How to clear and re-install Clover

[Macintyre]

I have managed to finally get High Sierra working on my old PC. Given that Catalina does not support Nvidia drivers, I don't think I can upgrade any further. With High Sierra I can Inject Nvidia after first removing nv_disable and get a full resolution display. This does not work with Catalina unfortunately.

The thing, is, this only works when I boot from the install USB stick. If I try to boot from the SSD, Clover sees only the NTFS HDD. I have an entry in the boot list called UEFI OS. If I select this, I get all drives, but booting High Sierra fails with the PC resetting itself.

I think what needs to happen is Clover needs to be removed and re-installed. It seems that when I use Multibeast (ver 12.3.0-3) to install Clover, nothing actually seems to happen. When I used the High Sierra edition (10.4.0) the install always ended with an error and reference to the log. The log indicated that I shoulkd use the -allowTrusted flg, although I am not sure where I was supposed to add that? The later version just worked.

I appear to have an EFI partition on the APFS disk, but I don't have an EFI directory on the MacOS system parition, so I believe that its set up for UEFI boot. I would like to be able to boot without the USB stick, but not sure how to accomplish this?

 

[jpz4085]

The thing, is, this only works when I boot from the install USB stick.

It seems that when I use Multibeast (ver 12.3.0-3) to install Clover, nothing actually seems to happen. When I used the High Sierra edition (10.4.0) the install always ended with an error and reference to the log.

I would like to be able to boot without the USB stick, but not sure how to accomplish this?

Have you tried copying the Clover configuration from your install USB to the SSD? Mount both EFI partitions and copy over the folders then try again.

 

[Macintyre]

Thanks. Unfortunately that hasn't helped. It still behaves the same with the copied EFI. I have also tried deleting Clover from the EFI partition and re-installing it both with the Clover installer as well as the Multibeast installer. Same effect.

What I have noticed is that I can boot the system from SSD if I add nv_disable=1 to the Clover parameters. It would therefore seem that the problem has something to do with the Nvidia driver. The USB stick is running an earlier version of Clover and when booting from USB, I can boot with nvidia_disable=1 (default) which gets me booted into a 1024x768 display, or I can remove nv_disable=1 and check the 'inject_nvida' option from the Clover options. This boots in with the display at full resolution. The latter does not work when using UEFI boot. The Driver directory contains the same files on both the USB stick and the system disk.

 

[Macintyre]

I think I have it!

I cleared the EFI again re-installed from Multibeast to get a clean setup. Same problem initially. I the carefully compared the Clover settings between the USB boot and the SSD boot. I noted two differences:

PCI Devices --> No Default Properties (USB=off, SSD= On)
Startup Sound Output --> Volume: (USB=0070, SSD=0000)

I changed both to match the USB drive along with adding InjectNvidia which allowed the system to boot from SSD. I now need to figure out how to save these settings as defaults.

 

[jpz4085]

I changed both to match the USB drive along with adding InjectNvidia which allowed the system to boot from SSD. I now need to figure out how to save these settings as defaults.

Sounds good. You should be able to use Clover Configurator - the version matching your Clover install - to edit the config.plist with those settings.

 

[Macintyre]

Yes, that worked. Thank you. It confused me a little at first because clicking the option to generate a plist gave me an error saying that clover-genconfig was not found. Unfortunately Google was no help at all and I could not find this tool anywhere. Eventually I realised that using this this option was not necessary. All that was actually required was to change the required settings and then select File->Save. I can now boot from SSD and have made a backup of the config.