y cable ....

You can use the rest of the 8GB drive as an installer and recovery drive or just a small data drive ...

This method has saved me several times in the past ... these days now that HS supports 3rd party NVMe drives its not so important but if you have spare/unused SATA controller i think booting the system from a small capacity dedicated boot SDD makes good sense.

Just thought i'd share my method
Cheers
Jay
Hi,
I have the same need to have a Clover/UEFI multiboot system (Gigabyte Z390 Designare) on two separate M.2 nvme pcie SSDs and I need to clarify a problem before starting: during the installation process of each of the operating systems (macOS Mojave, Win 10) it is mandatory to disconnect the other M.2 nvme drive until the end of the installation?
Thanks in advance for Your help
 
Hi, I have the same need to have a Clover/UEFI multiboot system (Gigabyte Z390 Designare) on two separate M.2 nvme pcie SSDs and I need to clarify a problem before starting: during the installation process of each of the operating systems (macOS Mojave, Win 10) it is mandatory to disconnect the other M.2 nvme drive until the end of the installation? ...Thanks in advance for Your help


@SardusX,

Technically no ... as long as you can identify which drive is which within each operating systems installer then you can leave both connected. However even the best of us some times make mistakes .... i've seen a few cases where someone has two identical drives installed and they some how mistook one for the other during installation and inadvertently erased the wrong one while installing a OS ....

So if you want to play it 100% safe .. remove the Windows NVMe while installing MacOS and vice-versa, thats what i did.

Yes it can be a pain as some motherboards require you to remove the GPU to gain access to certain M.2 slots (as in the case of my AS-Rock Z98 Motherboard) but it's worth it for piece of mind in my opinion.

Cheers
Jay
 
Last edited:
Hi,
I have the same need to have a Clover/UEFI multiboot system (Gigabyte Z390 Designare) on two separate M.2 nvme pcie SSDs and I need to clarify a problem before starting: during the installation process of each of the operating systems (macOS Mojave, Win 10) it is mandatory to disconnect the other M.2 nvme drive until the end of the installation?
Thanks in advance for Your help
Can you disable either or both of the M.2 slots in the UEFI/BIOS?
 
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