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

[vulgo]

besides the one that is the correct Mojave one on the SSD.

Preboot and Recovery are part of your macOS installation (they are also APFS volumes on a single container partition with the root volume), you can hide them from the Clover menu e.g. using Clover configurator

UEFI may generate 'UEFI' firmware boot menu options for any partition with an EFI folder, it's how it boots from removable media for example. Regarding post #1 the device path for these firmware-generated options won't necessarily start with HD in order to point to a physical disk. Options starting with HD are a short-form device path, firmware matches them to the full hardware device paths for whatever devices are connected at boot e.g. by partition UUID

I think the options you were originally trying to remove were added by Clover, it does that if you press a certain function key.

 

[worldcitizen]

Clover shows four drives with the following texts:

"Boot Firevault Prebooter from Preboot" (icon shows APFS)
"Boot MacOS Install Prebooter from Preboot" (icon shows APFS)
"Boot MacOS from SSD_1" (icon shows APFS)
"Boot Recovery from Recovery" (icon shows Recovery)

And here's a screen photo from the Clover UEFI Shell:

Options 01 and 02 are clearly on the SSD (main drive: a Kingston branded SSD), while options 00 and 03 do not reveal where they reside, at least not in plain text for humans.

Option 01 obviously corresponds to "Boot MacOS from SSD_1" as it's shown as an UEFI on the Kingston drive
Option 02 must correspond to "Boot Recovery from Recovery", I suppose
Options 00 and 03 I guess are the two Prebooter options

Notice the variable "Optional" - it says "N" for No on options 00 and 03, whereas it says "Y" for Yes on options 01 and 02.

I assume this is how it should be - and that I don't need to try to remove any of those four options. Is my assumption correct?

 

[worldcitizen]

One more (related?) thing that puzzles me is this: Earlier, when I was booting up from the UniBeast-created Mojave install Flashdrive, it said Clover v.4674, but now when I boot from the SSD it says Clover v.4769. Well, at least it's newer, but I am surprised that the two are not the same version of Clover ???

 

[vulgo]

Clover shows four drives with the following texts:

"Boot Firevault Prebooter from Preboot" (icon shows APFS)
"Boot MacOS Install Prebooter from Preboot" (icon shows APFS)
"Boot MacOS from SSD_1" (icon shows APFS)
"Boot Recovery from Recovery" (icon shows Recovery)

All as expected.

Options 01 and 02 are clearly on the SSD (main drive: a Kingston branded SSD), while options 00 and 03 do not reveal where they reside, at least not in plain text for humans.

Option 1 is UEFI boot from the fallback path /EFI/BOOT, option 2 is legacy BIOS boot (BBS = Bios Boot Specification) from the PMBR. Options 0 and 3 are intended for Apple EFIs, they point to boot.efi on the 'Preboot' volume, the specific APFS volume is described by its UUID in the VenMedia path.

Notice the variable "Optional" - it says "N" for No on options 00 and 03, whereas it says "Y" for Yes on options 01 and 02.

It may be there is "optional" data attached to 1 and 2 but not 0 and 4.

I assume this is how it should be - and that I don't need to try to remove any of those four options. Is my assumption correct?

No action required as long as Clover is starting when you expect it to.

I am surprised that the two are not the same version of Clover ???

Shouldn't be a problem.

options 00 and 03 do not reveal where they reside, at least not in plain text for humans.

My bootoption program may provide more information.

 

[worldcitizen]

Thanks for your detailed reply, vulgo!

I'm glad I was not totally wrong in my assumptions - and I'll leave those different boot options as they are.

 

[roboman01]

Why does it feel Clover is somehow embedding itself into the bios? I had to reinstall OSX due to migration issues with permissions and ownership. I created a clover boot stick with OSX on it. I go to reboot and the stick would not show up in the boot options. So I tried everything, resetting bios even as far as taking out battery. So I boot again and the normal disk I boot clover from finally booted bit whats weird is the version number is wrong. I was using v3766 or somethung like that but it showed v32xx ????? WTH is clover messing up out bio or what?

 

[8x13b]

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.​

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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.​

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

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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.​

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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:​

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View attachment 155807​

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4. At the Shell> prompt type

bcfg boot dump

the results should look something like this:​

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View attachment 155808​

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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.​

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View attachment 155816​

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The code to remove an entry looks like this:

bcfg boot rm XX

where XX is the Option number. In this example, I remove Option 02 with

bcfg boot rm 02

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View attachment 155811​

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If you have a LOT of bogus entries, it is best to do just a few, and then type the command

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.​

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6. When your have removed all entries that are not physical hard drives, type

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.​

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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.​

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• 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).​

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• 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

The bcfg command doesn't exist on the UEFI shell, what do I do?

 

[roboman01]

you have to type it in like bcfg boot dump...Then choose page up and page down to view the dump. Then go by the tutorials in 1st post.

Here is something weird. I shutdown my hack this morning, went to church, come home and whenever I rebooted a totally different version of Clover Bootloader loaded!!!! This is on my main boot drive. The rest of my other 9 HDDs do not have any EFI bootloader or Clover on them, I made sure of this. So how did a totally different version show up like that? I had previously updated my Clover Bootloader but the newer version just would send me to a panic screen, so I deleted the EFI directory and replaced with the previous on. How did the newer one get back on there is beyond me!!!

 

[Tatonga]

So do i understand right: For internal Data Storage i can remove the boot entries without any issue?
My Internal Backup Drive is a Time Machine Drive too, so i guess better not to remove the entrie?
And when i use remove, is it only removed or is the boot partition deleted too?

Thank u all for your great work and help.

 

[jzrodriguez98]

THIS WORKS (If you have Windows installed as well on a different drive):
In OSX:
1. Use EFI Mounter (download from Tonymacx86 downloads section) utility to open EFI and go to the BOOT folder.
2. Rename BOOT folder to LAUNCHER
3. Reboot to Windows
In Windows:
1. Download and use EasyUEFI utility to delete any extra boot options.
2. Use EasyUEFI to add a new boot entry, select other OS, name it what you want (I just called it El Capitan) so you can identify it when you boot, and click Browse and go through the file directory \EFI\LAUNCHER\BOOTX64.efi
3. Done

Reboot to OSX then restart several times and make sure you aren't getting extra boot options

I tried this except that I deleted the PCIroot boot entries in clover shell and now if I connect a second monitor to my discrete Gigabyte AMD RX 580 GPU through the HDMI, no image appears in the second monitor (black screen). I'm connecting a Samsung UHD TV as second monitor. I renamed the CLOVER\LAUNCHER back to CLOVER\BOOT but it didn't make a different, no luck with the second screen. Does anybody know how I can fix this?