[Solved] No boot device option when trying to do a clean install

[WolfpactVI]

Hello all,

Long time lurker, infrequent poster. Finally got my act together to upgrade to High Sierra from El Capitan. Bought a new drive to do a clean install. You can add me to the list of people who get no boot device option after the Clover boot. Boots just fine into Clover, but then there is no option for the "Boot OS X Install from Install macOS High Sierra". If I have my other drives plugged in, all of the Windows partitions on the Windows drive show up, the El Capitan partitions shows up on the Mac drive, but the install partition on the USB drive is no where to be found. When I unplug everything, Clover still boots just fine, but there is just no drive listed at all from which to boot.

I had to use the dosdude1's High Sierra patcher in order to download the High Sierra full installer, since the App Store was just giving me the 19MB pseudo installer. Followed all of the steps on the installation page here. Fairly certain my BIOS settings are correct. Havent changed anything since the El Capitan install, and everything mentioned on the install page was correct. Unibeast had no trouble creating the USB installer. I chose UEFI, the 5.2GB High Sierra in the Applications folder, the erased 32GB USB drive, and no graphics options because I'm just using the integrated graphics. Everything went swimmingly until Clover booted up.

Nothing is plugged into the computer except the keyboard, mouse, monitor via DVI, USB stick & unformatted new Crucial SSD. Tried erasing the USB drive and re-downloading the High Sierra installer and using Unibeast again, with the same result.

My setup is:
Gigabyte GA-Z87MX-D3H (BIOS version is F7, the latest)
i7-4770K
Crucial 16GB DDR3 1600 (2x8GB)
Currently running El Capitan on a Crucial SSD so I can at least use the computer (and post my question on this excellent site!)

I wasnt sure which BIOS screens to take pics of, so I took pics of everything (and some needed two pics to get everything). If there's anything else you need pics of, or uploaded, let me know (but pics will have to wait until after work tomorrow at this point).

Any help is greatly appreciated. I was so looking forward to using the new OS. And I'm completely at a loss as to where to start to fix this. Read as many of the other threads as I could find with people having the same problem as me, but didnt come across anything that seemed to be a definitive solution. I did read that some people got it to work by installing 10.13.1 first and then updating, but I have no idea how to access the earlier version of the installer.

 

[OGHUGO]

I had the same problem with a similar board (GA-Z87X-UD4H) and processor. However the way I was able to install it was creating a high sierra usb installer using the macOS High Sierra Patcher Tool, once that was done I booted the unibeast usb drive and I was able to see the mac_os installer. I got it installed but not able to run multibeast as it keeps giving me errors. Hope that helps.

 

[WolfpactVI]

So you had two separate USB drives, one made by unibeast and one made by the patcher? And clover was able to see and boot the USB drive made by the patcher. But now you can't run Multibeast to finish the installation? Well, that's further than I got. Let me know if you get Multibeast to work.

Out of curiosity, did you try copying all the clover files from the EFI partition on the unibeast-made USB drive to the EFI partition on the patcher-made USB drive? Then try and boot clover from the patcher USB and install?

 

[OGHUGO]

Update : I actually reinstalled again and this time everything went flawlessly. The reason why I was unable to install multibeast was because I did not have an EFI partition on my ssd. I think it had something to do with APFS. After reinstalling and formating to regular Mac os extended I was able to install and have multibeast create a EFI partition on it. So everything for me is working except the nvidia gtx 1080 that I have installed. Still working on that right now. Also the second thing you mentioned I did try.. however it did not work.. for some reason when unibeast makes the bootable usb drive the installer partition is not seen by clover.. but when I boot from the unibeast created usb drive and put in the installer usb created by the patcher I can install it from there. Let me know if you have any other questions. If need be I can send you my files or links where I got the stuff from.

 

[WolfpactVI]

Thanks for the update. I'll give that a try. So you had to skip using APFS in order to get everything working. I'm assuming you can't convert the drive to APFS afterwards without reformatting.

 

[WolfpactVI]

Anyone else have this problem but find a solution? One that uses APFS? While I dont feel compelled to update to the latest file system simply because it is the latest, it seems Apple is moving to adopt APFS permanently. So I figure I may as well get going with it.

Plus, Unibeast and Multibeast have always worked seamlessly for me in the past, and it seems to generally be the case for most people with High Sierra from what I've read on here. I'm really hoping there is a simple solution to my problem of Clover not being able to see the Unibeast-created High Sierra installer partition.

 

[hedbert]

Greetings-
I am having the same issue. I borked my system with trying to update to 10.13.2 so I built a new boot disk using the latest High Sierra download and latest Unibeast. I am able to boot to the USB and get the same Clover screen you see. But there are no volumes to boot to from the Clover screen. I borrowed a friend's mac to build the new boot disk and now he is gone. Thoughts? Part of me says be done with this Hackintosh thing any buy a Mac Mini. Please help me to NOT do that.

 

[hedbert]

Greetings
I did more searching and found this issue only work people who are unable to download the full version from Apple and use the alternative method to download High Sierra.

 

[Nicolo13]

I'm experiencing the exact same issue; have also downloaded High Sierra via HS patcher tool (as on Mac from 2009 which can't get it anymore officially). Am stuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[WolfpactVI]

Well that's interesting. I gave up yesterday and installed Sierra. Then I went to the App Store to get the installer for High Sierra, and it downloaded the full installer rather than the 19MB pseudo installer I was getting when I was using El Capitan. I'll try using Unibeast this afternoon to make a USB installer from the App Store full-sized installer, and report back.