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How to setup custom Clover entries on a non-Hackintosh Legacy MBR system?

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Skyy

Skyy

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Hey everyone,

to make it short, a friend of mine triple-boots Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on separate HDDs/SSDs for various personal reasons and after seeing my Clover bootloader setup he wanted to use Clover too. We installed Clover on a USB drive and set his UEFI to boot from it which worked fine, each of the three Windows installations boot fine too. The thing is with his system being MBR Clover relies on scanning and naturally shows all of his partitions.

I know how to setup custom Legacy entries via Clover Configurator and can edit his config.plist in my OSX install but how would I go about finding which Volume entries I need to add for his HDDs and SDD in Clover via Windows so I can disable scanning? Pressing F2 in his Clover doesn't save a preboot.log and pressing space doesn't show any info besides "Boot Windows" and "Back" so I'm stumped here. There should be a way to accomplish this right? Thanks to anyone helping.
 
You can try using mountvol.exe from a command prompt to list drive letters corresponding GUIDs and use them for your custom entries in clover
 
cubawire said:
You can try using mountvol.exe from a command prompt to list drive letters corresponding GUIDs and use them for your custom entries in clover
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! So for example I would enter \\?\Volume{6382ff17-1931-11e6-845d-bc5ff4819800}\ in Clover Configurators Volume field? Should I just enter the content of the brackets or is there a formatting I should adhere?
 
Sadly using only the ID in the brackets or even the Container-ID of the drive does not work. Clover doesn't show the custom entries. Is there another idea we can try? I don't know why Clover doesn't save the preboot.log, could it be related to the fact that I formatted the USB Drive as MacOS Journaled GUID but used MBR during the Clover Installation Setup? It was written like that in a Clover on a Pendrive tutorial I read here.
 
cubawire said:
Probably best to format the USB drive MBR and refer to option A in Clover wiki, why mix UEFI/GUID and MBR/CSM/BIOS on the same system?

https://clover-wiki.zetam.org/What-is-what
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your help, we got it! :)

Yeah I'm not sure why I just blindly followed the tutorial instead of thinking for myself. I reformatted the drive to FAT32 and reinstalled Clover. Now Clover could save its preboot.log (which makes sense, how should it save the log on a MacOS Journaled formatted drive during my first try, this was impossible) and afterwards I could extract the volume ID's in this format: HD(5,MBR,0x00000000,0x7055E800,0x3E528800)

We added them as custom entries, disabled scanning and everything boots up fine now, my friend is happy! :D

One nitpick question from me though, it's not important but I'm curious about it, after I formatted the USB-drive as FAT32 it started to show up twice in the UEFI. Once as UEFI and once as Legacy which makes sense as one is UEFI based booting and the other is MBR booting. The funning thing is, if I boot Clover in MBR mode everything works perfectly, Clover can set the screen-resolution to 1080p and each Windows entry can boot but there's a 3-4 second delay before Clover starts.

In UEFI mode Clover starts instantly but the screen-resultion is stuck at 1024x786 (I set 1920x1080 in the config.plist) and after selecting any Windows entry Clover hangs. I assume this is related to UEFI booting relying on its own drivers. Is there any quick and easy fix to this? If not I'll just let it run in MBR mode, the few seconds aren't a big deal for my friend.
 
Glad its working. Maybe you need CSM video driver for 1920x1080.
 
Skyy said:
I assume this is related to UEFI booting relying on its own drivers. Is there any quick and easy fix to this?
Click to expand...
Quick fix is boot options->legacy only (or CSM only or whatever) in mobo uefi settings, all drivers you need to boot windows are already present and the mobo boot menu is kept simple
 
cubawire said:
Quick fix is boot options->legacy only (or CSM only or whatever) in mobo uefi settings, all drivers you need to boot windows are already present and the mobo boot menu is kept simple
Click to expand...

I'll try that next time I'm at that PC. Legacy Clover works perfect aside from the 4 second delay and one small other thing. My friend told me that the timeout function doesn't work. As in Clover won't autoboot despite having the Windows 7 entry set as default. We tried Timeout 3 and 5 in config.plist. It does work in UEFI mode which is funny.

Although these two things are really not important, Clover seems to work great as it is for him.
 
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