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

[dhiraj]

Thanks a ton. Excellent guide. Helped me solve unwanted bios boot entry (GA B85M D#H)

 

[hoodsy]

To remove legacy boot options, follow this thread:

https://www.******.com/r/hackintosh/comments/413i01/how_to_te_remove_extra_entries_from_clover_boot/

 

[MacMerlin]

Duplicate UEFI boot entries really got me confused for a while, even while I was just booting with flash drives in USB ports. For what it's worth, the instructions in this post:



worked perfectly for me. The piece of the puzzle that was missing is that you need to explicitly tell Clover to write all of its boot entries into the UEFI and only then delete the ones that aren't pointing at the EFI partition on your OS X drive.

It's pretty easy to avoid hosing your Windows install if you have one, because it'll say "Windows Boot Manager" right in the description.

Now I can reboot between OS X and Windows all I want using either F12 or letting Clover handle it, without having to fiddle around moving my Clover installation to my Windows SSD. The /BOOT folder does serve one important purpose as a fallback in case your UEFI entries get corrupted or erased, so if you delete or rename it, make sure you have a bootable Clover flash drive in reserve for emergencies. I've attached a snapshot of what my bcfg looks like now.

So glad I found this forum. Having boot entries duplicate was a puzzling bug. (I'm using Z170x UD5 TH).

The difficulty was that I had no boot dump entry for HD that pointed to \EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI. Instead I only had \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI. And, I don't yet know how to tell Clover to write all it's boot entries into the UEFI.

Instead I solved it by writing my own boot entry into Clover EFI Shell. Boot to Clover loader. Enter EFI Shell. As shell loads, note the label of the HDD/SSD your efi and OS X are installed on. FS0 in my case. Then bcfg boot dump. VERY CAREFULLY add a new entry after the highest one in the list. I had to type "bcfg boot add 05 FS0:\EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI CloverBoot" w/o the quotes.

Then, booted into OS X, mounted EFI, and renamed /BOOT to BOOT.bak

Tested rebooting several times and seems resolved. (I did have to go into Bios and select my new CloverBoot as boot option 1).
Hope it helps! Use with caution.

 

[dreamcat]

So glad I found this forum. Having boot entries duplicate was a puzzling bug. (I'm using Z170x UD5 TH).

The difficulty was that I had no boot dump entry for HD that pointed to \EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI. Instead I only had \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI.

... note the label of the HDD/SSD your efi and OS X are installed on. FS0 in my case... Then add a new entry ... "bcfg boot add 05 FS0:\EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI CloverBoot" w/o the quotes.

Then renamed /BOOT to BOOT.bak

Finally thank you. Furthermore there is no need to:

* Edit any configuration or settings in the clover tool or boot menus.
* Place the new '\EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI' clover boot option in any specific positional or order in the UEFI boot menu.

The new clover boot entry can be created from windows, using the GUI tool 'EasyUEFI'. It is actually easier that way. Just except for renaming the folder '/EFI/BOOT' --> '/EFI/BOOT.disabled'. Which can be done as you say in Mac OS X, after mounting the disk's /EFI partition. Or just as easily in linux by mounting that /EFI partition on the cmdline.

 

[PolarIce]

When I boot into Clover UEFI Shell to remove the extra (26 ) boot entries I am unable to type the bcfg boot dump command. When I hit space after typing the g it just start typing over the first of it. I check and my apple keyboard is plugged into a USB 2 port.

I am running a Gigabyte GA-Z77N mb. Something weird about the apple keyboard? I would try another if I had one.

 

[fdrph]

When I boot into Clover UEFI Shell to remove the extra (26 ) boot entries I am unable to type the bcfg boot dump command. When I hit space after typing the g it just start typing over the first of it. I check and my apple keyboard is plugged into a USB 2 port.

I am running a Gigabyte GA-Z77N mb. Something weird about the apple keyboard? I would try another if I had one.

Same problem, solved by using PS/2 keyboard. Dunno of any other solution

 

[dreamcat]

Dunno of any other solution

surely that other solution would be windows program 'EasyUEFI'

 

[shortkud]

I had a really odd issue that this guide helped me resolve so I'm posting about it here in case anyone else thinks they are crazy if it happens it them.

I have an ASRock Z170 Pro4 Motherboard and on my booted USB I went into the Clover Boot Options and selected 'Add Clover boot options for all entries'. This added them fine but then I realized I didn't need them and then went back and selected 'Remove all Cloverboot options'. After running that I was left a weird bug where my UEFI F11 boot menu from my BIOS didn't display the options properly and had a corrupted entry/string. I made a video so you can see how weird it is.

[video=youtube;FR5V2NQ5U7M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR5V2NQ5U7M[/video]

It was resolved by removing the below bad entry. I assume it was maybe still referring to a USB drive that is no longer attached to my system?


Variable: Boot0080
Desc - Mac OS X
DevPath - VenHw()
Optional - N

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

I had a really odd issue that this guide helped me resolve so I'm posting about it here in case anyone else thinks they are crazy if it happens it them.

On my booted USB I went into the Clover Boot Options and selected 'Add Clover boot options for all entries'. This added them fine but then I realized I didn't need them and then went back and selected 'Remove all Cloverboot options'. After running that I was left a weird bug where my UEFI F11 boot menu from my BIOS didn't display the options properly and had a corrupted entry/string. I made a video so you can see how weird it is.

[video=youtube;FR5V2NQ5U7M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR5V2NQ5U7M[/video]

It was resolved by removing the below bad entry. I assume it was maybe still referring to a USB drive that is no longer attached to my system?


Variable: Boot0080
Desc - Mac OS X
DevPath - VenHw()
Optional - N
View attachment 184724

Most modern bios will see a boot drive twice. One in UEFI mode and one in NON uefi mode.

Drive 80 or 0080 is usually the first available drive in a system, and was typically used to boot legacy systems by selecting it at boot time.

When using UEFI, you have to ignore (And optionally delete) this entry, and work with the UEFI one.

So it does refer to an existing drive in your system, and yes, you should be able to delete it.

 

[flymacpara]

So glad I found this forum. Having boot entries duplicate was a puzzling bug. (I'm using Z170x UD5 TH).

The difficulty was that I had no boot dump entry for HD that pointed to \EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI. Instead I only had \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI. And, I don't yet know how to tell Clover to write all it's boot entries into the UEFI.

Instead I solved it by writing my own boot entry into Clover EFI Shell. Boot to Clover loader. Enter EFI Shell. As shell loads, note the label of the HDD/SSD your efi and OS X are installed on. FS0 in my case. Then bcfg boot dump. VERY CAREFULLY add a new entry after the highest one in the list. I had to type "bcfg boot add 05 FS0:\EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI CloverBoot" w/o the quotes.

Then, booted into OS X, mounted EFI, and renamed /BOOT to BOOT.bak

Tested rebooting several times and seems resolved. (I did have to go into Bios and select my new CloverBoot as boot option 1).
Hope it helps! Use with caution.

Thank you MacMerlin,

You saved my day, or actually an entire week of trying to get rid of bogus UEFI entries in my BIOS. BTW, this is on the same Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD5 TH motherboard with BIOS version F5. MacOSX is installed on an SSD and I use the latest Clover. Here is what I did:

- Boot into MacOSX
- Start a "terminal" program and type

diskutil list

- On my machine:

iMac$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *250.1 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 249.2 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

- Locate the EFI partition among the entries displayed, in my case entry 1

- Run diskutil info <IDENTIFIER> to get the partition UUID, like so:

diskutil info disk0s1 | grep Partition | grep UUID

It returns something like this:

Disk / Partition UUID: F0533C44-1111-4FF4-ADD9-6B555C38BCAC

- Locate the MacOSX partition among the entries displayed, and retrieve its UUID, just like I did for the EFI partition

Write down these UUIDs and the partition they belong to, so:

EFI: F0533C44-1111-4FF4-ADD9-6B555C38BCAC
MACOSX: C0533C44-1111-4FF4-ADD9-6B5662366636

Now, reboot the machine, and start the UEFI shell from the Clover menu. Then at the prompt (Shell> is the prompt):

Shell> map

It shows the BIOS mapping table. Locate the UUID of the EFI partition. Look at the beginning of that entry. It reads something like "FS0". Then, get rid of bogus entries (see post #1) and count the remaining entries:

Shell> bcfg boot dump

Assuming that you have 3 entries '00', '01' and '02' and the EFI partition is on FS0, add a new entry like so:

Shell> bcfg boot add 03 FS0:\EFI\CLOVER\CLOVERX64.EFI "CLOVER EFI"

Type "bcfg boot dump" again and find the entry that has \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI at the end. Get rid of it by typing

Shell> bcfg boot rm <option>

where option is the option number at the beginning of each boot entry.

Now reboot your machine and select the "CLOVER EFI" boot entry and boot into MacOS. Next is adding a custom entry into the Clover config.plist. I prefer to use a text editor for that but you might as well use Clover Configurator. The entry should read

<key>GUI</key>
<dict>
<key>Custom</key>
<dict>
<key>Entries</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>FullTitle</key>
<string>MacOSX</string>
<key>Hidden</key>
<false/>
<key>Ignore</key>
<false/>
<key>NoCaches</key>
<false/>
<key>Type</key>
<string>OSX</string>
<key>Volume</key>
<string>C0533C44-1111-4FF4-ADD9-6B5662366636</string> <<<< The UUID from the MacOSX partition
<key>VolumeType</key>
<string>Internal</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
<key>Scan</key>
<dict>
<key>Entries</key>
<false/>
<key>Legacy</key>
<false/>
<key>Tool</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</dict>

And don't forget the last bit that turns of scanning entries and legacy.
Voila, no more bogus BIOS entries.

Cheers,
Erwin