<< Solved >> Can not clone Catalina EFI partition

[bmoag]

I have used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Catalina installation to a larger SSD. I have copied the EFI partition in a variety of ways but nothing gets the clone to boot on its own either via USB or SATA.
No matter how I install or copy the EFI partition from the original to the clone it boots to the correct version of clover but with the wrong theme. Clover does not display all the discs connected to the computer. It will boot to Windows but only to a black screen with Catalina.
I have manually copied the EFI partition, used the CCC script, manually installed clover and copied over everything--same results.
In fact I even totally wiped the Clone of all partitions, started over and still get the same results.
I have mounted the EFI partitions of both discs using both Clover Configurator and EFI Mounter 3.1 with the same results.
I am typing this via the clone booted off USB from via Clover from the original catalina disc with everything working so CCC cloned the APFS volumes correctly.
I have both EFI partitions opened and their contents appear identical.
?????????

 

[Ploddles]

It can appear that you have both source and destination EFI partitions open at the same time but often that is not the actual case.
Try mounting the source EFI Partition and copy the entire EFI folder to somewhere, say to your Documents folder. Now unmount that EFI Partition and mount the destination (USB) EFI Partition. Delete the EFI folder and then copy the one from your Documents folder.
Reboot and try the new (USB) copy.

 

[bmoag]

Thanks, but been there/done that too many times to count.

 

[Ploddles]

Thanks, but been there/done that too many times to count.

Sorry to hear that. It works fine on my 2 systems doing it that way, ie only having 1 EFI Partition mounted at any 1 time. Whenever I mounted 2 at the same time it never seemed to work properly, they looked identical when mounted but on reboot and mounting separately they were different.

Hope you get it sorted.

 

[iSA08]

If you're getting the black screen with catalina, your WEG kext is out of date. Open hackintool and there you can check out of date kexts with new ones available to download. It's a frustrating process and sometime takes a while to diagnose.

 

[bmoag]

The black screen is the least of my problems trying to directly boot from my Catalina clone.

The WEG kexts on the original and the clone are identical, one boots one black screens. This should not be. Nor would that explain why the clover boot/splash screen has the wrong theme and does not show all connected drives like the original does when booted.

The configp files are absolutely identical, at least comparing them via clover configurator and screen shots.

As others seem to copy and paste the contents of their Catalina EFI partitions and everything works why does it not work here whether the EFI partition is copied or manually recreated in a variety of ways? I never saw this with any prior version of MacOS.

 

[Gigamaxx]

The black screen is the least of my problems trying to directly boot from my Catalina clone.

The WEG kexts on the original and the clone are identical, one boots one black screens. This should not be. Nor would that explain why the clover boot/splash screen has the wrong theme and does not show all connected drives like the original does when booted.

The configp files are absolutely identical, at least comparing them via clover configurator and screen shots.

As others seem to copy and paste the contents of their Catalina EFI partitions and everything works why does it not work here whether the EFI partition is copied or manually recreated in a variety of ways? I never saw this with any prior version of MacOS.

Use Hackintool and screenshot the Disk info. Catalina has a lot of partitions, if CCC did not create them correctly and the EFI is not disk0s1 that could be the issue.

 

[bmoag]

Good suggestion, thanks.

This is a screen shot from Hackintool with the Catalina Clone plugged in with a USB adapter identified as disk 9 and the EFI partition as 9S1. I believe that replicates the partition scheme shown above? Is that wrong?

 

[Ploddles]

The CCC script that copies/backs up the EFI Partition has recently (yesterday) been updated. You could give that a go and see if it solves your problem.

Note that it has the Test Switch set to "Y" so it won't copy anything until you change that to "N". With the Switch set to Y it will just create a log of what files it will copy.

 

[bmoag]

That seemed like a great idea but it did not change anything. For reasons I can not fathom my impression is that Clover seems to be ignoring the contents of the configp file when I try to directly boot the clone. I may try wiping the drive again (as in diskpart/clean), reformat and clone again but I think that will not do anything except waste time.