Clover upgrade killed my system - advice please

[Feartech]

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.

assume you don't have a working usb installer for cases like this? so you can compare the differences?

 

[SimonT]

assume you don't have a working usb installer for cases like this? so you can compare the differences?

I do have a working USB installer, but I can't compare the difference because I can't access the EFI partition on the affected SSD.

I've now 'solved' the issue by wiping the drive clean on a Windows machine, reformating it, and installing Catalina from the USB installer. I'm restoring my setup from a time machine backup (hooray for backups). Only 14 hours and 45 minutes to go. Then I have to restore the 'media' partition from my Backblaze backup which might take weeks.

Be careful with those Clover upgrades, everybody.

 

[Feartech]

I do have a working USB installer, but I can't compare the difference because I can't access the EFI partition on the affected SSD.

I've now 'solved' the issue by wiping the drive clean on a Windows machine, reformating it, and installing Catalina from the USB installer. I'm restoring my setup from a time machine backup (hooray for backups). Only 14 hours and 45 minutes to go. Then I have to restore the 'media' partition from my Backblaze backup which might take weeks.

Be careful with those Clover upgrades, everybody.

but if you have a working usb installer, could you not have booted from that and choose your mac partition to boot?

 

[SimonT]

but if you have a working usb installer, could you not have booted from that and choose your mac partition to boot?

No, because the partitions on the affected drive were not visible to the USB installer, and did not show up in disk utility.

 

[SimonT]

I now have a system which will not book into anything. I have two clones of my Mojave installation, three Mojave USB installers and a Catalina Mojave installer and none of them will boot.
I've reset BIOS and made the necessary tweaks (though might have missed something, I suppose, but no idea what or where). Clover will not boot, and all of the disks attempt to load the OS, but take an an age and then finally die and the computer restarts and we go round and round and round again.
I've tried booting into verbose mode, safe mode, single user mode etc, and sometimes all of those at once.
I'm getting various messages on screen during the boot process but the test flashes past before I can read it. Is there a way to recover such messages?
Any suggestions of what I should do to get back to a stable state?

 

[SimonT]

Update: I reset the NVRAM - no idea what that means or what it does but it has allowed me to now boot into the Mojave clones and installers.

All of this happened after successfully wiping the borked 1TB drive, installing Catalina, and resotoring my data from a time machine backup. On restart, the system wouldn't boot. So I went to bed and this morning nothing would boot. I seem to remember reading something on this site about resettig NVRAM after a Catalina install. Is this a known issue?