Clover Triple Boot Woes

[tmacgahan]

Hello folks,

I have done my best to ensure due diligence with respect to existing information, but find myself unable to make progress.

What I am trying to do:
I have 4 disks, 3 of which have operating systems installed, 1 OS per disk at most. They are OS X 10.11.3, win8.1 and ubuntu 14.04.3

Symptoms:
Clover detects OS X primary and recovery partitions, both of which boot. Clover also detects a linux partition. Attempting to boot this linux partition results in a flash of black and being bumped back to clover. Finally, clover detects two windows partitions, one reserve and the other main. Attempting to load either results in a black screen with blinking cursor.

My environment:
My partitions look like this to clover configurator:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *32.0 GB    disk0
   1:                      Linux                         32.0 GB    disk0s1
/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *63.0 GB    disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS El Capitan              62.2 GB    disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk2 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *120.0 GB   disk2
   1:               Windows_NTFS System Reserved         367.0 MB   disk2s1
   2:               Windows_NTFS                         119.7 GB   disk2s2
/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk3
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 SHARED DATA             934.7 GB   disk3s1
   2:                 Linux_Swap                         65.5 GB    disk3s5

My mobo is a gigabyte z97-hd3, sporting only builtins and an nvidia geforce gt740.

I am able to boot all of these operating systems: OS X via clover only, Ubuntu via grub only, Windows via grub or directly.

What I would like to do:
Have clover be a unified place from which to bootstrap all three operating systems.

What I have tried:
-I have attempted to install NTFS drivers. I am not exactly sure where they are meant to go, but I have both NTFS and NTFS UEFI installed through clover configurator.
-Somewhere I read that copying the Windows boot directory to /EFI/Microsoft/Boot can work, but this results in in a new windows partition in clover which dies at some point after the ms image takes over.
-Putzing around clover configurator
-Grub. I was completely unable to get grub to recognize and load OS X. If anyone has any suggestions as to how to remedy this, this would also be just fine with me.

Please let me know if there is any more information that would be of help. Also, please accept my apologies if this is covered elsewhere. I am happy to be given a link, although I wasn't able to find anything further own my own that seemed to be relevant.

I appreciate any help. I've lost more than two days wrestling with this now.

 

[Going Bald]

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *32.0 GB    disk0
   1:                      Linux                         32.0 GB    disk0s1
/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *63.0 GB    disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS El Capitan              62.2 GB    disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk2 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *120.0 GB   disk2
   1:               Windows_NTFS System Reserved         367.0 MB   disk2s1
   2:               Windows_NTFS                         119.7 GB   disk2s2
/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk3
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 SHARED DATA             934.7 GB   disk3s1
   2:                 Linux_Swap                         65.5 GB    disk3s5

My mobo is a gigabyte z97-hd3, sporting only builtins and an nvidia geforce gt740.

Given the setup listed, you have Windows installed Legacy mode. Clover installed UEFI mode (as you probalby installed it) will not boot Windows or Linux installed Legacy mode. Choice here is to either re-install/convert Windows to UEFI or re-install Clover Legacy mode.
I do not see an EFI partition on the Linux drive, so you probably installed it Legacy mode also. Big question here is where did you install Grub2? To the HDD MBR or to the Linux OS root?

I would say your easiest route is to mount the EFI partition of the OS X drive, copy the EFI folder to desktop, then delete the one in the EFI folder. After you empty the trash, install Clover in Legacy mode, copt any kexts and the working config.plist from the Desktop/EFI folder to the new one just created and reboot with Clover in Legacy mode. System Reserved icon should then boot Windows and the Linux icon may or may not boot Linux - you may have to move Grub2.

 

[tmacgahan]

Thank you for your reply.

To answer your question, grub is installed to the 32GB linux drive /dev/disk0.

I attempted to follow your advice, but suspect I do not fully understand it. I took the following steps:

1)
Step: I backed up the EFI partition on disk1,1 onto my desktop. I ran Clover_v2.3k_r3320-Legacy.pkg, which is what I interpreted you to have meant by installing Clover in Legacy mode. I then copied back my saved version of config.plist, originally located at /EFI/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist, back to the same location. No kexts existed in the original efi partition.

Result: Identical behavior. No changes apparent. Windows (both partitions) still fail to boot, yielding a cursor instead, while linux gives a black flash and bumps back to clover. OS X behaves correctly.

2)
Step: I ran Clover_v2.3k_r3320-Legacy.pkg.

Result: Borked boot loader sequence for this partition. I now get "b1f init\n" + "b1ferror" on a black screen when attempting to boot from disk1, does not make it to boot selection.

3)
Repeated step 1, without copying config.plist.

Result: Boot loader works again. Booting linux now results in a locked screen with some clover icon staring back at me. Booting windows partition 1 now works! Also, strangely, keyboard selection only works if I don't touch the mouse, now. Otherwise, clover gets upset and requires that I use the mouse to move between selections, but without moving the cursor, which I find odd.

This is progress, but I must say I am confused. I am now unsure where my configurations are, and I'm uncertain why repeating step 1 enabled windows rather than reverting to prior behavior, which is what I intended. In any case, thanks for all the help so far.

Cheers!

 

[Going Bald]

This is progress, but I must say I am confused. I am now unsure where my configurations are, and I'm uncertain why repeating step 1 enabled windows rather than reverting to prior behavior, which is what I intended. In any case, thanks for all the help so far.

Cheers!

The odd behavior is due to Clover itself. Try the latest version of Clover (download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/ ) and select to install Boot0SS to MBR only. This is the one you want to be able to boot the Windows install. Not sure what to do with the Linux except to purge Grub2 and reinstall it in the root of your Linux install.

 

[tmacgahan]

Great! I will take that under advisement and report success or failure when I am able to give it a try. Thanks for all your help. In the meantime, I will assume that I have exhausted the resources of this site and consider myself on my own from here.

Again, I appreciate your help. I apologize for all the nubi questions. I was surprised by 15 years of progress, as the last time I tried to build a machine myself, there was no (U)EFI that I was aware of. Apparently things have become more complicated since then.

 

[Going Bald]

Great! I will take that under advisement and report success or failure when I am able to give it a try. Thanks for all your help. In the meantime, I will assume that I have exhausted the resources of this site and consider myself on my own from here.

Again, I appreciate your help. I apologize for all the nubi questions. I was surprised by 15 years of progress, as the last time I tried to build a machine myself, there was no (U)EFI that I was aware of. Apparently things have become more complicated since then.

Yes, hardware/firmware has taken great strides and the Linux world is still trying to catch up. So far, EFI booting is still extremely buggy with Linux distros and grub boot loader. Lilo may work better, but have not tried it EFI.