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How to create an EFI partition manually?

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fjleon1980

fjleon1980

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Greetings everyone, so here's my eternal problem since El Capitan, i cannot get MacOS to boot from HDD, and everything is because i don't have an EFI partition.

I have 2 hard drives. Drive A is a SSD drive, for booting Windows 10.
Drive B has 3 partitions, the first one for MacOS, the second and the third are for Windows storage (apps and games)
My first mistake was to use Windows' partitioning tool to delete the Mac partition and leave it unassigned. Sierra's installer doesn't see the available space. It also cannot erase the partition if i format it to NTFS from Windows.

So i had to boot from GParted (a linux distribution that has a much better partitioning tool), nuke it and format it HFS+. After that, i could install Sierra and continue booting from USB.

The question is how should i create manually the EFI partition, which what parameters so i can solve this? Should i try just to copy whatever layout is on the USB drive?

If i put the USB in windows, i see an EFI folder, and the partition layout is:
1st partition: 200 MB EFI
2nd partition: 29.50 GB Primary
128MB Unallocated.

However in an old Mountain Lion box, on Disk Utility, i just see a big 32GB MacOs Extended Format.
diskutil list shows EFI and Apple_HFS on the USB drive, and just Apple_HFS and the two windows partitions on the HDD.
 
Well, partial success. I am able to boot from the HDD now, but no kexts seem to be loaded, as the USB2 port is not working, and the Atheros card isn't detected. If i boot from USB both network and usb work.

Multibeast used to run in about 5-10 minutes, now in about 1 minute. Seems that it was timing out because it couldn't find the EFI partition and now i see it mounts EFI in Finder.

In /Library/Extensions i see the kexts there, so my guess is that i have to copy them on the EFI partition. Can anyone help me in pointing out in exactly what folder i should do that? As i don't seem to find a 10.12 folder there.

Should i try copying the kexts to the /System/Library/Extensions folder instead? How do i make /System appear in finder?

I even tried downloading the latest clover, i see it is being installed because the clover them gets changed from black background to grey.

My partition layout is quite weird:
0: GUID partition scheme
1: EFI 200mb
2: NTFS
3: NTFS
4: Apple_HFS Macos

I would have thought if my 50GB empty partition was on the start of the HDD, when i created EFI and MacOS they would be #1 and #2 in the list.

I can't reformat the whole HDD as i don't have space to move my two NTFS partitions.
 
If the kexts are in L/E or in S/L/E then you do not need them in Clover.

Can you back up the contents of the NTFS partitions to off line storage or to your main Win10 SSD?
 
sadly i can't, since there isn't enough space. both NTFS partitions are 1.95 TB. The other thing i noticed is that my F12 boot menu shows up two "MACOSX" entries, but the one i actually use to boot to Sierra is when i select UEFI Western Digital.

If i choose any of the MACOSX entries i get booted to Win10 instead.
Since i can boot to Sierra from the HDD there must be some way to make it see the kexts, i will try loading them manually to see if that works.
 
fjleon1980 said:
sadly i can't, since there isn't enough space. both NTFS partitions are 1.95 TB. The other thing i noticed is that my F12 boot menu shows up two "MACOSX" entries, but the one i actually use to boot to Sierra is when i select UEFI Western Digital.

If i choose any of the MACOSX entries i get booted to Win10 instead.
Since i can boot to Sierra from the HDD there must be some way to make it see the kexts, i will try loading them manually to see if that works.
Click to expand...
Did you install the kexts to L/E with MultiBeast or Kext Beast properly or did you just copy the to the L/E folder?
 
I used GParted to delete the first 50GB of my HDD
Created a 200MB fat32 partition right on the start of the drive called EFI, and set flags boot,esd on it (since GParted shows that Unibeast does that with the USB drive)
Then created a HFS+ partition called MacOS with the rest of the unallocated space.
Booted off USB and installed Sierra, rebooted and used USB to boot the installed Sierra.
Ran Multibeast 9, chose UEFI, with Atheros E2200 2.2 i think, the latest one. Also chose Intel 7/8/9 USB. I didn't touch anything else.
Build->Install, i saw that EFI was mounted (to make sure, i removed the USB drive before starting)
Ran the NVIDIA installer and rebooted, pressed F12 and chose Western Digital and booted fine, but doesn't detect my ethernet card or the usb 2.0 ports.
Weird enough, the NVIDIA card works fine, so i don't know where the issue is. Should i try booting without cache?
 
Update: booted with UseKernelCache=No and used kext beast to install AtherosE2200Ethernet.kext, FakePCIID_XHCIM.kext and FakePCIID.kext and installed them in S/L/E. Immediately I got a warning that the Atheros kext wouldn't work, but I rebooted and ethernet is working. Ironically, the USB kexts did get copied to S/L/E and they don't work since the USB 2 port isn't working (at least USB3 port seems to work).

In conclusion: I understand even less now. But I can boot from HDD and have ethernet working.
Now, if only I can get this built in VT2021 sound card working... In El Cap, voodoohda didn't work and didn't try again.
 
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