Catalina invisible to UEFI

[bmoag]

Every installation USB key I make for Catalina is invisible to the UEFI.
I have tried different brands of USB keys all of which worked with other versions of OSX.
Every other bootable USB key, USB based SSD (e.g. my Mojave backup), Windows installation USB etc shows up as bootable in the motherboard EFI as it should.
I can install Catalina to an SSD in a variety of ways but the EFI partition is never seen by the motherboard. I can get those Catalina versions to boot with my Macbook Pro.
I have tried copying known bootable EFI partitions and creating new ones with both the installation key and SSDs with Catalina installed but the EFI partition is always invisible to the UEFI. If I do the same with any non-Catalina OSX installation there is no problem.
Other posts describe using the EFI shell in Clover to fix this. If I do that after Clover initializes from the bootable Mojave SSD I do not see any drives with the required "FS" listing to identify the drive. All I see are descriptions of drive sectors beginning with BLK and with no "FS" anywhere in the description.
When I use the command "bcfg boot dump" I see the two bootable drives, Mojave and Windows, as they should appear. Since I do not know the FS number for the drive I am trying to make bootable. If I know the drive number, for example disk4s1, from how it appears in Mojave is the number 4 the correct FS number?
My limited understanding is that Clover64.efi is missing a bootable notation but that has never been an issue before Catalina in my experience no matter how the EFI was created/cloned.

 

[bmoag]

Multiple USB keys from different OEMs, found one that booted for installing Catalina--the first two, which worked with Mojave and High Sierra would not work with Catalina for unknown reasons.
After successfully installing Catalina cloning the EFI from the installation USB or any other source does not work as it did for prior versions of OSX, at least not for moi, to get Catalina to boot off the SSD.
In that state the SSD is not detected by the motherboard UEFI as a bootable device.
One sees that installing a version of Clover after Cloning an EFI does not update the existing/cloned version of Clover but creates a second EFI entry in the boot partition. It is that EFI that is recognized by the motherboard UEFI and is bootable.
The EFI created by cloning can be simply deleted.
Ergo one has to install Clover to the Catalina disc, copy needed kexts and configp rather that simply clone the USB EFI in order to boot off the SSD.
Others may have had a different experience but that resolved my series of blunders.

 

[foster]

Are you limiting bootable devices in UEFI settings (BIOS)?

Be careful booting any drive with clover installed on a real Mac.

Make sure you are mounting the SSD EFI partition
and picking the Catalina partition in Clover Installer

SSD must still be GUID not MBR or Apple

 

[TommyV]

to me happen this whem i was booting from USB key. but i could doit booting from hard drive and choose install .... from clover menu and did an upgrade.