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Hotswapping vs clover vs F8 manual bios selection

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Hello,

I intend on doing by first hackintosh today. I currently have 2 SSD drives and one has windows10 installed and the other is completely empty. I would like to keep windows10 as my primary OS and use sierra occasionally for guests who prefer apple. If I unplug my windows10 ssd and install sierra onto the empty ssd:

1. Will I have to install clover if I want to do the manual bios OS selection?

2. Can I use the Hotswapping method using an external USB HDD?

3. If I do install clover, will it mess with my asus z170-a bios menu options (no more fancy and easy navigation menus)?

4. Can clover ever be uninstalled?

5. How do I keep windows10 as my primary OS and have it passively load when computer is powered on WITHOUT me having to install clover?
 
Hello,

I intend on doing by first hackintosh today. I currently have 2 SSD drives and one has windows10 installed and the other is completely empty. I would like to keep windows10 as my primary OS and use sierra occasionally for guests who prefer apple. If I unplug my windows10 ssd and install sierra onto the empty ssd:

1. Will I have to install clover if I want to do the manual bios OS selection?

2. Can I use the Hotswapping method using an external USB HDD?

3. If I do install clover, will it mess with my asus z170-a bios menu options (no more fancy and easy navigation menus)?

4. Can clover ever be uninstalled?

5. How do I keep windows10 as my primary OS and have it passively load when computer is powered on WITHOUT me having to install clover?
1. You must install Clover in order to be able to boot OS X.
2. Personally, I use https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00475DQ6Y/?tag=tonymacx86com-20 and just swap out drives.
3. Asus UEFI has capability to save different setups, so do one for Windows and one for OS X. With latest versions of Clover and OS X, there is really not that much difference - only thing different I had to do was to disable the serial printer port in SuperIO, but I do not need the serial port anyway, so it did not matter.
4. Yes.
5. Use the hot swap bay and only insert the OS you want to boot. You can also buy static free drive enclosures for the drive you are currently not using.
 
Here in my computer (with bios) I plugged four HDs of 2 TB each, two for linux (my main operating system), one for windows and one for OS X hackintosh. Each system remains alone in its own hd, totally independent. Inside bios I have the option to choose HD boot order. Before installing each system I have configured the destination HD as primary boot hd, and so installed the system normally (each system by its own method). Yes, after installing OS X you must install clover to make possible it boots. After install I have configured grub (on linux hd) and clover (with was installed only on OS X hd) to show only the respective boot option and boot it immediately, hiding the options to boot the other systems. So, when I want to change between systems, I only need to go into bios (wich I have protected with password) and load the preconfigured bios (that I saved before - my bios can save different configurations too) with proper boot order. So, the people here at my home can not choose what system will boot, it is always the last I have chosen into bios, and it boots by its own methods (clover is invoked only to boot OS X). I don´t know how your UEFI works, but perhaps it has same options as my bios, and you can think to do something like that in your machine, installing all you ssds inside it. To maintain systems totally independent, into OS X you can configure the OS to not mount your windows partitions, since OS X recognizes them at boot and show them in finder if not configured to do so. I hope I have helped. Good luck.
 
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If you want to have Windows as your primary operating system then just define UEFI to use that SSD for 1st boot.

You will need Clover to boot OSX on that specific SSD. If you want to boot OSX just use the F8 to select that drive.

In addition if you want to you can hide Windows SSD from Clover so that it is not visible for OSX. But this is not necessary.

You can also have OSX on external HD. Plug it before boot and select the drive with F8 during boot.
 
If you want to have Windows as your primary operating system then just define UEFI to use that SSD for 1st boot.

You will need Clover to boot OSX on that specific SSD. If you want to boot OSX just use the F8 to select that drive.

In addition if you want to you can hide Windows SSD from Clover so that it is not visible for OSX. But this is not necessary.

You can also have OSX on external HD. Plug it before boot and select the drive with F8 during boot.


Sigh...I followed all the instruction on the tutorial, but when I try booting the MacOs USB I made, I get a black screen with one line reading "error loading OS"

Any idea on what I did wrong? Should I recreate the flash drive using a 16gb instead of 8gb?
 
Sigh...I followed all the instruction on the tutorial, but when I try booting the MacOs USB I made, I get a black screen with one line reading "error loading OS"

Any idea on what I did wrong? Should I recreate the flash drive using a 16gb instead of 8gb?
Not sure what the problem, but try it with a 16GB USB flash drive and UniBeast + latest Sierra download
 
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