If you prepared the installer flash drive with unibeast, it should work!
Its not supposed to erase the EFI partition. APFS manages its volumes within a normal GPT partition, the EFI partition should remain untouched. In terms of partition structure when converting from HFS+, the recovery partition and root partition should get merged into a single APFS container partition. All other partitions are left the same. If you had updated Clover and installed APFS EFI before you updated the partition would have appeared as expected.
The installer never erases whole disks, you need to use Disk Utility. Don't even think the installer itself will erase a target partition.Thank you for the response!
I'm talking about the disk erase, not the HFS+ to APFS conversion. It's clear that a conversion is not touching the EFI partition, but for a disk erase: users expect that the whole disk is erasing including every partition created on that specific disk.
Never said that...
The operation you want in Disk Utility is 'partition' not erase.Yes, doing a clean install means you erase the drive in Disk utility then select it as an install destination.
Just try to format a HFS+ macOS Sierra system drive in the High Sierra Installer in Disk Utility. It will only format the main partition.. EFI partition will be untouched.
This SOLVED my problem:
If you try to clean install 10.13 High Sierra on a drive where you had 10.12 Sierra before, you can easily get in trouble that boot drive not showing up after 10.13 install...
You won't belive but High Sierra installer doesn't properly erase the drive you select in Disk Utility!! It doesn't erase the EFI partition of the drive, i don't know why?! So after the High Sierra installation completed with the restart, my Hackintosh booted from the SSD using the old Sierra Clover EFI - because it was not formatted.
So basically when High Sierra installation is completed, after the restart double check (in BIOS) that you're booting from the installer flash drive and not the system drive!
