Guide: Multibooting UEFI on Separate Drives

[Doccnot]

I have heard of people doing this but never tried it myself. If you are going to purchase another GPU, best to get an AMD GPU that will perform as well as or better than the nVidia quadro card you now have and swap the new for the old. OTOH, there are still nVidia GPUs that are supported - see Dortania listing. You might be able to find one that will be comparable to the M5000, but it is doubtful as Mac support for nVidia GPUs has always been several years out of date, never having the latest GPU by a version or two, e.g. support for K5000, but not for M5000. The M5000 will outperform the K5000 by a good deal.

Thanks.

One last question. My current Mac is running Catalina and I would like to restore my time-machine backup onto the new Hackintosh. However, since it'll be running High-Sierra I have doubts that it'll be able to restore the Catalina backup. Any suggestions or ideas?

FYI the main purpose of the Hackintosh is so that I can run Logic Pro X, because my current mac is simply too old, laggy, and doesn't support my big Logic sessions like it used to anymore. This is evident from the sessions crashing due to "system overload". I certainly hope that all the third-party plugins will be working on the Hackintosh.

 

[Going Bald]

Thanks.

One last question. My current Mac is running Catalina and I would like to restore my time-machine backup onto the new Hackintosh. However, since it'll be running High-Sierra I have doubts that it'll be able to restore the Catalina backup. Any suggestions or ideas?

FYI the main purpose of the Hackintosh is so that I can run Logic Pro X, because my current mac is simply too old, laggy, and doesn't support my big Logic sessions like it used to anymore. This is evident from the sessions crashing due to "system overload". I certainly hope that all the third-party plugins will be working on the Hackintosh.

As you probably found out, the closest Mac to your hardware is the Late 2013 Mac Pro and Catalina does not support this Mac as it was dropped from support with Mojave. High Sierra runs well on it and Mojave can be made to run with the no_compat_check boot arg.
If your main app is LPX, you do not really need a powerful GPU unless you also game on it and the M5000 is not a very good gaming GPU. Suggest an inexpensive RX570 or RX580.

Best to install High Sierra from scratch if that is the Mac OS version you will be running.

 

[flyingace]

I apologize in advance as this question has likely been answered already. I want to be able to launch both Windows 10 and OS X Mojave (10.14.6) from this computer. I've had Mojave running without issue for some time, launching from Clover at startup etc. I recently added a new hard drive and followed the steps outlined at the beginning of this thread for making a Windows 10 drive. I see a Windows 10 drive in the Clover launch window but it takes me to a blinking cursor on a black screen and then nothing. I can launch Windows 10 by selecting F12 at startup and selecting the drive in the menu thereafter.

When I say I followed the instructions at the beginning of the article I mean that I followed them for Windows installation. I did nothing to my OS X driver thereafter.

If this question has been answered previously (I've tried to find an answer but 5 years is a lot of posts to sort through) and someone can point me there I'm happy to try to follow whatever instructions have been previously offered.

Many thanks.

 

[Going Bald]

Do you have an EFI partition on the Win10 drive? Did you disconnect the Mac OS drive while installing Win10?
Does the icon in Clover have the Win10 drive labeled as Boot Windows EFI from EFI? If not, what is the label on the Win10 icon?

 

[flyingace]

Thank you very much for your prompt reply.

Do you have an EFI partition on the Win10 drive?

Yes there is an EFI partition on the Win10 drive. I just mounted it from OS X using Clover Configurator and verified that it has an EFI directory in which are two directories, Boot & Microsoft.

Did you disconnect the Mac OS drive while installing Win10?

I did. I disconnected all other drives while I was installing Win10 as per the recommendation at the beginning of this tutorial.

Does the icon in Clover have the Win10 drive labeled as Boot Windows EFI from EFI? If not, what is the label on the Win10 icon?

The icon in Clover has the Win10 drive labeled as "Boot Microsoft EFI Boot from EFI."

Again, thank you for your help with this. I will try to answer any further questions promptly.

 

[Going Bald]

Thank you very much for your prompt reply.

Yes there is an EFI partition on the Win10 drive. I just mounted it from OS X using Clover Configurator and verified that it has an EFI directory in which are two directories, Boot & Microsoft.

I did. I disconnected all other drives while I was installing Win10 as per the recommendation at the beginning of this tutorial.

The icon in Clover has the Win10 drive labeled as "Boot Microsoft EFI Boot from EFI."

Again, thank you for your help with this. I will try to answer any further questions promptly.

Have you disabled CSM in BIOS/UEFI?

 

[flyingace]

CSM was not disabled in BIOS. It was locked on "Always" but after I switched whatever the OS switch just above it was from "Other OS" to "Windows 8" it became accessible and I switched it over to Disabled. I then switched the OS switch back over to "Other OS". The menu that asks whether I want to be able to boot "UEFI Only/UEFI and Legacy/Legacy Only" had been set at "UEFI Only" when I made these changes. Now that CSM is disabled that menu is no longer accessible and it's locked on "UEFI Only." No idea whether this is important or not.

When I look at the Boot order on the first screen of the BiOS I noted that none of the icons that represented the Windows drive had the little UEFI icon above them as some of the others did. But I thought I had installed Windows 10 as UEFI. Could I be easily mistaken on that point?

After making the changes I've made above I rebooted the machine and tried to boot into Windows 10 from Clover. First I got the little wheel of spinning balls and soon "Preparing Automatic Repair" appeared, then "Diagnosing Your PC" and finally the screen that says "Your computer didn't start properly" and the options to restart or to try to fix the thing. So I restarted and when I got to Clover tried again to boot Windows 10. This time no messages, just the spinning balls wheel and then a black screen and the power light on my monitor blinking as it does when it's not getting any content.

 

[Going Bald]

CSM was not disabled in BIOS. It was locked on "Always" but after I switched whatever the OS switch just above it was from "Other OS" to "Windows 8" it became accessible and I switched it over to Disabled. I then switched the OS switch back over to "Other OS". The menu that asks whether I want to be able to boot "UEFI Only/UEFI and Legacy/Legacy Only" had been set at "UEFI Only" when I made these changes. Now that CSM is disabled that menu is no longer accessible and it's locked on "UEFI Only." No idea whether this is important or not.

When I look at the Boot order on the first screen of the BiOS I noted that none of the icons that represented the Windows drive had the little UEFI icon above them as some of the others did. But I thought I had installed Windows 10 as UEFI. Could I be easily mistaken on that point?

After making the changes I've made above I rebooted the machine and tried to boot into Windows 10 from Clover. First I got the little wheel of spinning balls and soon "Preparing Automatic Repair" appeared, then "Diagnosing Your PC" and finally the screen that says "Your computer didn't start properly" and the options to restart or to try to fix the thing. So I restarted and when I got to Clover tried again to boot Windows 10. This time no messages, just the spinning balls wheel and then a black screen and the power light on my monitor blinking as it does when it's not getting any content.

Sound as if Win10 was not properly installed UEFI mode.
If Win10 installs UEFI mode there are 4 partitions
Partition 1 = Recovery
Partition 2 = EFI
Partition 3 = Microsoft Reserved (MSR)
Partition 4 = Primary Partition (C:\)

 

[cmorellato]

I apologize in advance as this question has likely been answered already. I want to be able to launch both Windows 10 and OS X Mojave (10.14.6) from this computer. I've had Mojave running without issue for some time, launching from Clover at startup etc. I recently added a new hard drive and followed the steps outlined at the beginning of this thread for making a Windows 10 drive. I see a Windows 10 drive in the Clover launch window but it takes me to a blinking cursor on a black screen and then nothing. I can launch Windows 10 by selecting F12 at startup and selecting the drive in the menu thereafter.

When I say I followed the instructions at the beginning of the article I mean that I followed them for Windows installation. I did nothing to my OS X driver thereafter.

If this question has been answered previously (I've tried to find an answer but 5 years is a lot of posts to sort through) and someone can point me there I'm happy to try to follow whatever instructions have been previously offered.

Many thanks.

Hey flyingace, just saw your posts on both threads. I know how you feel, been there!

I'm aware this might be a silly question, but we know much of these processes are so complex we might forget to watch for the little things. What USB stick are you using? Have you tried using another one? I've had similar non-successful trials that ended up being caused by an USB 3.0 pendrive. I finally made another Windows installation disk on Rufus with a common stick, and voilà.

I run a smooth dualboot Win10 & Mojave on a Gigabyte mobo also, booting through Clover. Let me know if it helps

 

[flyingace]

@Going Bald, @cmorellato, thanks to you both for your replies and your patience. I did manage to get the Multi-Boot working finally and I am very grateful for your help.

I think that the Windows drive was formatted properly as UEFI as it has all four of those partitions. There may have been an issue with the Boot Order, or perhaps the changes I needed to make to the Bios. I wrote that the little "UEFI" icon/label wasn't showing up above the drive's icon in the Boot Order panel and it still doesn't. However, when I looked at the "Boot Override" dialog from the final screen (the one with "Save & Exit" and the other exit options) I noticed that all the drives had the UEFI icon above them. I'm not sure what is causing this discrepancy.

I wanted to list the way some of the Bios options we discussed are now set since things seem to be working. If any of these seem less than optimal or unnecessarily altered please let me know and I will go back and try updating them.

FWIW, VT-d has always been locked even though I know that the recommended setting as listed on this site for that feature is "Disabled". I don't know if there's some trick to changing that or if it even matters that much.

Thanks again!