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Guide: Multibooting UEFI on Separate Drives

I had been multibooting win10 and macOS Sierra on the same drive for the last month but **** that, it ended up screwing up my efi partition and I had to fresh install, so win10 is all I'm running now. I'm getting a new ssd dedicated to macOS now to ensure neither updates or anything messes with both operating systems.

Question is, I am already up and running fully on my fresh windows 10 install and it would be a pain to have to fresh install it again. Would physically removing the current win10 drive, inserting the new ssd and install macOS here be good to dualboot? Will clover detect both my "old" windows installation with all my files in it and the new macOS SSD and let me choose what to boot?

Thanks!
 
I had been multibooting win10 and macOS Sierra on the same drive for the last month but **** that, it ended up screwing up my efi partition and I had to fresh install, so win10 is all I'm running now. I'm getting a new ssd dedicated to macOS now to ensure neither updates or anything messes with both operating systems.

Question is, I am already up and running fully on my fresh windows 10 install and it would be a pain to have to fresh install it again. Would physically removing the current win10 drive, inserting the new ssd and install macOS here be good to dualboot? Will clover detect both my "old" windows installation with all my files in it and the new macOS SSD and let me choose what to boot?

Thanks!
See post 1. Does not matter order of install or how long between installations.
 
MultiBooting Win10, OS X and Ubuntu on separate drives is as simple a procedure as installing all 3 on the same drive and booting them with Clover ( See http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-multibooting-uefi.197352/ ).
What you need:

3 HDDs or SSDs or some combination of the two.
Your installation USBs:

View attachment 205199

some time and patience.

For this guide, there is no need to give detailed installation instructions for OS X - this guide already exists.
Due to the way I install the boot files for Linux, I need to install OS X before installing Ubuntu.
You can install either OS X or Win10 first. I chose to do Win10 first.

The only special thing you need to do for Win10 is create the EFI partition as the first partition on the drive and format the drive GPT partition tables. This is easiest to do with the OS X Disk Utility, but it can be done from an elevated command window at the Win10 installer screen with diskpart. If you do not know how to do it with diskpart I suggest you do it with OS X Disk Utility. Note that CSM must be enabled for the installation process.

For Win10:
Connect a drive, insert OS X Install USB, boot the system and at the POST hit the Function hotkey that allows you to select a boot device. Select the OS X Install USB. At the installation screen, select Utilities->Disk Utility and format the drive single partition GUID/Mac OS Extended (Journaled). When done, exit Disk Utility. Quit the OS X installer.
Remove the OS X Install USB and insert the Win10 USB, boot the system and at the POST hit the Function hotkey that allows you to select a boot device.
Windows shows up as USB: Win10Installer (or whatever you named the USB) and as UEFI USB: Win10Installer.
Select the UEFI USB: Win10Installer and boot the system.
At the installation screen, select Custom Install. At the next screen select the OS X partition and delete it - do not delete the EFI partition. With the resulting free space hi-lited, install Windows to the space. The installer will create and format the partitions for you. When finished, update and install your 3rd party apps and security suite. Reboot to BIOS/UEFI and disable CSM. Save&exit, continue boot to desktop. Shut down, disconnect the drive.

For OS X:
Follow the guide at http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/u...pitan-on-any-supported-intel-based-pc.172672/

I went ahead and upgraded to Sierra PB2 while I had a new installation of El Capitan just to make sure there were no surprises with Sierra.

For Linux:

You should have created your USB for UEFI installation. If you did not, you need to go back and do this. I found Rufus to work well for this.
Normally, I would disconnect the OS X drive before installing another OS. This time, since I want to install the Linux boot loader to the UEFI folder on the OS X drive, I will leave it connected.
So, with the system shut down, connect the next drive, insert the Linux Install USB, boot the system and at the POST hit the Function hotkey that allows you to select a boot device. Select the Linux Install USB and boot the system.

At the Grub screen boot the Live Linux default and then at the desktop double-click on the install icon.
Select your language (continue).
If your system has a fast network connection, click the burger dots to install updates during the installation process (continue). For Installation type, select "Something else" (continue). You should see something like this:
View attachment 205204

sda is obviously your OS X drive, sdb is your drive for Linux. Select it, click on new partition table. This will wipe the drive to free space. Create your swap, root, home, usr partitions as you normally would for Linux.
When done, make sure you select to put the boot loader files in the sda EFI partition:
View attachment 205205

Click on Install Now and go get a cup of coffee, take a bathroom break, do something else while Linux installs.
When the installation is complete, you will need to reboot. At the post, go ahead and hit the Function key to select the Linux drive to boot to finish the installation and create your user. Remove the install USB. Update if you did not select to update during install, download any apps you want, set the system up and get it working for you as you wish it to. When done, shutdown. Connect the Windows drive.

With all 3 OSs installed and all 3 drives connected boot to the UEFI BIOS and make the OS X drive first in BBS boot order.
When Clover screen shows you will only see icons for OS X and Windows. We will fix this with a config.plist edit.
Choose the OS X icon and boot to desktop. You will need to download Xcode or your favorite plist editor for this next step.
Mount the EFI partition and navigate to the config.plist. Open the config.plist in Xcode and add this entry:

View attachment 205207
Save the config.plist, quit Xcode and reboot. You will see this:
View attachment 205208

and this:
View attachment 205209

And that, my children is just how simple it is.

View attachment 205210

There is just one slight annoying problem I have not solved yet in Sierra: OS X complains "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" "Initialize Ignore Eject" when it boots, complaining about the Linux drive. Previous free 3rd party apps that worked for earlier versions of OS X do not seem to work at all in Sierra yet - maybe the authors will update their apps when the Gold Master is releaased. You can get used to the complaint and just click eject when you boot OS X or find/create another solution.

Why 'For Win10' do we have to disconnect the drive?

Do we not utilise that EFI partition on that drive when installing Clover?
 
Why 'For Win10' do we have to disconnect the drive?

Do we not utilise that EFI partition on that drive when installing Clover?
You want Win10 installer to install all of the Windows partitions and files on the Win10 drive. If you have another drive connected to a SATA port with higher priority than the one Windows is installing on you may find your Windows EFI partition or WinRE Tools partition on that drive instead of the Win10 drive. Then if you remove or reformat that drive for some reason, Win10 no longer boots. Do you want to take that chance?
 
You want Win10 installer to install all of the Windows partitions and files on the Win10 drive. If you have another drive connected to a SATA port with higher priority than the one Windows is installing on you may find your Windows EFI partition or WinRE Tools partition on that drive instead of the Win10 drive. Then if you remove or reformat that drive for some reason, Win10 no longer boots. Do you want to take that chance?

Ahhh. That makes sense. Definitely not taking that chance
 
I'm wondering - if this guide could also allow me to create an additional drive boot option to run a Beta version of the new High Sierra when the public version comes out?

I have a stable system that has multiple boot options now for MacOS and Windows (Both installed on separate SDDs, each with their own EFIs) but don't want to mess that up.
 
I'm wondering - if this guide could also allow me to create an additional drive boot option to run a Beta version of the new High Sierra when the public version comes out?

I have a stable system that has multiple boot options now for MacOS and Windows (Both installed on separate SDDs, each with their own EFIs) but don't want to mess that up.
You could easily add a partition on the Mac OS drive and install the HS Beta on it if you have a large enough drive, using your existing Clover to boot it if you want. Should not affect anything on the other drives.
 
Is there an easy walkthrough in using diskpart? I have the following problem: I installed Mac OS on a Samsung SSD and now wanted to install Windows 10 on an Intel 750 NVMe SSD, which the Mac OS installer does not recognize as a drive at all.

Edit: Found a very helpful website.

Maybe you could add this to your first post to make this excellent guide even better?
 
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I want to triple boot Windows 10, macOS Sierra and Ubuntu. Windows is my primary OS, macOS for other "I have a mac - stuff" and Ubuntu for Android Development...
My PC (laptop in this case, doesn't matter though) offers me 3x mSATA SSDs
1x250GB for W10
1x250GB for Ubuntu (I need the space)
1x64GB for macOS

Oh and a 2TB HDD for the big stuff

I want to make a clean installation of every OS, the usb installers are prepared
For the bootloader I want to use the newest version of Clover for UEFI motherboards...
Which OS should I install first? macOS because of Clover? Windows because it always wants to set the windows bootloader as primary? Linux goes last I guess...
All of my drives are blank at the moment (I got a old desktop as well, just in case)

Thank you very much for all the future support :)
 
I found my way here by reading this link which accurately describes my problem, but I couldn't find a solution to it particularly. The only solution I saw was for installing the OS's on different drives. I have succesfully installed both WIN10 and OS X 10.12.5 on a 120GB SSD.

OS X has been fully optimized and updated (drivers and software)

However, I cannot get into my windows partition. Initially in Clover it shows as "Boot windows from (BLANK)", as in there is nothing written only Boot windows from. And when I select that option and hit enter I am taken to a black screen where all I can see is the blinking white cursor on the top left of the screen.

Both all installed in UEFI and I began with the OS X installation and used disk utility to split the drive. I followed by installing windows on the partition I had labeled windows on the disk utility after reformatting it.

Thanks for any responses to this.
 
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