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

[Reghuram]

Thanks @Anachronoa for replying'
The thing is I don't want to run clover on my system anymore, and I don't have MacBook with me or with my friends. So Is there any possible way I could able to make it run? Another thing- will Q-FLASHING the bios helps to solve this??
thanks in advance, cheers

 

[Anachronaut]

Did you try resetting the CMOS? Q-Flashing the bios may help. I can't imagine why you can't boot from a Windows 10 Installer USB. Perhaps your Windows 10 Installer USB is bad, or perhaps it was not set to boot UEFI systems. Try disconnecting any internal HD's and SSD's and just having the Windows 10 Installer USB as the only boot option.

 

[Reghuram]

Did you try resetting the CMOS? Q-Flashing the bios may help. I can't imagine why you can't boot from a Windows 10 Installer USB. Perhaps your Windows 10 Installer USB is bad, or perhaps it was not set to boot UEFI systems. Try disconnecting any internal HD's and SSD's and just having the Windows 10 Installer USB as the only boot option.

Thank you so much @Anachronaut I tried resetting the CMOS and it clearly helped, I was able to install windows 10 and also I disabled CSM support on my bios settings, which also helped and doesn't made my firmware look like a potential BIOS instead of UEFI.
Thank you so much @Anachronaut and @Going Bald . You were really helpful! Cheers!

 

[tubbies]

I am unsure what created this, but after flashing my bios and using a corresponding DSDT.aml, I am faced with 2 Clover boot screen now.
First a blank one (attached a photo of it).
And after choosing to exit Clover, a second Clover screen (which is what I initially had) appears.
Could this be that I have multiple Clover boot entries?
I tried following the guide but only 1 option number showed up.
Appreciate any input on how to remove the first boot screen. Thanks in advance.

 

[themick4u]

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.

use -b flag after cmd

 

[rwillett]

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

I wanted to say thanks for this. I've spent the best part of the day pulling my hair put to find this issue and clearing out the UEFI entries worked.

Appreciate it.

Rob

 

[toothpix]

Hello, thank you for this guide. I was able to follow it and successfully remove some of the 'ghost' bootloaders from my machine. Unfortunately, I still cannot boot into my machine without the USB drive (I can't find a configuration of MultiBeast that works).

Here was what my boot drive options looked like before I followed this guide:

I followed the guide, and here is what my boot options are now:

All I have connected are 1) my USB jump drive and 2) my 120 GB SSD. Question 1: Should these other boot options (SanDisk Cruzer Edge 2.01 and P3: SanDisk SSDX 120 GG25) be continuing to show up after removing all non physical drives via the UEFI Clover Shell command line method described in this post ?

Unfortunately, despite doing this, booting into MacOS using the USB bootloader and running MultiBeast - I still cannot get my machine to boot without using the USB stick.

Additionally, I've noticed that the entries that are not physical hard drives come back. For example, I followed this guide two separate times, removing all the options that did not have DevPath - HD. Here's what it showed the third time (Option 01 and 02 are not physical drives and reappear):

Question 2: Is that supposed to happen - the non-physical drives continuing to reappear?

. . . here's what it looked like after I removed them for a third time:

Unfortunately, despite booting into MacOS via the USB drive and running MultiBeast, I just get a black screen when I try to boot directly into the sole remaining non-USB UEFI option (UEFI: SanDisk SDSSDX120GG25).

Would greatly appreciate any thoughts or assistance.

 

[Anachronaut]

Hello, thank you for this guide. I was able to follow it and successfully remove some of the 'ghost' bootloaders from my machine. Unfortunately, I still cannot boot into my machine without the USB drive (I can't find a configuration of MultiBeast that works).


Unfortunately, despite booting into MacOS via the USB drive and running MultiBeast, I just get a black screen when I try to boot directly into the sole remaining non-USB UEFI option (UEFI: SanDisk SDSSDX120GG25).

Would greatly appreciate any thoughts or assistance.

You are probably fine just leaving this as is for now. You have an older UEFI(BIOS), so perhaps this is as good as it will get. Check to see if you can set to boot to UEFI only in the BIOS as this may help things a bit. Really, I wouldn't worry about the extra boot entries for now. First get the computer booting properly from your SSD boot drive. For more help, I would post your question about the boot problem in the Forums --> Post Installation --> General Help. You probably have not configured Clover properly yet.

 

[ConteMario]

I am using Anachronaut your method to remove extra Clover BIOS boot entries before updating to Big Sur. It seems to me that it is a mandatory prerequisite for updating (at least in my system Asus). What I am trying to ask I guess is: Is there a way to avoid this method every time? The answer is not important to me because (again) I use your method (I remove extra boot entries) and the upgrade works. It is just annoying (but not that much).