- Joined
- Apr 24, 2021
- Messages
- 2
- Motherboard
- MSI Z97 Gaming 5
- CPU
- Intel i5-4690K
- Graphics
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 750
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
Five years ago, following instructions on this wonderful site, I built two identical machines with the following key hardware components:
cpu: Intel i5-4690K
mbo: MSI Z97 Gaming 5
gpu: Nvidia GeForce GTX 750
hdd: Samsung 850 EVO 120GB 2.5-Inch SATA III
They are currently upgraded to High Sierra 10.13.6. All was fine until I foolishly let the HDD completely fill on one machine. At that point it would black screen at the boot stage where one would normally see the Clover boot menu popup.
I booted to a Unibeast created High Sierra install usb, ran Disk Utility First Aid on all partitions (all green), and then used the Terminal to delete a couple games in the Applications folder which cleared half the disk. I attempted to reboot and got the same black screen, no Clover popup.
I then booted once again to the install usb's Clover and from the Clover menu choose to boot from the existing hard disk High Sierr installation. This worked, High Sierra booted and I was able to use the machine in that mode. Since I have two identical machines, one with no problems, once I got in I used the EFI mount utility on this site to mount the EFI partitions on both machines, zipped up the entire contents of the EFI folder on the bad machine, and copied it over to the good machine for comparison.
A diff -r comparing the EFI folder contents on both machines only showed differences in the log files and some plist data which seems related to the USB drive being attached/used. The diffs are attached here as diff.txt. A binary cmp on the BOOTX64.efi files showed no differences. I followed in the instructions here:
www.tonymacx86.com
to add a boot option for the CLOVERX64.efi instead. Despite all this, nothing is working. I still get a black screen where there should be the Clover boot menu when attempted to boot to hdd EFI instead of the USB EFI.
Any guidance would be much appreciated. Ideally, I would like to repair this EFI installation before resorting to a fresh wipe/reinstall. I've also attached a zip of screenpics that may help.
cpu: Intel i5-4690K
mbo: MSI Z97 Gaming 5
gpu: Nvidia GeForce GTX 750
hdd: Samsung 850 EVO 120GB 2.5-Inch SATA III
They are currently upgraded to High Sierra 10.13.6. All was fine until I foolishly let the HDD completely fill on one machine. At that point it would black screen at the boot stage where one would normally see the Clover boot menu popup.
I booted to a Unibeast created High Sierra install usb, ran Disk Utility First Aid on all partitions (all green), and then used the Terminal to delete a couple games in the Applications folder which cleared half the disk. I attempted to reboot and got the same black screen, no Clover popup.
I then booted once again to the install usb's Clover and from the Clover menu choose to boot from the existing hard disk High Sierr installation. This worked, High Sierra booted and I was able to use the machine in that mode. Since I have two identical machines, one with no problems, once I got in I used the EFI mount utility on this site to mount the EFI partitions on both machines, zipped up the entire contents of the EFI folder on the bad machine, and copied it over to the good machine for comparison.
A diff -r comparing the EFI folder contents on both machines only showed differences in the log files and some plist data which seems related to the USB drive being attached/used. The diffs are attached here as diff.txt. A binary cmp on the BOOTX64.efi files showed no differences. I followed in the instructions here:
[Solved] UEFI clover boot option gone after BIOS update
Following fixing a different issue, where Clover was making a new UEFI boot drive every time I restarted (causing 20+ boot drives in bios), my issues have gone the other way. I updated BIOS to F20, and no longer see any UEFI drives to go to clover in the BIOS setup - only the two drives in the...
www.tonymacx86.com
to add a boot option for the CLOVERX64.efi instead. Despite all this, nothing is working. I still get a black screen where there should be the Clover boot menu when attempted to boot to hdd EFI instead of the USB EFI.
Any guidance would be much appreciated. Ideally, I would like to repair this EFI installation before resorting to a fresh wipe/reinstall. I've also attached a zip of screenpics that may help.