Launch an EFI shell?

[romanaOne]

I have a mobile Intel HD4600 in what appears to be a Clevo W670SQZ laptop. I say "appears," because the people at System76 claim Clevo only made the case. Funnily, in the BIOS screens, it nevertheless says "clevo W670SZ 1.03.05," just like an unofficial BIOS version I see online. Anyway, they won't give me the original BIOS image, but just runaround.

While the UEFI Boot option is not present in the BOOT menu, there is something called "Launch an EFI shell" in a different menu. Like with my last Hackintosh laptop, Lenovo Y570, the BIOS in this one has been extensively modded (crippled) by the laptop vendor so that ALL of the settings in the Clover UEFI Guide are not visible, except for the SATA AHCI. I gather that UEFI does not work well with Linux and that's probably why they got rid of it.

Plan A: EFI Shell?

So I am wondering, can I boot Clover through this "Launch EFI Shell" menu by selecting the right .efi file?

Will this leave my MBR/PBR untouched so I can easily revert back to legacy BIOS booting if the experiment is a failure?

Plan B: Get the BOOT UEFI option back.

Is there a tool in Linux/OS X to dump and/or disassemble all of the BIOS into a file? That way, I could safely compare it to what I suspect is the BIOS that System76 customized and find the diffs.

What is the benefit of UEFI booting Clover? I mean, I am still guessing at ig-platform-id to fix menu bar corruption. Could this have any affect on the problem?

 

[RehabMan]

I have a mobile Intel HD4600 in what appears to be a Clevo W670SQZ laptop. I say "appears," because the people at System76 claim Clevo only made the case. Funnily, in the BIOS screens, it nevertheless says "clevo W670SZ 1.03.05," just like an unofficial BIOS version I see online. Anyway, they won't give me the original BIOS image, but just runaround.

While the UEFI Boot option is not present in the BOOT menu, there is something called "Launch an EFI shell" in a different menu. Like with my last Hackintosh laptop, Lenovo Y570, the BIOS in this one has been extensively modded (crippled) by the laptop vendor so that ALL of the settings in the Clover UEFI Guide are not visible, except for the SATA AHCI. I gather that UEFI does not work well with Linux and that's probably why they got rid of it.

Plan A: EFI Shell?

So I am wondering, can I boot Clover through this "Launch EFI Shell" menu by selecting the right .efi file?

Will this leave my MBR/PBR untouched so I can easily revert back to legacy BIOS booting if the experiment is a failure?

Plan B: Get the BOOT UEFI option back.

Is there a tool in Linux/OS X to dump and/or disassemble all of the BIOS into a file? That way, I could safely compare it to what I suspect is the BIOS that System76 customized and find the diffs.

What is the benefit of UEFI booting Clover? I mean, I am still guessing at ig-platform-id to fix menu bar corruption. Could this have any affect on the problem?

Are you certain your laptop has no ability to boot UEFI?

It is required by Microsoft for Win8 logo...

 

[romanaOne]

There's no Win8 or Microsoft logo anywhere on this thing. Ubuntu LTS 14.04 came preinstalled on the hard drive. I have that drive in my DVD-ROM caddy, so I can boot Linux. (I want a bullet-proof way to keep grub from messing up OS X, and Clover from wrecking Linux.) The Linux drive has no EFI stuff. Grub is in the MBR and there are 2 partitions and it's obvious what they're for:

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048  1945135103   972566528   83  Linux
/dev/sda2      1945135104  1953523711     4194304   82  Linux swap / Solaris

One thing I don't really like is this recovery partition. I wish OS X would give you the option not to create it, or easily remove it once created. I'd rather have a simpler partition table and an external drive for recovery.

Are you certain your laptop has no ability to boot UEFI?

I'm not totally sure. The manual from Clevo shows "BOOT UEFI" in the BIOS BOOT menu. In my BIOS BOOT menu, there is no "BOOT UEFI" at the bottom, but there is another menu with "Launch EFI Shell."

I tried installing with the "UEFI capable systems settings" from the guide but rebooting just went straight to the MBR which still had Chimera.

Installing Clover with the GUI "BIOS-only systems" settings resulted in the boot0 error. That was when I started reading the Clover docs. installed boot0af to MBR, put boot1h in /dev/disk0s1 PBR, formatted /dev/disk0s1 HFS+, and copied CLOVER there.

btw: only ig-platform-id 0xa260006 and 0xa260005 work for me and the latter one looks slightly better but the Apple startup logo is still corrupted as is the menu bar. After logout/login, all is perfect. The other 3 suggested mobile HD4600 ig-platform-ids don't get me past the logo screen.

 

[RehabMan]

One thing I don't really like is this recovery partition. I wish OS X would give you the option not to create it, or easily remove it once created. I'd rather have a simpler partition table and an external drive.

The recovery partition is easy to remove. Enable the debug menu in Disk Utility (google it).

I'm not totally sure. The manual from Clevo shows "BOOT UEFI" in the BIOS BOOT menu. In my BIOS BOOT menu, there is no "BOOT UEFI" at the bottom, but there is another menu with "Launch EFI Shell."

I tried installing with the "UEFI capable systems settings" from the guide but rebooting just went straight to the MBR which still had Chimera.

It could be that UEFI is enabled but without an option to turn it off. Only way to find out is to try to launch typical UEFI media (Windows 8.1, for example).

Installing Clover with the GUI "BIOS-only systems" settings resulted in the boot0 error. That was when I started reading the Clover docs. installed boot0af to MBR, put boot1h in /dev/disk0s1 PBR, formatted /dev/disk0s1 HFS+, and copied CLOVER there.

btw: only ig-platform-id 0xa260006 and 0xa260005 work for me and the latter one looks slightly better but the Apple startup logo is still corrupted as is the menu bar. After logout/login, all is perfect. The other 3 suggested mobile HD4600 ig-platform-ids don't get me past the logo screen.

Clover works fine in legacy, so if that's all you can do, that's ok.