[Solved] Boot Clover in UEFI instead of legacy

[ellissitzky]

Solution: I installed the UEFI BIOS upgrade for my originally legacy motherboard. I was able to get more boot entry flexibility and was able to choose the correct version of Clover that'd boot my Windows properly. That being said, I think my issue may have been mixed up, I think I had Clover in UEFI instead of legacy which I needed to boot Windows, if that makes sense. Also now I can even utilize the Startup Disk pane which is very convenient for rebooting into Windows remotely.

Background: Many months ago I did a fresh El Capitan install on a drive it shared with Win 7. Shortly after that I split them onto two separate drivers. There was a absurd amount of troubleshooting (primarily isolating the Win 7 install) and along the way I created, resolved, and created more boot issues with the Win 7 boot entry. I believe one of the issues I created may have been from installing both the legacy and UEFI version of Clover and fudging up the boot entries. FYI I think I have a weird hybrid legacy/UEFI board but I've mostly used it as legacy over these years.

Issue: My primary issue is that when I try to boot Win 7 from the Clover menu I am greeted with a boot error. My workaround has been to just boot straight into the Win 7 drive from the BIOS boot drive select which has worked fine.

Proposed solution: I noticed today that if I exit what appears to be the Clover legacy bootloader, I am then taken into the Clover UEFI bootloader (it's higher res, more devices show up, mouse semi-works), and selecting Windows will in fact boot it.

Is there some way for me to force Clover to boot into whatever that second menu is so it'll properly boot Windows?

 

[Going Bald]

Background: Many months ago I did a fresh El Capitan install on a drive it shared with Win 7. Shortly after that I split them onto two separate drivers. There was a absurd amount of troubleshooting (primarily isolating the Win 7 install) and along the way I created, resolved, and created more boot issues with the Win 7 boot entry. I believe one of the issues I created may have been from installing both the legacy and UEFI version of Clover and fudging up the boot entries. FYI I think I have a weird hybrid legacy/UEFI board but I've mostly used it as legacy over these years.

Issue: My primary issue is that when I try to boot Win 7 from the Clover menu I am greeted with a boot error. My workaround has been to just boot straight into the Win 7 drive from the BIOS boot drive select which has worked fine.

Proposed solution: I noticed today that if I exit what appears to be the Clover legacy bootloader, I am then taken into the Clover UEFI bootloader (it's higher res, more devices show up, mouse semi-works), and selecting Windows will in fact boot it.

Is there some way for me to force Clover to boot into whatever that second menu is so it'll properly boot Windows?

Something to try:

Mount the EFI partition. Copy the EFI folder in the EFI partition to desktop.
Move the EFI partition EFI folder to trash, empty trash.
Download and run MultiBeast, selecting ONLY the EFI Clover bootloader.
Copy your config.plist from the EFI/Clover folder on the desktop to the EFI partition EFI/Clover folder, replacing the existing one installed by MultiBeasst.
Boot to BIOS and set it to boot EFI only. Make sure your OS X drive is first in BBS boot order. Save&exit, continue boot.

Report results.

 

[ellissitzky]

Great thanks. You had given me advice on the original issue a few months back. That's the direction I was leaning toward. If I have an issue getting back in, my install USB should be able to get me back in, correct?

 

[ellissitzky]

Something to try:

Mount the EFI partition. Copy the EFI folder in the EFI partition to desktop.
Move the EFI partition EFI folder to trash, empty trash.
Download and run MultiBeast, selecting ONLY the EFI Clover bootloader.
Copy your config.plist from the EFI/Clover folder on the desktop to the EFI partition EFI/Clover folder, replacing the existing one installed by MultiBeasst.
Boot to BIOS and set it to boot EFI only. Make sure your OS X drive is first in BBS boot order. Save&exit, continue boot.

Report results.

So I kind of figured it out.

I tried reinstalling the EFI with Multibeast but I wasn't able to get it to work. What I WAS able to do though was upgrade my board to UEFI, they were released on the cusp of UEFI and shipped with a legacy BIOS despite supporting UEFI. After that I had more flexibility in selecting the boot entries and was able to default it to go into the entry that was giving me a proper Windows boot. I can even use the Startup Disk pane now to tell it which OS to reboot.

That being said, I think I may have my issue mixed up, I think my issue may be that it was booting UEFI and I needed the legacy entry. In order to finally get it to work I set it to "Boot legacy only" and set my boot device to P0 (the Clover drive). If I set it to anything with UEFI in it I would get the low res bootloader that would give me the Windows boot errors.

So going back to the original issue, was my machine bringing up the UEFI loader first and then when I hit Exit it would load up the legacy one? This has been very confusing but I'm so glad it is working now.