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[GUIDE] Remove extra Clover BIOS boot entries & prevent further problems

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I had this same problem with out-of-control boot entries.

System:
Gigabyte Z170MX Gaming 5
i7 6700K @4GHz
32gb RAM (Crucial Ballistic Elite)

Storage:
500gb SSD (Sierra + Clover EFI) [for work]
500gb SSD (Windows 10) [for games]
4tb HDD (Storage in Sierra)
2tb HDD (Time Machine backups)

Solution:
Updated mobo firmware to version F5e. No more multiple boot entries after several boots to Sierra and Windows. Clean as a whistle in both BIOS and Clover Shell. I took no other steps.

Notes/issues:
  1. I avoided F20 (latest) firmware because I read that others had big issues with this and Sierra and reversion is impossible. Is anyone running my mobo with F20 without issue?
  2. Enabling XMP Profile with new firmware now causes consistent boot failure (before reaching Clover). I've read others with my mobo have had this problem with F5e. I think I'm going to have to put up with RAM running at 2400 rather than 2666 for now. Not sure there's that much of a performance benefit there anyway.
Is ANYBODY using an internal drive as a Time Machine backup of the boot partition? If so, are you still experiencing multiple boot entries after having followed the steps here to fix the problem? IOW, after fixing the issue, is it OK to use an internal drive as a Time Machine target for backing up the OSX partition?

No problems with my internal Time Machine backup thus far. Have only run one backup since though so we'll see after a few restarts etc today.

Now to remove the extra windows boot options (legacy etc) from the Clover GUI!
 
Clover is a great boot loader, and tonymacx86 has developed some great tools to get you up and running. However, some people are still having problems. I think a lot of this has to do with the design of the systems. Many have extra backup internal hard drives or partitions with legacy boot loaders or previous Clover systems. While this may have been fine in the past, with Clover and the newer OS X's, this does not work on many motherboards.

Often it happens that Clover and El Capitan (or Yosemite) will install and seem to work fine, but then degenerate to an unusable state. I chased this problem for quite a while before I found the solution (see Source #1 below).

Look at the boot options list in your BIOS. If you see entries that are not physical drives, it is likely that you are encountering some form of this problem.

First, remove all of the extra boot entries.


0. You COULD try to reflash the BIOS and you MAY be done. This worked on my 6 series board, but not on my current 9 series. If it works for you, skip to the second section on preventing the problem from happening again. If this does not work, or if you really don't want to have to flash the BIOS, then continue.

1. Disconnect all drives except one with only one instance of Clover. If you only have a partitioned drive with ANY backups on the partitions, it is probably best to boot with only the Clover Install USB stick and no other drives attached.

2. Boot your system and press the right arrow key when the Clover boot loader appears.


2b. If you cannot get to Clover, reset your CMOS and try again, this time going into the BIOS and selecting your physical drive for boot override. DO NOT touch any other entries at this point as it may lock the BIOS and you will need to reset the CMOS and start over again. It SHOULD work, so keep trying – I don't know another way.


3. Use the right and left arrow keys to select the Clover UEFI Shell and hit enter. The following screen should appear, and either let it time out, or press a key:



View attachment 155807



4. At the Shell> prompt type
Code:
bcfg boot dump
the results should look something like this:



View attachment 155808



5. You need to remove any entry that is not a physical hard drive. As far as I know, if it is a real physical disk, it will list as DevPath - HD.

View attachment 155816


The code to remove an entry looks like this:
Code:
bcfg boot rm XX
where XX is the Option number. In this example, I remove Option 02 with
Code:
bcfg boot rm 02
.

View attachment 155811


If you have a LOT of bogus entries, it is best to do just a few, and then type the command
Code:
bcfg boot dump
again before repeating the process. When I first did this on my ASUS H97 board, I had at least 10 entries to clear so it took several iterations of this process.

6. When your have removed all entries that are not physical hard drives, type
Code:
exit
and press the return key. This will get you back to the main Clover screen. At this point, I would choose restart from the Clover choices and enter the BIOS to check if your work was successful.




Second, rethink your system design and backup scheme to prevent this from happening again.


• Design your system so that there is only one disk (an SSD if you like speed) that has an EFI partition that contains the Clover boot loader. Of course in OS X, all (I think) formatted drives will have an EFI partition, but you do not want two EFI partitions that contain ANY boot loader – that includes Clover, Chameleon, Chimera or whatever.

• On some boards, it may help to set the boot options for all devices to UEFI Only (didn't make a difference on my board, but did speed up boot time).

• Currently, I have a 250 GB M.2 SSD as my boot disk, and the others are just for data. For backups I use EXTERNAL DISKS, so that I don't reencounter the same problems. The external drives are connected only when I need to backup. [I am working on a GUIDE for Clonezilla.] External USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 drive enclosures are quite reasonably priced at the moment, so I encourage you to do this as well. I think you could use Time Machine for data backup, but I have no experience with this.​

• Currently I am only running Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. It would be great to hear about successful system designs in the same way I am discussing here from others who are also running Windows, Linux or other versions of Mac OS X​



Source #1 - Thanks to trioset on InsanelyMac

Is there a way to get the entries I removed back? Windows won't boot after I removed the non-HD entries.
Thanks a bunch!
 
How do I get the bcfg boot dump output to pause? I have tons of these bogus entries but the screen scrolls way too quickly to see the ones at the top.
 
Is there a way to get the entries I removed back? Windows won't boot after I removed the non-HD entries.
Thanks a bunch!

I am no expert on this, but yes, it is possible. Here is a good link to get you started:

https://sourceforge.net/p/cloverefiboot/tickets/226/


How do I get the bcfg boot dump output to pause? I have tons of these bogus entries but the screen scrolls way too quickly to see the ones at the top.

I have not found a way to stop the scrolling. I just start deleting them at the bottom, and work my way back to the top. Usually removing 2 or 3 at a time and then type bcfg boot dump again to check your progress is a good way to go. If the list is long it may take some time. You could also try the bios flash method, and it MAY fix it all at once (does not always work).
 
Hello,

I tried both methods listed, first I tried deleting all of the PCIRoot drives as instructed but after restarting my machine it created another one. Then I reflashed my bios and that didn't work. Any other ideas before I do a full reinstall? I'm running Sierra. I've attached an image of the list of the clover shell UEFI. Also attached a link to a short video of when my machine starts up everything lights up then goes black and then on again (my fan flashes red, might be hard to see).
 

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So for what it's worth, when I started doing this, I thought it would be a good idea to actually go completely against this guide and to have two bootable mac OS operating systems. Two different EFI partitions, two different clover bootloaders (using my bios to separate which clover bootloader I loaded into).

I did not do this for an extremely long period of time so I cannot attest to how it would work out in the long term, but short term, I used this technique to roll out stable changes to my actual operating system while always maintaining a bootable copy. I did not run into any issues, especially after renaming one of the cloverx64.efi partitions to bloverx64.efi - that way you don't ever accidentally boot into it without specifically altering that.
 
Hello,

I tried both methods listed, first I tried deleting all of the PCIRoot drives as instructed but after restarting my machine it created another one. Then I reflashed my bios and that didn't work. Any other ideas before I do a full reinstall? I'm running Sierra. I've attached an image of the list of the clover shell UEFI. Also attached a link to a short video of when my machine starts up everything lights up then goes black and then on again (my fan flashes red, might be hard to see).

Have you tried going into the BIOS first and disabling entries that are not UEFI?
 
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