Clover Clean Up: Dual Boot and Custom Entries

[ntableman]

I have no idea why this is so hard and why so many of the guides are just wrong, at the least in my case. It might be because clover has changed or APFS is making it strange or who knows....

1 - none of the guides seem to mention that clover will tell you why it is not matching the custom entry: type, volume, path, etc... so you know exactly what to fix.

2 - the path to *.efi's is not consistent. It appears the EFI needs the old style DOS and the recovery and filevault preboot need unix style. Again clover will tell you if it cannot resolve the path

3 - you can paste in the volume number of to the clover "boot to this volume first" value to send it right to filevault preboot

4 - I installed win 10 on another volume following the guide here and it worked fine, no issues. Didn't have to rename anything. I hid the legacy volume in clover and made a custom entry for the efi from MS on the EFI volume and bingo!

5 - the volume GUIDs seemingly need to have the -'s in them when they have them and not when they do not. Kind of obvious I guess, but none of the guides mention this. The best advice I have is it paste in the GUID from the boot log as-is, dash and not.

I'm pasting in my plist so people can see what I am referring to.

It seems to me that Clover could do a lot more of the heavy lifting here. Since clover seems to output debug of exactly what is happening here, it could easily spit out a skeleton of custom entries and let you fill in the names and such.

I guess I could take a crack at an enhancement in the project...maybe someday!

Other notes:
When tinkering with how to fix messy clover settings, I found these commands: dmpstore -d Boot0*, dmpstore -d BootOrder which can be run in the EFI shell from clover. They seemingly remove all the boot entries in my BIOS.

I have not been able to get clover, nor preboot, to have the right resolution. I have an 1080 and it looks ugly, but works. I encountered none of the issues with filevault preboot others did. My drivers are

AppleImageCodec-64.efi OsxAptioFix2Drv-64.efi
AppleKeyAggregator-64.efi SMCHelper-64.efi
AppleUITheme-64.efi UsbKbDxe-64.efi
DataHubDxe-64.efi UsbMouseDxe-64.efi
EmuVariableUefi-64.efi VBoxHfs-64.efi
FSInject-64.efi apfs.efi
FirmwareVolume-64.efi

and the custom entry part of my clover.plist, notice the \ vs / and the -'s in some GUIDS and not in others.

<key>Entries</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>FullTitle</key>
<string>Wyn-der-zzz EFI</string>
<key>Hidden</key>
<false/>
<key>Hotkey</key>
<string>w</string>
<key>Ignore</key>
<false/>
<key>Path</key>
<string>\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi</string>
<key>Type</key>
<string>Windows</string>
<key>Volume</key>
<string>BD9B663E-E077-424E-901E-44EA69B726AF</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>FullTitle</key>
<string>Schiibupfeischter FV</string>
<key>Hidden</key>
<false/>
<key>Hotkey</key>
<string>s</string>
<key>Ignore</key>
<false/>
<key>InjectKexts</key>
<true/>
<key>NoCaches</key>
<false/>
<key>Path</key>
<string>\404E65D8-F025-3EAB-AAEC-D878E91FEBE3\System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi</string>
<key>Type</key>
<string>OSX</string>
<key>Volume</key>
<string>466BB265B2083A42B89B9052CE93EA39</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>FullTitle</key>
<string>macOS Recovery</string>
<key>Hidden</key>
<false/>
<key>Hotkey</key>
<string>r</string>
<key>Ignore</key>
<false/>
<key>InjectKexts</key>
<true/>
<key>NoCaches</key>
<false/>
<key>Path</key>
<string>\404E65D8-F025-3EAB-AAEC-D878E91FEBE3\System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi</string>
<key>Type</key>
<string>OSXRecovery</string>
<key>Volume</key>
<string>466BB265B2083A42B89B9052CE93EA39</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>FullTitle</key>
<string>Preboot Installer</string>
<key>Hidden</key>
<false/>
<key>Ignore</key>
<false/>
<key>InjectKexts</key>
<true/>
<key>NoCaches</key>
<false/>
<key>Path</key>
<string>\404E65D8-F025-3EAB-AAEC-D878E91FEBE3\com.apple.installer\boot.efi</string>
<key>Type</key>
<string>OSXInstaller</string>
<key>Volume</key>
<string>466BB265B2083A42B89B9052CE93EA39</string>
</dict>
</array>

 

[vulgo]

It appears the EFI needs the old style DOS

It's not old DOS style, its 'modern' EFI style...

the volume GUIDs seemingly need to have the -'s in them when they have them and not when they do not.

Clover does some string matching with the device path description, so partial UUIDs and bits of things like 'Sata(0x4,0xFFFF,0x0)\HD(1,GPT' should match too. For GPT partitions the UUID string is enough. For differentiating between APFS volumes you can incorporate parts the vendor-specific device path - in the string representation visible as VenMedia(UUID,???)

Once you string-match the volume, the LoaderPath property is an absolute path to the EFI executable (which are Windows PE - portable executable format, and probably why the paths are also DOS style, Microsofts not insignificant involvement in uefi.org)

 

[robaird]

I have not been able to get clover, nor preboot, to have the right resolution. I have an 1080 and it looks ugly, but works.

On Asus boards, you have to disable CSM (i.e., Compatibility Support Module) in bios to get proper resolution for clover (may need to specify resolution in config.plist as well--I always do). On MSI mb's, I think they label CSM as Windows 8.1/10 WHQL Support. Side benefit, many report much faster boot times. Apparently if you have NVM SSD, may not be able to disable if booting to windows (at least I think that's what the warning says each time I upgrade bios and disable CSM).