Does it make sense to move the entire EFI partition to a separate drive?

[macfanatic]

I currently have a Hackintosh that I am putting together slowly (i7 8700 Coffee Lake/GA-Z370 Aorus Gaming 5/32 GB DDR4 3200 RAM/AMD Vega 64), and have gotten the MacOS Mojave 10.14.3 loaded and so far appears to be stable. I have been toying with the idea of setting a dual boot system with a Win 10 and MacOS on separate physical SSDs. I am going to be using Clover as the boot loader but was concerned about documentation of Windows 10 updates overwriting Clover on the EFI partition and inserting Windows Bootloader. As a result, I have maintained a USB backup of my EFI partition so that (hopefully) if this ever happens I can wipe out the EFI partition and re-partition and copy my saved EFI folder back into it.

Is there a way to PROTECT my EFI partition/bootloader/clover from getting violated by the evil Windows 10? I saw on the one of the Golden Builds the guy who did it, put his entire EFI partition into a separate physical SSD (128 GB) and kept the vanilla MacOS and windows on separate SSDs. In the BIOS, he recommended setting the only boot drive to the EFI partition SSD, and then Clover can direct access to Win 10 SSD or MacOS SSD.

Wondering if anyone has a better way to implement this, and if not, would this guarantee that Windows bootloader doesn't kill my partition? It would be great if there were a way to set it and write-protect my EFI partition.

 

[Jamesbond007]

I currently have a Hackintosh that I am putting together slowly (i7 8700 Coffee Lake/GA-Z370 Aorus Gaming 5/32 GB DDR4 3200 RAM/AMD Vega 64), and have gotten the MacOS Mojave 10.14.3 loaded and so far appears to be stable. I have been toying with the idea of setting a dual boot system with a Win 10 and MacOS on separate physical SSDs. I am going to be using Clover as the boot loader but was concerned about documentation of Windows 10 updates overwriting Clover on the EFI partition and inserting Windows Bootloader. As a result, I have maintained a USB backup of my EFI partition so that (hopefully) if this ever happens I can wipe out the EFI partition and re-partition and copy my saved EFI folder back into it.

Is there a way to PROTECT my EFI partition/bootloader/clover from getting violated by the evil Windows 10? I saw on the one of the Golden Builds the guy who did it, put his entire EFI partition into a separate physical SSD (128 GB) and kept the vanilla MacOS and windows on separate SSDs. In the BIOS, he recommended setting the only boot drive to the EFI partition SSD, and then Clover can direct access to Win 10 SSD or MacOS SSD.

Wondering if anyone has a better way to implement this, and if not, would this guarantee that Windows bootloader doesn't kill my partition? It would be great if there were a way to set it and write-protect my EFI partition.

If you are going to install Windows 10 and Mojave on separate drives, then before attempting to install Windows 10 on a new drive, disconnect or disable the Mojave drive temporarily until the Windows 10 installation is completed. That should prevent the Windows 10 installation program from writing anything on the Mojave drive.

 

[macfanatic]

What about during periodic Windows updates? Does it write to the bootloader?

 

[jpz4085]

What about during periodic Windows updates? Does it write to the bootloader?

This is probably the most frequently asked question and it has a simple straight forward answer. You need to add Clover as a boot option in your computer's firmware boot menu and move it to the top of the list.

If the BIOS setup doesn't have a option you need to use a tool like EasyUEFI or bcfg in the Clover UEFI Shell or efibootmgr in Linux or vulgo's bootoption utility for macOS.

Once you've done this there's no more problems with the boot order changing and no need to rename or delete anything in the EFI partition. Maybe I should write a short guide when I get a chance.