Clover upgrade killed my system - advice please

[SimonT]

I took the foolhardy step of trying to upgrade Clover before upgrading from Mojave to Catalina. I used Clover Configurator to do this, and made a note of the drivers in my EFI folder and hoped everything would go well. It didn't.

My system will not boot from the 1TB SSD I use. I have a clone, on a 250SSD, and that boots fine. But my system can't recognise the 1TB disk now at all. It can't see the EFI partition, the main partition with the MacOS installation, or the storage partition I use.

At boot, Clover can see the 1TB disk and its MacOS system, but if I try to boot from that drive I end up with the classic 'no entry' sign.

On rebooting into the 250SSD, neither Clover Configurator, Finder nor Disk Utility can see the ITB, or any of its partitions.

I could at this point throw the 1TB away - but there's a lot of stuff on that secondary partition which is valuable. (It is backed up to a cloud backup service but downloading it all with be painfully slow).

I'm not sure what to do next at this stage. Upgrading Clover always seems to cause a disaster of some kind, and I wish I knew why. I didn't change any options, and wasn't asked to approve any options or make any changes during the upgrade process.

My 250SSD (clone backup) is running clover 5099. My 1TB (main system disk) was also running 5099 and I attempted to upgrade to 5126.

I did make a Catalina install USB before doing any of this, using the tools available from this site. I also have a Macbook, recently updated to Catalina to help with any repairs.

So, some questions:

1. What did I do wrong during the Clover upgrade?
2. Is it okay to stick with clover 5099 when upgrading to Catalina?
3. Is there any software tool that might give me access to the borked 1TB SSD?
4. If I get access, my plan is to delete the contents of the EFI partition and do a drag and drop from the 250SSD clone's EFI partition. Does that sound like a reasonable plan?

 

[SimonT]

I also can't boot into the Recovery partition of the affected drive.

 

[Jamesbond007]

I took the foolhardy step of trying to upgrade Clover before upgrading from Mojave to Catalina. I used Clover Configurator to do this, and made a note of the drivers in my EFI folder and hoped everything would go well. It didn't.

My system will not boot from the 1TB SSD I use. I have a clone, on a 250SSD, and that boots fine. But my system can't recognise the 1TB disk now at all. It can't see the EFI partition, the main partition with the MacOS installation, or the storage partition I use.

At boot, Clover can see the 1TB disk and its MacOS system, but if I try to boot from that drive I end up with the classic 'no entry' sign.

On rebooting into the 250SSD, neither Clover Configurator, Finder nor Disk Utility can see the ITB, or any of its partitions.

I could at this point throw the 1TB away - but there's a lot of stuff on that secondary partition which is valuable. (It is backed up to a cloud backup service but downloading it all with be painfully slow).

I'm not sure what to do next at this stage. Upgrading Clover always seems to cause a disaster of some kind, and I wish I knew why. I didn't change any options, and wasn't asked to approve any options or make any changes during the upgrade process.

My 250SSD (clone backup) is running clover 5099. My 1TB (main system disk) was also running 5099 and I attempted to upgrade to 5126.

I did make a Catalina install USB before doing any of this, using the tools available from this site. I also have a Macbook, recently updated to Catalina to help with any repairs.

So, some questions:

1. What did I do wrong during the Clover upgrade?
2. Is it okay to stick with clover 5099 when upgrading to Catalina?
3. Is there any software tool that might give me access to the borked 1TB SSD?
4. If I get access, my plan is to delete the contents of the EFI partition and do a drag and drop from the 250SSD clone's EFI partition. Does that sound like a reasonable plan?

(1) The problem with Clover 5126 (or 5123 and above) is that there is a big change. Clover 5123 and above incorporates the OpenCore bootloader to help boot Big Sur, but doing that require extensive changes to config.plist (and maybe the drivers). That may be why you are having problems with Clover 5126. Also, upgrading Clover, as far as I know, replaces the original EFI folder with another, and if you do not make appropriate adjustments your MacOS system will fail to boot even if it is still there.

But if you cannot see the MacOS partition on your 1 TB SSD even when you are booted into Mojave from the 250 GB SSD, then that may mean a hardware problem. Can you see your 1 TB SSD when you go into the BIOS settings of the motherboard?

(2) I think so. I use Clover 5119 (the version included with Unibeast) to boot Catalina 10.15.7. If you wish to upgrade Clover I suggest upgrading to 5119 instead.

(4) Yes, I think that is reasonable.

 

[SimonT]

I can see the 1TB SSD when booted into the Clover boot screen. Both the system partition and the recovery partition are offered up as boot options. But selecting either of them leads to the 'no entry' sign, and failure to boot. The drive is only a few months old, Samsung, and has shown no signs of problems, so I'm fairly sure it's not a hardware failure. I had no idea about the clover 5123 and above issues, wish I had.

I gather tools such as DiskWarrior don't really work with the AFPS drives, so feel a bit stuck.

I will boot into BIOS and see what it tells me.

 

[Feartech]

I can see the 1TB SSD when booted into the Clover boot screen. Both the system partition and the recovery partition are offered up as boot options. But selecting either of them leads to the 'no entry' sign, and failure to boot. The drive is only a few months old, Samsung, and has shown no signs of problems, so I'm fairly sure it's not a hardware failure. I had no idea about the clover 5123 and above issues, wish I had.

I gather tools such as DiskWarrior don't really work with the AFPS drives, so feel a bit stuck.

I will boot into BIOS and see what it tells me.

booting verbose may may

also adding the new config.plist entries if you are using the new version of clover

or go back to a previous build of clover that worked

 

[SimonT]

I want to go back to the previous build of clover but can't - because there's no way to mount any of the partitions on the 1TBSSD - the system parition, storage or EFI. It won't boot into Recovery either. I tried connecting it to a PC and that doesn't see the disk either. My Macbook also doesn't see it. But I'm pretty sure that it's there, the data is still on it. Which is all very frustrating.

I also booted into Clover, which saw the 1TB and had the correct name of the parition (MacGuffin) but I booted into the Recovery drive of the 250SSD. But Disk Utilities there could not see the faulty SSD at all.

 

[tedyun]

R-studio disk recovery has served me well for messed up files. It saved my butt when I partitioned and formatted the wrong drive earlier this year. I've used this for years and it has always been able to find pretty much everything that I thought was gone.

Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux

R-TT offers disk recovery software and hard drive data recovery tools. Network and RAID support.

www.r-studio.com

 

[SimonT]

R-studio disk recovery has served me well

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the demo to see if it would help, and like Disk Utility, Clover Configurator, EFIMounter etc, it can't even see the affected drive. The only thing that does find the drive is the Clover bootloader on the working 250GB SSD and various USB install disks - for both Mojave and Catalina. Trying to reinstall the OS from the USB sticks always fails, getting stuck at the Apple logo.

R-studio does look like a good disk tool because it claims to work with AFPS disks. Sadly, it can't help me in my current predicament. At least I can recover eventually using Clones and cloud backups.

 

[SimonT]

I've attached the drive to a Windows laptop and followed some instructions found online to open a tool called 'Disk Management'. This sees the 1TB drive and its partitions, says they are all healthy. So I'm fairly sure it's not hardware failure. It won't let me delete the EFI partition, however, which it says is protected.

 

[SimonT]

I used command prompts on the Windows machine to 'clean' the drive which removed the partitions and all data, then reformatted it into GUID. My Mac still can't read the drive. So that Clover update did something really weird at a very deep level, I guess.