Thanks, astrobruin, for your reply. Yes, I did use Clover Configurator and followed the
How to Fix iMessage guide. I gave up on that guide and decided to move over to Clover on my Mavericks. I also am running into problems installing Clover over Mavericks. I followed all the steps through Step 3 but get the message "This copy of the install of OS X Mavericks application cannot be verified". I've redownloaded Mavericks and also tried the Terminal command "date 041711152014" that I found on YouTube but that didn't work either.
Like you did I may need to consider doing a clean install of Yosemite using Clover but I didn't want to have to reload all my software and start over.
Honestly, I don't understand EFI partition but will read up about that next.
As for the config.plst file I did exactly as you suggested. I took the
config.plist-Standard and modified it on Clover Configurator but haven't got it loaded on to Mavericks yet.
Thanks again for your help and explaining all this in detail.
Happy to help.
I definitely understand; I tried to avoid doing a clean install as well, but my hand was eventually forced.
If you do go that route, I recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your drive before you start, and again as soon as you have a new working build. And continue to make backups as you make incremental changes.
I'd advise against using Migration Assistant to restore from a Time Machine backup. I've had two experiences where that completely broke my build, to the point where I couldn't boot off either my SSD or my USB drives. Not 100% sure Migration Assistant was the problem, but that's when everything fell apart. (resetting the BIOS to defaults with F7, then changing back a few required settings, restored access to my USB drives)
In any event, it's usually safer and cleaner to restore everything manually.
The EFI partition is actually more straightforward than it seems, so don't be intimidated by it. As above, it's just a hidden partition on your boot drive. To put that another way, it's effectively a small hidden hard drive. You can make it temporarily visible by "mounting" it (it will disappear again when you reboot).
See for yourself. Launch your Terminal and type "diskutil list" and hit return. It will spit out something like this:
For me, the EFI partition is labeled "EFI EFI", is a tiny 209.7 MB, and has an identifier of "disk0s1." Will likely be the same for you too.
When you mount it, it will appear in your Finder as a hard drive named "EFI".
volume/"Yosemite" (or whatever you named your boot drive)
volume/"EFI"
When you reboot, the "EFI" drive will disappear again. So after every reboot, you will need to mount it to see it. It's similar to, say, a hidden directory on your computer.
The Clover Yosemite guide walks you through the process of formatting the EFI partition and copying the Clover files over to it, including the
config.plist.
volume/"EFI"/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist
So in order to make changes to Clover using the Configurator, you first need to mount the EFI partition by it's identifier (in my case "disk0s1"). Then load Clover Configurator and open the config.plist that has this directory path:
volume/"EFI"/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist
Anyway, don't worry if that still seems confusing. When you walk through the steps it will all fall into place. Again, it's conceptually the same as making a hidden folder on your hard drive visible in order to make changes to its contents. It just requires a different tool to make it visible.
One last thing that confused me. My first attempt at installing Clover (a month ago) resulted in me accidentally installing Clover on both my system drive and my EFI drive. It looked like this:
volume/"Yosemite"/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist
volume/"EFI"/EFI/CLOVER/config.plist
I kept editing the config.plist in my "Yosemite" drive because it was the only one I could see. But the computer was ignoring it and following the config.plist in my hidden "EFI" drive, which of course didn't change. So I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, and why nothing was updating.
Finally, just hit Command+S to save your changes in Clover Configurator when you're ready to commit them. Obvious, I know, but it doesn't say "save" but instead says "export" which sounds different. It's the same thing as "save."
Good luck!