I was able to install High Sierra 10.13.2 on a fusion drive without any difficulties. Creating a bootable EFI partition however caused problems. The fault lies in Clover installer and MultiBeast, not in the macOS installer.
How-to
- Install High Sierra on a normal bootable drive.
- Install Clover boot loader on the EFI partition of the disk using MultiBeast or whatever tools you prefer. Tweak the configuration until you are satisfied with the settings.
- Copy the contents of the /EFI/ folder of the EFI partition to an external USB flash drive.
- Create a fusion drive using a SSD and a HDD. If you are using the drive you just installed macOS on, your installation will be wiped out.
- Install High Sierra on the fusion drive using UniBeast. The macOS installer will list the fusion drive as a installation target.
- Finish the installation by rebooting from the UniBeast USB.
- Boot into Linux from a live USB. Mount the EFI partition of the physical disk you want to install Clover onto. (You could also do this from macOS with EFI mounter.) Copy the contents of the /EFI/ folder you saved earlier into the EFI partition (excluding the contents of the /EFI/Apple/ folder).
- Boot macOS via Clover normally.
Long version
I have a 1 TB SATA hard disk and a 128 GB NVMe SSD connected to a PCIe x 4 slot on my motherboard using a 2 dollar
Chinese adapter card. I created a fusion drive following the instructions on this Apple page and this video:
I booted the macOS installer from my UniBeast USB drive. I then opened terminal from the Utilities menu and ran diskutil as instructed. I checked the partition tables on the two drives using the terminal version of diskutil. (I was prepared to do this step using Linux live, but the text-only version of diskutil shows the hidden partitions, unlike the graphic version of Disk Utility.) Both drives now had a 209.7 MB EFI partition in the beginning and a 134.2 MB Apple-Boot partition at the end.
I then started macOS installation without rebooting in between. The installer showed the newly created fusion drive as the only possible target for the installation (apart from the MultiBeast USB naturally). The installer rebooted the system several times. I had to manually select the boot device from UniBeast. The result was a working High Sierra installation I could boot using the Clover bootloader on the UniBeast USB drive.
Diskutil now showed that the Apple-Boot partition on the HDD had grown to 650.0 MB and had been renamed as "Recovery HD". The Recovery disk also became visible in the bootloader. Both EFI partitions had a /EFI/Apple/ folder but the content was different.
Failed attempts
I then tried to install Clover and kexts on one of the two EFI partitions using MultiBeast. (In my case the HDD, see below.) MultiBeast was totally unaware of the two EFI partitions and only listed "Fusion" as a possible installation target. ("Fusion" is the name I had given to the volume.) Running MultiBeast resulted in failure and a "The Installation Failed" warning.
I then downloaded the latest version of Clover (
v2.4k_r4834) and tried to do the installation directly from the Clover installer. Clover too was unable to choose between the two EFI partitions and only offered the choice "Fusion". Running the installer did not produce any error messages. Nothing was written to the EFI partitions, but a /EFI/ folder had been created in the root of the fusion drive.
I copied the /EFI/ folder to a USB flash drive. I noticed that kexts folder had no FakeSMC.kext.
I then booted into Linux live and mounted the EFI partitions of the HDD and the UniBeast USB installer. I copied the EFI folder from the USB drive into the EFI partition of the HDD, adding FakeSMC.kext and IntelMausiEthernet.kext from UniBeast to the /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other/ folder.
More failures
Booting with the patched-together EFI partition brought up a nice Christmas greeting from the Clover team. MacOS however froze right at the start of the boot process. Booting in verbose mode (-v) produces only one line of text: "
does printf work?" Various discussions suggest this error is related to osxaptiov2.
I tried to fix the Clover installation by copying over various parts from UniBeast, first the config.plist and then the BOOT64.efi executable. Neither of these seemed to have any effect. I ended up erasing the whole Clover installation and just copying the whole EFI partition from the UniBeast USB drive.
I have another 250 GB drive with a working High Sierra 10.13.6 installation. I will next copy the EFI partition from there, but this will take some screwdriver work.
Booting from NVMe on a non-supported motherboard
I am using an Intel Xeon E3-1230 v2 processor (4-core Ivy Bridge) on an
DQ77MK Intel® Desktop Board. The BIOS on the motherboard does not support booting from a NVMe drive. Installing Clover bootloader on the EFI partition of a SATA disk should allow me to boot the operating system from the NVMe. I tried this earlier without creating a fusion drive. The High Sierra installer was happy to install macOS on the NVMe drive, but Unibeast (and Clover) failed to see the drive to boot from it or to finish the installation. By creating the fusion drive I am now able to boot from the NVMe without having support for it on the motherboard.
P.S. - This thing is FAST!