<< Solved >> Installed Catalina but Clover will not add to UEFI boot entry

[HackMacker87]

I got my Catalina installed and running smoothly on intel graphics with the Geforce GTX 980 disabled. There a couple quirks, but I'm chalking that up to the Intel graphics and I do plan to get a Radeon VII soon. I've had 2 monitors so long that going back to only one monitor is getting on my nerves.

However... I am unable to add Clover boot entries to my UEFI bios!

I have the drive formatted APFS (Samsung SSD)

if I try to install Clover from within Catalina it tells me its not valid for this system, and then the installation fails
I copied the EFI file from the USB to the EFI partition
I booted on the USB to add the clover boot entries.
it still won't add them

would I be better off just reinstalling and setting this to HFS rather than APFS? Is that the cause of my issues?

***NOTE***

I didn't use any of Tony's tools this time around; I wanted to see if I could do it all on my own. For the most part, I have succeeded.

 

[Gigamaxx]

I got my Catalina installed and running smoothly on intel graphics with the Geforce GTX 980 disabled. There a couple quirks, but I'm chalking that up to the Intel graphics and I do plan to get a Radeon VII soon. I've had 2 monitors so long that going back to only one monitor is getting on my nerves.

However... I am unable to add Clover boot entries to my UEFI bios!

I have the drive formatted APFS (Samsung SSD)

if I try to install Clover from within Catalina it tells me its not valid for this system, and then the installation fails
I copied the EFI file from the USB to the EFI partition
I booted on the USB to add the clover boot entries.
it still won't add them

would I be better off just reinstalling and setting this to HFS rather than APFS? Is that the cause of my issues?

***NOTE***

I didn't use any of Tony's tools this time around; I wanted to see if I could do it all on my own. For the most part, I have succeeded.

Download Hackintool and go to the Utilities icon and open. The third icon on the bottom row is disable gatekeeper. Do that then try the clover to EFI.
Also you should download clover configurator app. Open it and select mount EFI the open the EFI, you can edit the SIP settings for CSR active. I think it’s in RT variables or System Preferences. Set it to 0x03FF, or 0x67

 

[HackMacker87]

Download Hackintool and go to the Utilities icon and open. The third icon on the bottom row is disable gatekeeper. Do that then try the clover to EFI.
Also you should download clover configurator app. Open it and select mount EFI the open the EFI, you can edit the SIP settings for CSR active. I think it’s in RT variables or System Preferences. Set it to 0x03FF, or 0x67

I have configurator installed, and I disabled Gatekeeper via the terminal. It still fails :/
I even tried updating clover using Clover Configurator and it still failed.

I tried with a few other applications and they work fine. It's only with Clover, seems like.

 

[Gigamaxx]

I have configurator installed, and I disabled Gatekeeper via the terminal. It still fails :/
I even tried updating clover using Clover Configurator and it still failed.

I tried with a few other applications and they work fine. It's only with Clover, seems like.

Try setting csr active settings.
Try updating clover using CC app.

 

[HackMacker87]

I did it anyway though - hackintool is neat!
I downloaded clover r5105 after disabling gatekeeper
*note* I see that it ran the spctl master disable command
mount uw then killed the finder
I ran these manually as well before

I went to install clover on the hard drive (called Catalina) and it says "This package is incompatible with this version of macOS. The package is trying to install content to the system volume. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance"
I chose to install anyway

"the installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail" yada yada

 

[HackMacker87]

I decided to try using my old clover usb boot disk to see if that would add the UEFI entries.
well... it added them.

it also crippled the system.
getting the "error loading kernel cache (0x7) error message
and it appears they removed the 'boot without kernel cache' option

it won't even boot the install from the USB now.
it will boot the installer just fine
it just won't boot the actual install.

 

[Gigamaxx]

I did it anyway though - hackintool is neat!
I downloaded clover r5105 after disabling gatekeeper
*note* I see that it ran the spctl master disable command
mount uw then killed the finder
I ran these manually as well before

I went to install clover on the hard drive (called Catalina) and it says "This package is incompatible with this version of macOS. The package is trying to install content to the system volume. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance"
I chose to install anyway

"the installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail" yada yada

You need to select “ Customize” option after selecting disk. Select UEFI option at the top of the options window. If you dont it tries to install on your main partition which is why you’re getting the error. It will still say it is incompatible but install anyways and it should work.

 

[Gigamaxx]

I decided to try using my old clover usb boot disk to see if that would add the UEFI entries.
well... it added them.

it also crippled the system.
getting the "error loading kernel cache (0x7) error message
and it appears they removed the 'boot without kernel cache' option

it won't even boot the install from the USB now.
it will boot the installer just fine
it just won't boot the actual install.

Try booting to recovery option an use utilities/disk utility to repair disk.

 

[HackMacker87]

disk utility won't repair them because there are other APFS volumes mounted.

I've had it up to here with APFS ... is it normally this bad? I did notice that there is a recovery, main OS drive, and a Pre-Boot drive. Wondering if maybe the EFI partition wasn't working properly due to the APFS / Clover communication.

I'm really wondering if a reinstall would be best. I did install the system on my MacBook Pro and then transfer it to the desktop, after all.

 

[Shiitaki]

I got my Catalina installed and running smoothly on intel graphics with the Geforce GTX 980 disabled. There a couple quirks, but I'm chalking that up to the Intel graphics and I do plan to get a Radeon VII soon. I've had 2 monitors so long that going back to only one monitor is getting on my nerves.

However... I am unable to add Clover boot entries to my UEFI bios!

I have the drive formatted APFS (Samsung SSD)

if I try to install Clover from within Catalina it tells me its not valid for this system, and then the installation fails
I copied the EFI file from the USB to the EFI partition
I booted on the USB to add the clover boot entries.
it still won't add them

would I be better off just reinstalling and setting this to HFS rather than APFS? Is that the cause of my issues?

***NOTE***

I didn't use any of Tony's tools this time around; I wanted to see if I could do it all on my own. For the most part, I have succeeded.

A technique I now use is to install to a USB thumb drive, get everything working correctly for a perfect system. This allows for installing Clover on the USB using a working machine, using Clover configurator to adjust settings and add kexts using a different machine. Very nice.

Now for the trick. For some reason you install clover to a USB stick and a motherboard bios will find it on it's own and boot from it. Not so with an NVMe drive! You have add an entry in to the UEFI firmware. You can do this manually using the EFI shell in Clover on a USB stick. The first time is painful, but the second was 5 minutes. You can do this to add other operating systems as well.

Update EFI boot entries with UEFI shell

Motivation

blog.stigok.com

Once you have the USB stick working perfectly you can then mount the USB EFI partition using CC and copy it to a safe place. Then unmount the EFI and mount the EFI on your internal drive and then copy over the files. Then reboot, at the clover menu select Shell and follow the instructions on the web page. You will have to do trial and error to find bootx64.efi in your /EFI folder on your internal drive. A nice tip is to make an empty folder in the root of each of your EFI partitions with names like USB and NVME so you can tell where you are.

I had a APFS go corrupt and there is not fixing it, happened when installing Windows the EFI partition changed size. macOS worked for a long time until one day it was unbootable. If you don't have a Time Machine compatible NAS you should really get one. Took a while to put 800GBs back but it was easy to do.