High Sierra to Mojave Upgrade Problems

[999wj]

Backstory: I had a perfectly functional Sierra system set up back in 2018 and just recently, I wanted to update it to Catalina but decided to go slow. So naturally.. I followed the steps mentioned in Sierra to High Sierra successfully. It gave me a lot of hope that it's not actually all that difficult.. Until I hit the first road block: For some odd reason, Clover didn't pick up the "Boot macOS Install" drive mentioned in step 5 of the "Update Directly to macOS Mojave" link. So I figured it might be Clover's fault so I updated it to the most recent version and made modifications to the kexts because I read that the most recent version of Clover has redundancy issues so might as well just fix that up right now.

Now.. It doesn't boot up ANY macOS drives. I did save an exact copy of the EFI folder but even if I boot into that, it just gives me error messages and goes back to the splash screen. I've tried changing to the Christmas theme because that apparently made a difference to some people?? But no luck.

So my question is.. Is there a way to revert Clover back to 3XXX? So that it picks up my mac drives or at the least the EFI backup?
FYI: I don't have the original installation USB but I did backup the EFI and Mojave OS installation files

 

[wstrohm]

Not familiar with your motherboard, sorry. The best I can do is offer to upload an OpenCore EFI folder that works on my "Mini-ITX 2" computer below, which runs an Intel Skylake (6th-generation) CPU, but on a Gigabyte motherboard. You would need to make mods peculiar to your computer, no doubt, and if new to OpenCore, not all that easy.

I transitioned from Clover to OpenCore quite a while ago, and the changeover was pretty extensive. IMHO it is worth making that change, but others might disagree. If you want to try out OpenCore, one thing that has to change is to eliminate all third-party kexts in your Library/Extensions folder. I think all the kexts you would need to boot are in my EFI folder, but if not, you would have to add stuff.

Again, if you want to try OpenCore, I would recommend you click on the link, then click on "Getting Started," and then click in the left column on "Skylake." From there, scroll down and read through all the instructions. If you are interested, post back here.

As far as what version of MacOS you want, my Skylake OpenCore EFI folder has worked on Mojave, Catalina, and (presently) Big Sur. You should be aware that the footprint of MacOS increases with version: Mojave is 6.3 GB and will run both 32- and 64-bit applications. Catalina is over 8 GB but will run only 64-bit apps. Big Sur is over 12 GB and also runs only 64-bit apps, as will be true of all MacOS versions in the future. So if you need to run 32-bit applications, stay with Mojave. You can use GO64 to check the apps on your computer (once it's running).

Be aware that installing Mojave, or any later version of the Mac OS beyond Sierra will result in an automatic change from Apple's HFS+ file system to Apple's newer APFS file system. Going back to HFS+ can be done (up to Mojave 10.14.6) but it's not easy to do.