<< Solved >> Copying the EFI files to my cloned drive is not working

[davstrom]

I have a Hackintosh that runs well. I wish to clone a backup, just in case.

I used the free version of SuperDuper to clone the drive. After that, I ran Clover Configurator from the Hackintosh to mount the EFI partitions, and I copied the EFI folder from the Hackintosh main drive to the clone drive. Then I swapped out the main drive, put in the clone drive, and tried to boot up. The bootup progress bar goes about halfway, then the computer shuts down.

I should say that the Hackintosh uses a 512GB SSD, and I am trying to clone it to an old spinny hard drive. Also, I note that on my Hackintosh EFI, I see an EFI folder, but no nvram.plist file. (I see that file in videos on how to copy the EFI partition, but I suspect that since my Hackintosh uses onboard Intel video and not NVIDIA, that might be okay.)

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[davstrom]

I got the clone working.

Turns out that for some reason, the free version of SuperDuper did not make a workable clone of my Hackintosh drive. I do not know why, I have used SuperDuper before and never had any problems. When I opened the clone drive after SuperDuper (should have done that before), there were lots of extra folders, and several folders were empty, such as the User folder. To quote 2001's HAL, I suspect that this problem was due to human error.

I tried using Disk Utility to do a restore to the clone drive. That failed.

I have used Carbon Copy Cloner on my MacBook Pro for years, and I am happy with it. I downloaded a trial version to my Hackintosh. I erased the clone drive, formatting as APFS. I ran Carbon Copy Cloner. The file structure looked good. I used Clover Configurator to open the EFI on the Hackintosh main drive and the cloned drive, and I copied the contents of the EFI on the main drive to the EFI on the cloned drive. I shut down, swapped out the main SSD and put in the cloned HHD, and I booted up. The cloned drive worked.

But boy did I notice how much slower HDD is than SSD! In the future, I might be tempted to still buy another SSD. In the meantime, I have a bootable backup drive for my Hackintosh.