Guide: MultiBooting UEFI

[Going Bald]

open a command window in Win10 and type msinfo32, hit enter & post screenshot of result.

 

[Realyungsun]

I was able to get USB up and running again. I followed a few of rehabman's guides and manually mapped the ports and turns out the 15 port limit was the issue. Weird because that never happened before windows install.

Here is msinfo32:

 

[Going Bald]

I was able to get USB up and running again. I followed a few of rehabman's guides and manually mapped the ports and turns out the 15 port limit was the issue. Weird because that never happened before windows install.

Here is msinfo32:

Looking at everything I would have said you had a Legacy mode Windows install, but the msinfo32 says the BIOS mode is UEFI. However did you wind up with that backward partition formatting? Usually Win10 installer partitions it as WinRe Tools, Microsoft Reserved, EFI, System primary. Every Wi10 install I have done is this way. I have never seen one where the EFI is after the Win10 System primary partition unless someone added it after installing Windows. Without the EFI partition, your drive looks like a typical Legacy install.

 

[Realyungsun]

Looking at everything I would have said you had a Legacy mode Windows install, but the msinfo32 says the BIOS mode is UEFI. However did you wind up with that backward partition formatting? Usually Win10 installer partitions it as WinRe Tools, Microsoft Reserved, EFI, System primary. Every Wi10 install I have done is this way. I have never seen one where the EFI is after the Win10 System primary partition unless someone added it after installing Windows. Without the EFI partition, your drive looks like a typical Legacy install.

As I mentioned, I created the EFI partition on the windows drive after installing windows, as I thought I could mount it with clover and transfer the EFI from the osx drive over and then get rid of the Microsoft folder on there. I guess since the partition order matters, I'm unable to mount the windows EFI partition i created with clover. Honestly after fixing the USB issues I was facing, everything else seems to be working and stable; so I guess I'll leave things as is.

 

[bungalow]

Thank you GoingBald.
This has been a struggle, I must admit, but that makes the pleasure of success that much more sweet.
One key for me, and I hope this helps someone else, is to unplug, physically, not just disable in the BIOS, all other SSD and HDD when installing Windows.
The other key was following your instruction to format the Windows target drive as GUID+OSX(Journalled). This forced the EFI partition to be NTFS and thereby removed the need to disable CMS. It took a bit of research to find out why CMS should be disabled - it's to force UEFI mode - bit obscure that one. It was a block for me because my Gigabyte MB insisted that Windows8 should be enabled in order for CSM to be disabled. Nothing worked after that until I undid that Windows8 and CSM switches in BIOS.
The final part of the puzzle is to re-plug in the OSX SSD and make it first in the boot order.
When that had been done, booting starts Clover (v5101) which presents both Windows and OSX as required, and both boot nicely.
So nice job, GoingBald and a big thanks to EdHawk who provided the vital Kexts etc to make this old Haswell system comply.
I have made donations to TonyMac and Clover Configurator folks.
Thanks All.

 

[thecrusher]

I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Mojave on two separate SSDs and Clover booting them. Win is on a 500G, and Mojave on a 1TB drive. The Clover EFI that boots is on the 1TB Mojave drive, which is partitioned with GPT into the EFI partition and an APFS container.

Now I want to add a Linux distro. Leaning towards Ubuntu, though I'm still open.

Ideally I would copy Mojave to the 500GB SSD alongside windows and have 1TB for Linux, though I could also leave it where it is and shrink down the APFS container and free up 750-800G for Linux. So first question. Is copying the current functioning Mojave installation to a different disk easy or a nightmare? Do I move the Clover EFI too or just leave it where it is? If I copy it (correctly) will the existing Clover just automatically find it and offer it to boot?

Next, when I install Linux on the 1TB SSD (where the Clover EFI is) will it blow away the Clover EFI? Is there a way to avoid this? Does that answer vary by distro? Although it seems like not a hard problem to solve if I make a thumbdrive to boot from and put the EFI back. (I've never had to do this before, either because I don't use Windows that often, or because Windows is playing nice and only updating it's own SSD EFI and not the second one.)

I know, this is a lot of questions, but I've done a ton of googling and I'm really not finding good answers on this.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Going Bald]

I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Mojave on two separate SSDs and Clover booting them. Win is on a 500G, and Mojave on a 1TB drive. The Clover EFI that boots is on the 1TB Mojave drive, which is partitioned with GPT into the EFI partition and an APFS container.

Now I want to add a Linux distro. Leaning towards Ubuntu, though I'm still open.

Ideally I would copy Mojave to the 500GB SSD alongside windows and have 1TB for Linux, though I could also leave it where it is and shrink down the APFS container and free up 750-800G for Linux. So first question. Is copying the current functioning Mojave installation to a different disk easy or a nightmare? Do I move the Clover EFI too or just leave it where it is? If I copy it (correctly) will the existing Clover just automatically find it and offer it to boot?

Next, when I install Linux on the 1TB SSD (where the Clover EFI is) will it blow away the Clover EFI? Is there a way to avoid this? Does that answer vary by distro? Although it seems like not a hard problem to solve if I make a thumbdrive to boot from and put the EFI back. (I've never had to do this before, either because I don't use Windows that often, or because Windows is playing nice and only updating it's own SSD EFI and not the second one.)

I know, this is a lot of questions, but I've done a ton of googling and I'm really not finding good answers on this.

Thanks in advance.

If you are not sure what Linux distro you want to install, then best to install it on a small partition on the Win10 drive (100GB would be plenty large enough). Use the Win10 disk management app to shrink the System partition. If installing Ubuntu you can select "install alongside Windows", select the free space you created for the installation and let the installer do the rest.

 

[thecrusher]

If you are not sure what Linux distro you want to install, then best to install it on a small partition on the Win10 drive (100GB would be plenty large enough). Use the Win10 disk management app to shrink the System partition. If installing Ubuntu you can select "install alongside Windows", select the free space you created for the installation and let the installer do the rest.

I've decided to go with Ubuntu for now. And decided on my disk layout. I'm going to shrink both current installations, install the root partition on the 500G Windows drive, and the /home partition on space freed from the 1TB drive. In theory user file system ops and system processes can get faster parallel access to data this way.

I think I finally understand UEFI bootloaders, but this raises a question. It seems like most people run the GRUB bootloader from the Clover bootloader to boot into Linux. Is there a reason why I can't just create Custom entries in Clover that point directly to the available Linux kernels, and boot to them straight from Clover? I get that GRUB updates are more natively supported from Linux, but it seems like a script could easily keep Clover EFI updated in the same way that GRUB configs are kept up-to-date when new kernels are installed.

Are there instructions anywhere for doing something like this, or would I be trailblazing?

 

[Going Bald]

Are there instructions anywhere for doing something like this, or would I be trailblazing?

See https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/efistub-load-linux-with-clover.200300/

 

[thecrusher]

See https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/efistub-load-linux-with-clover.200300/

Thanks this looks perfect.