Migrating to Clover

[123jezza]

I have a working Hackintosh BUT have had frequent freezes when inserting USB devices or when running Parallels.
Today I made a USB bootable version of Clover and - voila - problems disappeared!

I'd like to install Clover properly onto the HDD but two questions:

1) Will I still be able to access my two windows partitions (separate versions of Win7 64 on separate drives) via the Clover bootloader?

2) Is it easy to revert to Chameleon if anything goes pear-shaped? (I read that I can activate UEFI mode in BIOS for Clover then switch to Legacy for Chameleon but don't know if this is correct)

I'd be most grateful if anyone can advise on this.


Machine specs are as follows:

Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H
Seagate 2TB Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s 64MB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Corsair 16GB (2 x 8GB) Dominator Platinum DDR3 2400MHz DIMM
Asus 12x BD-R Reader 16x DVDRW 48x CD-R Black Retail Drive
Corsair 860W AX860 80PLUS Platinum High Performance
Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00GHz 8MB S1150 'Devils Canyon' Processor
Asus GeForce GTX 780 3GB PCI-Express 3.0 HDMI DirectCU II
3 x Samsung 840 Evo 250Gb basic sata SSDs
Corsair Carbide 500R micro ATX midi tower
TP-link TL-WDN4800 450Mbs Wireless N dual band PCI express adapter
Corsair Hydro Series H100i All-In-One 240mm Digital High Performance Rad Liquid Cooler for CPU

 

[neilhart]

I have a working Hackintosh BUT have had frequent freezes when inserting USB devices or when running Parallels.
Today I made a USB bootable version of Clover and - voila - problems disappeared!

I'd like to install Clover properly onto the HDD but two questions:

1) Will I still be able to access my two windows partitions (separate versions of Win7 64 on separate drives) via the Clover bootloader?

2) Is it easy to revert to Chameleon if anything goes pear-shaped? (I read that I can activate UEFI mode in BIOS for Clover then switch to Legacy for Chameleon but don't know if this is correct)

I'd be most grateful if anyone can advise on this.


Machine specs are as follows:

Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H
Seagate 2TB Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s 64MB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Corsair 16GB (2 x 8GB) Dominator Platinum DDR3 2400MHz DIMM
Asus 12x BD-R Reader 16x DVDRW 48x CD-R Black Retail Drive
Corsair 860W AX860 80PLUS Platinum High Performance
Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00GHz 8MB S1150 'Devils Canyon' Processor
Asus GeForce GTX 780 3GB PCI-Express 3.0 HDMI DirectCU II
3 x Samsung 840 Evo 250Gb basic sata SSDs
Corsair Carbide 500R micro ATX midi tower
TP-link TL-WDN4800 450Mbs Wireless N dual band PCI express adapter
Corsair Hydro Series H100i All-In-One 240mm Digital High Performance Rad Liquid Cooler for CPU

Be very very cautious! Changes to the BIOS can cause you to not be able to boot into your Windows.

If you are happy with your "test drive Clover" you should be able to install Clover to your OS X drive's hidden EFI partition.

However, if you want to convert your system to a UEFI boot from a Legacy boot, you will most likely have to start from the beginning and re-install everything including Windows.

It is time for you to do a bunch of research.

Before doing anything, make sure that you have everything backed up to an off line resource (and that it is a restorable backup).

Good modding,
neil

 

[123jezza]

Be very very cautious! Changes to the BIOS can cause you to not be able to boot into your Windows.

If you are happy with your "test drive Clover" you should be able to install Clover to your OS X drive's hidden EFI partition.

However, if you want to convert your system to a UEFI boot from a Legacy boot, you will most likely have to start from the beginning and re-install everything including Windows.

It is time for you to do a bunch of research.

Before doing anything, make sure that you have everything backed up to an off line resource (and that it is a restorable backup).

Good modding,
neil

Many thanks Neil.
The prospect of reinstalling three separate operating systems doesn't appeal hugely!!
All I want to be able to do is install Clover to my HDD and still be able to boot back into windows so the UEFI total conversion is perhaps a step too far.
It seems, from what I've read so far, that removing Clover is quite tricky - assuming I can't get it to do what I want - which is why I don't want to lose the ability to boot via Chameleon as that works well except for the issue with freezing in OS X.

 

[neilhart]

Many thanks Neil.
The prospect of reinstalling three separate operating systems doesn't appeal hugely!!
All I want to be able to do is install Clover to my HDD and still be able to boot back into windows so the UEFI total conversion is perhaps a step too far.
It seems, from what I've read so far, that removing Clover is quite tricky - assuming I can't get it to do what I want - which is why I don't want to lose the ability to boot via Chameleon as that works well except for the issue with freezing in OS X.

Well I can not address system freeze issues other then my opinion is it belongs to GigaByte and is a IMHO a design issue that should not exist.

If Clover solves it for you (and I don't understand why it would) then you should invest in the gear to clone each of your bootable devices and back up all data. After that is done, you can proceed to install Clover to your OS X partitioned hard drive or SSD. This would be the "Legacy" boot method similar to your USB Clover test drive device.

As long as you don't go into your OS X partitions and remove those items required for a Chimera boot (that would be don't trash the /Extra folder and don't delete the "boot" file from the root), you could always boot back into OS x using a Chimera USB stick.

Getting rid of Clover is just a matter of deleting the contents of the hidden EFI folder. The only trick here is knowing which drive it is located on... If it should be required, use the Search function to find the guide to remove Clover.

Good modding,
neil

 

[123jezza]

Many thanks again Neil, I'll give it a shot!