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

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Is there something like EasyUEFI available for macOS ? Even a cli app would be ok
 
I found a iso which can be used to make a usb stick bootable with windows pe inclusive EasyUEFI :)

No longer Windows required to easily edit the UEFI boot menu.
 
@Anachronaut Just wanted to say thanks for this quick guide. I had tons of stuff in there. I ended up updating my bios either way but I liked the learning process.
 
Hi all, I have an emergency :( I cleaned it using this method one year ago and I tried it again but everything went wrong.

I have removed one registry that says DevPath BBS (UEFI Samsung Evo 960) then now I can't see Clover anymore or boot from this drive (SSD nvme). It is like it doesn't exists

I didn't delete anything called HD(1, etc) or anything that says HD, only PCIroot and BBS stuffs.

I have boot from emergency USB and I have tried to install Clover again on that drive (ESP) but it fails... Even if I install on root (not ESP) this drive won't boot anymore. If I go to BIOS it says "Windows UEFI (Samsung EVO 960)" while it should say "Clover UEFI (Samsung EVO 960)".

I guess I could start formating totally from by emergency boot and try to install again everything from scratch, but I would like to know what happened really. Could you help to understand what happened here? Is there any method to recover UEFI registry like I had or at least, re-install Clover at ESP (I guess this would fix this).

Thanks a lot for your advice and help,
 
Despite being the one that started this thread, I am no expert on this. I would try resetting the CMOS on the board. If you decide to do this, make sure that your check your UEFI settings so that you can change them back manually after the CMOS reset.
 
Hi all, I have an emergency :( I cleaned it using this method one year ago and I tried it again but everything went wrong.

I have removed one registry that says DevPath BBS (UEFI Samsung Evo 960) then now I can't see Clover anymore or boot from this drive (SSD nvme). It is like it doesn't exists

I didn't delete anything called HD(1, etc) or anything that says HD, only PCIroot and BBS stuffs.

I have boot from emergency USB and I have tried to install Clover again on that drive (ESP) but it fails... Even if I install on root (not ESP) this drive won't boot anymore. If I go to BIOS it says "Windows UEFI (Samsung EVO 960)" while it should say "Clover UEFI (Samsung EVO 960)".

I guess I could start formating totally from by emergency boot and try to install again everything from scratch, but I would like to know what happened really. Could you help to understand what happened here? Is there any method to recover UEFI registry like I had or at least, re-install Clover at ESP (I guess this would fix this).

Thanks a lot for your advice and help,

Despite being the one that started this thread, I am no expert on this. I would try resetting the CMOS on the board. If you decide to do this, make sure that your check your UEFI settings so that you can change them back manually after the CMOS reset.

Thank you for replying me... I have solved it anyway.

The problem was on EFI that was broken due my Clover terminal deletion (by my fault). I mean that deleting the wrong registry (BBS in my case) may break your EFI boot!

The solution was to install again CLOVER, but this is a problem if you don't have another bootable Mac USB flashdrive or rescue partition. I had, apart of this, another extra problem because CLOVER failed to install to ESP partition... The workaround is very simply. Just mount that EFI partition manually (I did it using Clover configurator), then I tried to install CLOVER again on that ESP and it worked... Finally, muy BIOS / UEFI detected it again and showed me that option for boot: UEFI: Samsung 960 EVO...
 
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:​
4. At the Shell> prompt type
Code:
bcfg boot dump
the results should look something like this:​
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.​
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
.​
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
Hey hai hope someone sees this and replies
Long story short, 6 months ago I did my first Hackintosh, since I'm a noob tony mac really helped to get it through. Now after facing some lag issues, I decided to revert it back to windows. I made my USB bootable using rufus and installed windows 10. It ran smoothly and everything went well until I noticed that it took hell a lot of booting time than it used to, so I decided to remove all the things related to mac, all the clover bootloader, and stuff. I thought wipinng my HDD would delete everything including the clover bootloader, so I inserted my internal HDD into my friend's PC and formatted (NTFS) it. I inserted my HDD into my PC and booted it, again I saw multiple bios entries some pertaining to mac. I sought out to ask help in tonymac and @Going Bald asked me to find the solution in this thread.
I followed the same steps as mentioned above "Boot your system and press the right arrow key when the Clover boot loader appears". I selected clover UEFI shell and typed "bcfg boot dump". I was able to see three options, the same which I already saw during booting
OPTION 00 UEFI OS
OPTION 01 WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER
OPTION 02 BDS (Not sure about the name in this one)


I thought removing option 1 and 2 will delete the boot priorities so I removed those using
bcfg boot rm 00 & bcfg boot rm 01. After that, I checked using bcfg boot dump, I could able to see only option 01. I thought everything was fine so I booted using my USB stick, it got stuck on the windows logo and three dots and a black screen from thereon. What actually happened?

Will q-flashing my bios help restore the mistake I did?
Thanks in advance. Cheers :)
 
I followed the same steps as mentioned above "Boot your system and press the right arrow key when the Clover boot loader appears". I selected clover UEFI shell and typed "bcfg boot dump". I was able to see three options, the same which I already saw during booting
OPTION 00 UEFI OS
OPTION 01 WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER
OPTION 02 BDS (Not sure about the name in this one)


I thought removing option 1 and 2 will delete the boot priorities so I removed those using
bcfg boot rm 00 & bcfg boot rm 01. After that, I checked using bcfg boot dump, I could able to see only option 01. I thought everything was fine so I booted using my USB stick, it got stuck on the windows logo and three dots and a black screen from thereon. What actually happened?

Will q-flashing my bios help restore the mistake I did?
Thanks in advance. Cheers :)
Should have kept the Windows boot manager one.
Boot with the install USB. When you get to the page with the install button there should be an option in lower left corner of the screen to repair the computer. Select this and repair the boot sector. There are many guides for doing this on utube.
 
Should have kept the Windows boot manager one.
Boot with the install USB. When you get to the page with the install button there should be an option in lower left corner of the screen to repair the computer. Select this and repair the boot sector. There are many guides for doing this on utube.
Hey hai, the installation doesn't go that far, it just stops when windows logo appears and with a three dots! I've attached a video of what's really happening!
Help me out! Thanks in advance, cheers! :)
P:S will q-flashing it help solve my mistake?
 
Hey hai, the installation doesn't go that far, it just stops when windows logo appears and with a three dots! I've attached a video of what's really happening!
Help me out! Thanks in advance, cheers! :)
P:S will q-flashing it help solve my mistake?

First, try resetting the CMOS on the motherboard, and then try the installation USB again.

If that doesn't work you can try this... Note, I have had success with this sometimes, but I don't really know exactly why it worked. At least it will not make anything worse:
Format a USB drive with FAT32 on a Mac so that it has an EFI partition (MacOS creates this by default). Install Clover for UEFI BOOT ONLY on the USB EFI partition, but nothing else. Try to boot from this USB. Of course it will not work, but I found in one case it reset the Boot list and fixed a problem.
 
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