Clover stopped recognizing my boot drive

[BHuij]

I just got a clean install of High Sierra working on my SSD. I keep the OS, Home Folder, and Applications on the SSD, but have a spinning disk 2TB drive to store all my files, photos, etc.

Everything was working great today and I spent the morning reinstalling all my Adobe software, copying all my files from my backup drive to the 2TB drive, setting up Time Machine again, etc. Rebooted a few times without issue, even sleep was working properly.

I also have a second 2TB drive with a working Windows 7 install on it. I just boot from the BIOS boot options menu when I want to use Windows, I’ve never tried setting it up to boot Windows through Clover.

I was trying to boot Windows but accidentally selected the 2TB drive with all my photos instead of the 2TB drive with Windows. It’s not a bootable drive, obviously, and didn’t work.

Ever since that attempt, Clover no longer recognizes my SSD. The BIOS does, but when Clover loads, it only shows a couple of Windows drives (presumably the actual drive and its System Reserved partition). It won’t boot either of them. The High Sierra drive doesn’t appear.

Same when I plug in and start from my USB install stick. BIOS still sees the SSD, but Clover doesn’t.

How could accidentally trying to boot a non-bootable drive change my Clover settings? And how can I get Clover to recognize the Mac SSD again like it was before? Really don’t want to fresh install again, just hours after I finally got everything perfect.

 

[BHuij]

From my research, it appears the most likely problem is that somehow my apfs.efi driver got erased, modified, or corrupted in one or both locations where it needs to be, in order for Clover to be able to read APFS volumes.

In theory that's a simple fix, just put the file where it belongs on the EFI partition of the SSD.

How to do that is another question. I can't boot into anything but Windows 7 right now, and Windows 7 can't read APFS drives. I can see the drives in Disk Utility from my install USB, and I can see them from inside my Win7 install, but I can't write to them from either location, at least not using any method I know of.

Is there a way to do this with terminal, or from inside Win7? I'd like to avoid having to yank my hard drive and go put it inside my brother's tower just to copy a file onto it. Let me know.

 

[P1LGRIM]

Let me know.

You could boot from your USB installer (assuming you have apfs.efi on it).

 

[BHuij]

So when I try to boot from the USB stick, I run into the same problem - Clover loads, but can't see any AFPS volumes.

I am going to double check that my USB stick EFI partition has the necessary files though. I believe there are at least two places where the APFS.efi file you have attached needs to be in the EFI partition. Can you tell me where exactly they're needed?

 

[P1LGRIM]

I believe there are at least two places where the APFS.efi file you have attached needs to be in the EFI partition

You are misinformed.

Can you tell me where exactly they're needed?

It (not they) should be in /EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI/.

 

[BHuij]

Okay, just popped the file you linked into the /EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI folder on my USB boot stick using my laptop. There was already an apfs.efi file there, so I overwrote it with this newer one.

Upon booting from the USB stick, Clover loaded and still did not show any AFPS-formatted volumes.

Do you have any ideas what else could be causing my drives not to be readable by Clover? The weirdest part of this is that they were working flawlessly and my install was in great shape for like... 8 hours or so. Only after I accidentally tried booting from a non-bootable drive did it suddenly crap out.

 

[P1LGRIM]

Do you have any ideas what else could be causing my drives not to be readable by Clover?

None.

 

[BHuij]

How important is the version of apfs.efi? It looks like different versions of that file are for different builds of 10.13.6?