Guide: Multibooting UEFI on Separate Drives

[wolko]

It is my understanding that it is infact possible, however I am having trouble getting the USB to be bootable, might just have to go to the store and get an optical to burn the Image. See the first post of this thread for instructions (note: you will disconnect your Mac drive and leave the to be Windows SSD connected.

Thanks for your answer

So just to clarify a few points, what i sould do is :
- Create a bootable USB for win10
- Shuting down my machine
- Disconecting my OSX SSD
- Connection my new SSD
- Boot on my win10 usb and simply install win 10
- Once win installed, i jsut have to reconnect both SSD ?

i'm having some difficulties to understang that .

 

[ThrasherOSX]

Answers as I know them below:

I'm planning to add a second 960 EVO NVME drive to my existing Windows 10 PC (UEFI) in order to make it dual boot with High Sierra. Yesterday I successfully made a High Sierra Bootable USB drive with UniBeast. I tried to thoroughly read the installation guide and this forum, but I still have some questions regarding the proces.

1. I get the impression that installing macOS on a separate drive isn't really that different from a single boot scenario because the bootloader/Clover is installed on the drive with macOS. Is my assumption correct? Can I install macOS on a separate drive without losing the existing Windows drive?

I found that the install was very easy, the only thing I did differntly was to install the SSD and format to HFS+ under my OSX system, once the drive was formatted, I shut down, disconnected all MAC drives and left the WIN Drive ONLY connected (per the multi boot instruction) booted from the WINDOWS Install disc, deleted ONLY the HFS partition (you need the EFI partition for clover I believe).

2. As long as this drive with Clover is set as boot priority it can boot both Windows and macOS?

If you have a properly operating Hack your Clover bootloader will show windows as an option (note: Boot Priority should have your OSX volume as Boot option 1)

3. Do I need to physically disconnect my existing 960 EVO with Windows 10 and my Sata drives (storage) to get macOS safely installed on the second m.2 drive? Would I be able to identify the 960 EVO as destination drive if I leave them on my motherboard (Z270i)? (It would be really easy to add a second m.2 drive on the back of the motherboard, but it would be really annoying to disassemble the GPU and the CPU cooler to get access to the m.2 slot on the front.)

Install your OSX per the instructions first, get everything working properly then proceed to do windows later, it is seemless to add later.

4. Is the proces reversible if things go wrong with the macOS drive? Can I reformat or disconnect the drive without affecting the Windows drive?

Yes, you just disconnect the drive to prevent any damage to the OS, I have disconnected OSX and booted soley from Win. and Vice Versa with no problems

5. Am I forgetting something really important when it comes to dual booting besides the steps in the guide?

The guide is very good, follow inst. instructions and you should be good to go.

Thanks in advance!

 

[ThrasherOSX]

You got it, the only thing to add is when you connect your windows and OSX drives all together at the end, you need to boot directly into the BIOS and ensure you have the OSX partition (clover bootloader) as the BOOT option 1, I set up my comptuer to be as follows:

Boot 1 - OSX
Boot 2 - DVD Optical
Boot 3 - USB
Boot 4 - Windows

Good luck.

Thanks for your answer

So just to clarify a few points, what i sould do is :
- Create a bootable USB for win10
- Shuting down my machine
- Disconecting my OSX SSD
- Connection my new SSD
- Boot on my win10 usb and simply install win 10
- Once win installed, i jsut have to reconnect both SSD ?

i'm having some difficulties to understang that .

 

[bumblebee71]

Hi, I want to add my OSX to the existing multiboot system.

What is the status: I have 2 HDs:
HDD 1) Running with Grub Win 10 and Linux Mint
HDD 2) Running OSX Sierra High

Currently I "plug and play" means: if I want to use Win or Linux, I plug in HDD 1
if I want to use OSX I change the HDD to 2 , unplug HDD1!
Fortunately all my hardware works on all 3 systems.

So is it possible to plug in both HDs and tell the BIOS : HDD1 is bootdisk (I know, it is !)
and to tell grub: HDD2 is another, additional OS ?

THX for ur Help,
kind regards,
Michael

 

[ThrasherOSX]

Michael,

Look at the instructions in post #1, also my comments in #300. I am not using Grub, so I don't know how that reacts with Clover bootloader, but you should be able to connect all drives, set the OSX drive as the priorty to boot and then use clover to select the boot drive.

Hi, I want to add my OSX to the existing multiboot system.

What is the status: I have 2 HDs:
HDD 1) Running with Grub Win 10 and Linux Mint
HDD 2) Running OSX Sierra High

Currently I "plug and play" means: if I want to use Win or Linux, I plug in HDD 1
if I want to use OSX I change the HDD to 2 , unplug HDD1!
Fortunately all my hardware works on all 3 systems.

So is it possible to plug in both HDs and tell the BIOS : HDD1 is bootdisk (I know, it is !)
and to tell grub: HDD2 is another, additional OS ?

THX for ur Help,
kind regards,
Michael

 

[Going Bald]

Hi, I want to add my OSX to the existing multiboot system.

What is the status: I have 2 HDs:
HDD 1) Running with Grub Win 10 and Linux Mint
HDD 2) Running OSX Sierra High

Currently I "plug and play" means: if I want to use Win or Linux, I plug in HDD 1
if I want to use OSX I change the HDD to 2 , unplug HDD1!
Fortunately all my hardware works on all 3 systems.

So is it possible to plug in both HDs and tell the BIOS : HDD1 is bootdisk (I know, it is !)
and to tell grub: HDD2 is another, additional OS ?

THX for ur Help,
kind regards,
Michael

If Grub is installed UEFI (boot files in a folder in the EFI partition), connect both drives, boot to UEFI/BIOS and set the OS X drive as first in BBS boot order. Clover should see the Grub boot file and give you an icon. If it does not, edit your OS X Clover config.plist for Linux boot - search is your friend - how to do this has been explained multiple times already.

 

[1amBulletproof]

Hello! And thanks in advance for any help provided. I realize we all have busy lives...

TLDR: If you install linux EFI on a separate drive from the Mac/Clover efi, how can you get Clover to recognize the linux install? Details on how this happened and what I've tried are below and in the attached photos.

I installed Centos on a 3rd drive in addition to my already-working-clover hackintosh which has MacOS High Sierra and Windows installed on separate drives. I followed your guide precisely when installing Mac & Windows, but failed to do-so for CentOS as I could not find how to put the bootable files on a separate disk. From some basic googling, I think this may NOT be an option for CentOS. I was therefore forced to install them on my 3rd, separate, drive (i.e. NOT in the same EFI partition as my MacOS/Clover installation). As expected, Clover does not see/recognize the CentOS installation, although it boots just fine if you manipulate the BIOS to make the ssd w/ CentOS highest boot priority.

I have reinstalled CentOS several times, occasionally trying to make my own partition scheme or use other methods to install the EFI information alongside my EFI but nothing has worked so far. Attached are photos showing the modified CLOVER config.plist, MacOS EFI partition directory contents (including the CentOS folder I added) AND the disk's on my hackintosh.

 

[Going Bald]

EFI partition of Linux drive with Linux boot can be seen by Clover in EFI partition on the Mac OS / Win10 drive. You just have to modify the section in Clover config.plist:

<key>Scan</key>
<dict>
<key>Entries</key>
<true/>
<key>Legacy</key>
<string>First</string>
<key>Linux</key>
<true/>
(you may need UUID and other info here)
<key>Tool</key>
<true/>
</dict>

You may need more than this, but it is a start. There is a thread over in the Workshop / Bootloaders forum where this was discussed using Arch Linux. Forum search is your friend.

 

[vulgo]

Attached are photos showing the modified CLOVER config.plist, MacOS EFI partition directory contents (including the CentOS folder I added) AND the disk's on my hackintosh.

Regarding the Clover Linux scan you might want to take a look at the loader.c source. Your directory structure looks wrong, if the executable is GRUB maybe it should be \EFI\CENTOS\GRUBX64.EFI, ...\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI is a special path in EFI. There would have been companion vendor folder/contents with GRUB configuration files or maybe \EFI\LOADER folder if the loader is systemd-boot. In any case the files and EFI NVRAM entry should be created using your distro's grub install/config commands for grub or bootctl for systemd (try 'man grub' or 'man bootctl'), plus the 'efibootmgr' command (see 'man efibootmgr'). If the created directory structure is not being scanned for by Clover you will need a custom entry.

 

[hkfan45]

I just installed Ubuntu on a separate drive, and installed the boot files to the OS X/EFI drive, as the instructions say. Now, even when I select the OS X UEFI drive to boot, I go right to the Ubuntu screen. No clover screen. What happened? How can I salvage this? How can I boot to OS X?