Migrating from Chimera to Clover

[BobDobbs]

I've searched countless entries on these forums and haven't yet seen a thread which applies directly to my situation.

I have two systems, both running Yosemite 10.10.5, which have Chimera as the bootloader. What I want to do, in preparation for future upgrades, is switch to Clover as the bootloader on one system and work out all the kinks before switching over completely. The problem is that most threads describing a Clover upgrade assume the initial install was made using Clover, or that you're going to clean install the OS . My target drives were formatted GUID and of course have the EFI partition present. This is referring to the X58 system in my info, which is my test/upgrade machine.

As shown in one of the guide threads, I installed Clover on the EFI partition using the standard utility. Everything went to completion, and the EFI partition appears to have all the desired data after the install. The problem is that when I boot the drive directly from the BIOS I get the the boot0: hang. Using the Chimera bootloader from another boot drive and instructing it to boot the updated drive works of course, because the OS data hasn't been disturbed. It's clear to me that while Clover may be installed, the partition is not configured to point to the correct location and the first stage boot can't be located.

So my question is: how do you update the boot record to point to the correct location when you're switching from Chimera to Clover? Clearly the Clover installer doesn't do this by default. Is there an option which does this? Or perhaps one of the 1000 parameters in the Clover configurator?

I'm going to build a Clover USB installer to see if this will boot the drive, but I'm not clear on my next step. As described above, I am not ready to do a clean install of the OS - I just want to update the bootloader. Should be easy, right?

 

[BreBo]

What I want to do, in preparation for future upgrades, is switch to Clover as the bootloader on one system and work out all the kinks before switching over completely. The problem is that most threads describing a Clover upgrade assume the initial install was made using Clover, or that you're going to clean install the OS.

Maybe this helps: Clover Basics and Switching Advice

 

[BobDobbs]

Yes, I looked at that FAQ and there's a lot of info about Clover setup. But as far as I can tell, they all assume that you've already gotten Clover to boot your volume prior to making the changes. In fact, I made the changes to the plist and it didn't change anything in the system's behavior. The field "Default Loader" looks interesting, but I'm not clear on how to populate it. I have made a Clover install USB and am going to try to boot from it as soon as I have a block of time to spend on it. If that allows me to hand off to the installation on my boot drive, then maybe I can puzzle it out from there. Otherwise, I'm back to square one.

 

[BobDobbs]

Incidentally, attempting to boot the Clover USB (which was built on a real Mac under Sierra) resulted in the fabled "Can't find /System/Library/kernels/kernel" error. I changed a couple of things in the BIOS (turned off native USB3 for example) and it reached the Clover boot screen but was unable to hand off to the hard drive which had been updated with Clover. Still testing...