High Sierra installation deletes EFI partition?

[davidr418]

I just went through a High Sierra installation on a clone of my Sierra drive. I booted from the clone drive and ran the installer from it. It was the only disk mounted on the system.

At the first reboot, I started from the "Boot MacOS Install" partition as directed. That thrashed for a while and then rebooted. Again, I chose the "Boot MacOS Install" choice.

This time the system worked for about half an hour, presumably converting my 800+GB volume into APFS. Then it rebooted one more time...and Clover showed no bootable volume!

Booting from my Sierra disk and running Diskutil showed the reason: the EFI partition has vanished from my SSD:

/dev/disk2 (synthesized):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +1000.0 GB disk2
Physical Store disk1s2
1: APFS Volume High Sierra Neu 841.9 GB disk2s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 18.0 MB disk2s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 520.8 MB disk2s3

EFI Mounter doesn't show one either. It looks as if the APFS container occupies the entire disk.

1. WTF?
2. I don't think there's any way to shrink the APFS container and sneak an EFI partition under it, but if there is, that would be cool.
3. How can I prevent this from happening again?

TIA.

 

[itwas]

1000.0 GB HDD ? APFS only support SSD as boot drive, not HDD

 

[davidr418]

It is an SDD— Samsung 850 Evo.

 

[ownself]

I'm having the same issue, can't see any boot options at boot screen of Clover

 

[dfritchie]

This is how mine looks 850 Evo.

/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_APFS Container disk2 249.8 GB disk0s2

/dev/disk2 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +249.8 GB disk2
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Hackintosh 72.4 GB disk2s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 18.7 MB disk2s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 520.8 MB disk2s3
4: APFS Volume VM 2.1 GB disk2s4

 

[vulgo]

/dev/disk2 (synthesized)

APFS creates a container partition on your physical drive. See this line:

0: APFS Container Scheme - +1000.0 GB disk2
Physical Store disk1s2

See disk1 for the container partition (and your EFI partition still where it was)

The volumes on disk2 are APFS volumes which are not physical partitions, they are virtual/synthesised. Read about modern filesystems/volume managers, and install the APFS EFI driver so Clover can 'see' these APFS volumes and access the filesystems.

 

[ownself]

Somehow I found out I have use UEFI way to boot the clover to see the macOS, and it works. I used legacy way to boot macOS Sierra before I upgraded. I don't know why, but it seems fine now.

 

[davidr418]

Ah, right, I hadn't noticed I was looking at the logical APFS container rather than the physical disk. Here's the correct info:

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk2 1000.0 GB disk1s2

/dev/disk2 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +1000.0 GB disk2
Physical Store disk1s2
1: APFS Volume High Sierra Neu 842.0 GB disk2s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 18.0 MB disk2s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 520.8 MB disk2s3

The EFI partition does in fact exist, and seems to contain all the correct files, including CLOVERX64.efi at the root.

However, it's still not bootable. If I boot from my existing Sierra disk, Clover does not show the High Sierra disk as a boot option. If I try to reinstall Clover, the High Sierra disk is not shown as a possible destination.

So the EFI partition seems to be there: I can mount it, move files around, etc. However, Clover itself-- both in the installer and when booted from another drive-- just doesn't see it.

 

[cdlight]

APFS creates a container partition on your physical drive. See this line:
See disk1 for the container partition (and your EFI partition still where it was)

The volumes on disk2 are APFS volumes which are not physical partitions, they are virtual/synthesised. Read about modern filesystems/volume managers, and install the APFS EFI driver so Clover can 'see' these APFS volumes and access the filesystems.

I know this is an old thread, but I have to thank vulgo for his post. I just upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra and forgot to install apfs.efi, and when I did a "diskutil list" in Terminal I thought that the installer had blown away my EFI folder. Much, much thanks!