Cannot Boot to Newly Created Clover Stick

[neilhart]

Gordo74 - I have been following your thread with interest.

I am trying to come up to speed on Clover and have built a Clover USB boot stick and a USB Clover Yosemite installer per Tony’s guide.

On my daily use workstation which is a Haswell i7-4770k on GA-Z87M-D3H with Mavericks on a 4 HDD RAID-0 system boot drive(s) along with a 2 TB HDD with three partitions (Mavericks, Yosemite, Data). The is a conventional UniBeast/MultiBeast configured system.

Anyway using the Clover USB boot stick, I can boot each of these partitions including the RAID. I found this interesting and went ahead with a test build of UEFI Yosemite/Clover on a lab machine.

The test build is pure vanilla Yosemite 10.10 with all of the configuration via the Clover config.plist from the EFI partition. On this build I am using the internal GPU HD 4600. This system runs without issue. I have not attempted to setup iMessage however.

It appears that many hackers are using UniBeast/MultiBeast for system installation and setup then switching over to Clover for booting. This methodology apparently works in the short term.

In my mind these are “hybrid” systems and may present a whole new set of problems.

I would think that a UniBeast install of OS X without ever running MultiBeast and then setting up Clover in the EFI partition would maintain the integrity of the OS as vanilla.

Anyway just my thoughts. Keep your thread alive as I am following along.

Good modding,
neil

And as an after thought, the Nvidia card solution is interesting as I have a GTX 650 TI Yosemite install that is acting up. I will have to look that fix.

 

[Gordo74]

Hi neil,

Thanks for the post! Good feedback in there.

Ultimately, I think I would want to make this build be as vanilla as possible as well. Clover seems to be pretty powerful from what I see in the Clover Configurator, but as you know, the more options there are, the more likely something is to go wrong. I would have been quite happy to keep using UniBeast+MultiBeast if it worked for iMessage, but, being as it is one of my most used programs, I needed that functionality.

I see a LOT of injection options. Once I get the configuration correct, it seems to be very simple. I think the only hurdle will be audio, should my GPU be supported.

I may bite the bullet and install Yosemite with nv_disable=1 and see where that gets me on Saturday. Unfortunately I will not be at my computer until that time again, which is why I am looking for some ideas to kick around on what I am seeing between now and then.

 

[neilhart]

Gordo74 - not to high jack you thread; I changed the Nvida kexts per the link in your earlier post on my system that has a GTX 650 TI GPU. This is a UniBeast/Multibeast Yosemite system.

I was experiencing two problems; a random boot hang just as the system would present the desktop and an incomplete shutdown. The frequency was about 50%.

With the NV kexts from DP1, the problem appears to have been resolved (about 10 reboots no issues).

Good modding,
neil

 

[Asus-Freak]

The test build is pure vanilla Yosemite 10.10 with all of the configuration via the Clover config.plist from the EFI partition. On this build I am using the internal GPU HD 4600. This system runs without issue. I have not attempted to setup iMessage however.

@neil: I'd be interest in more info on your test. I've been try to do a raid0 with 2 850's using Clover. If do a test install to RAID-0 using Clover (don't believe it's really any different than doing it with UB) it works fine booting from USB and selecting the array. If you then install Clover to the array selecting UEFI Install, it installs Clover to the root of the array rather than the EFI partition, therefore you cannot UEFI boot. Now if you copy the EFI folder that's in the root to the EFI partition on one of the disk in the array and then boot UEFI to that disk it's fine for one boot, on the next boot the array switches to disk2 for example and therefore can't find a EFI folder on that drives EFI partition. If you also copy your working EFI folder to both disk in the array it works providing you're willing to maintain both partitions as any changes made in one of the partitions, ie config.plist or drivers, needs to be done on the other. This is not a viable option from my perspective.

There's also another caveat, when you update to a new version of Clover it still installs to the root so you're going through whole process of coping to EFI partitions again.

This is now very OT, maybe we should start another thread on this topic. Regards-

 

[Going Bald]

If you then install Clover to the array selecting UEFI Install, it installs Clover to the root of the array rather than the EFI partition, therefore you cannot UEFI boot. Now if you copy the EFI folder that's in the root to the EFI partition on one of the disk in the array and then boot UEFI to that disk it's fine for one boot, on the next boot the array switches to disk2 for example and therefore can't find a EFI folder on that drives EFI partition. If you also copy your working EFI folder to both disk in the array it works providing you're willing to maintain both partitions as any changes made in one of the partitions, ie config.plist or drivers, needs to be done on the other. This is not a viable option from my perspective.

Take a look at post 4 of this thread for a unique solution to this problem - http://www.tonymacx86.com/alternate-bootloaders/145840-x99-boot-issue-clover.html

 

[neilhart]

I saw that one, but most systems don't have a m.2 capability. My test system has a mSATA port that could be dedicated to Clover ...

A new thread is needed as we should not hi-jack Gordo74's thread.

Good modding,
neil

 

[Asus-Freak]

Take a look at post 4 of this thread for a unique solution to this problem - http://www.tonymacx86.com/alternate-bootloaders/145840-x99-boot-issue-clover.html

Thanks, I already tested this with a small SSD with only Clover on it. It worked on every other reboot so I concluded something was still changing in the array itself. I'll test it again to refresh my memory of the issues...

 

[Gordo74]

Keeping true to my word, I'm back with an update and a couple more questions.

Good news, bad news.

Bad news: After creating the Unibeast Install stick to experiment to see if Nvidia drivers were working when booting into the installer with my card using a "familiar" tool, the graphics injection worked absolutely fine. Now I'm wondering what the difference is between a Unibeast stick and a Clover stick as far as graphics injection since they are both not injecting anything (Unibeast has GraphicsEnabler=No). Anyone have any ideas?

Good news: I booted to Unibeast and figured, since I was in the installer, what the hell, why not install? I installed fine and rebooted to the Clover stick. I noticed that there was a new Recovery partition to select in the Clover list, even though I used the Unibeast install method. Odd. I picked my boot drive as normal and booted verbose. To my surprise, it booted just fine! Full graphics acceleration and all. iMessage worked as well no problem, setup SMS Relay (what I've been after this whole time).

Then, of course, I had no sound. No big deal at all. Ran Toleda's ALC script, which is STUPIDLY easy, rebooted and have sound.

Then I wanted to install Clover. Ran into a couple of issues. I figured I would go for the gold and install Clover on UEFI. No matter how I did it, even with formatting the EFI partition, my BIOS would not "see" the UEFI boot option (Yes, UEFI boot is turned on - this computer boots to Win 7 with UEFI no problem). So I had to settle for the "BIOS Only" configuration from this thread near the bottom of the first post: http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-desktop-guides/144426-how-install-os-x-yosemite-using-clover.html

Copied the kexts to the EFI partition, configured my config.plist tailored to my computer (Added SSDT, removed nv_disable=1, removed verbose boot, added XMP Detection because I paid for faster RAM and I want the system to use it damnit!), booted fine from the SSD after that.

This was all a very big experiment for me and I am quite happy with the results. I honestly thought I would not be able to wrap my head around this, but here I am. Based on my experience, I think using Unibeast to install and then switching to Clover for booting/configuration seems to be the easiest way to "move up".

I will be going all SSD on Black Friday, so this gave me a trial run of installing. This was just an upgrade install, but that will be a full install.

A couple of questions from all of this:

1. What was different between the Clover stick and the Unibeast stick as far as Graphics were concerned that allowed Unibeast to have full acceleration in the installer and Clover to not?

2. Since I ran Toleda's audio script, I notice that AppleHDA is now being injected in Clover. Does this mean during the 10.10.x updates, I won't have to run this again since it will inject to the native HDA? If so, that's really awesome! Great scripting by Toleda as well, couldn't have been more user friendly.

3. Since I am running the BIOS configuration of the Clover install, is there any reason why I should switch to UEFI?

 

[toleda]

1. What was different between the Clover stick and the Unibeast stick
2. I won't have to run this again
3. any reason why I should switch to UEFI?

Lots of good news.
1. The Clover UEFI graphics issue is likely CSM. Is there a BIOS/Boot/CSM option? If no, run Clover Installer and select Drivers64UEFI/CsmVideoDxe-64.
2. Yes.
3. I prefer one boot folder on a drive over a boot folder on each partition.