[Solved] Updated Clover to 4699 but now cannot boot into Mac

[buddyjack2]

Hi, in preparation for my eventual update from High Sierra to Mojave, I read your Direct Update tips and thought I could at least update Clover while waiting to do the Mojave update (am waiting for the updated NVIDIA web drivers). I'd successfully updated Clover before, most recently this past July 2018, and it went without a hitch. Today, however, I updated to v.4699 (from the official Clover package on their website) and now cannot boot into High Sierra at all. Am currently only able to boot into Windows 10. I know that Clover created a backup of its old version on the root level of my Mac SSD drive, but that isn't at all accessible from Windows, so am not sure how I could revert to the old version just using Windows, and get my Mac to boot up. For that matter, all the tools I see on here on tonymac are Mac programs such as the EFI Mounter or Clover configurator and as I mentioned, all I have working at the moment is Windows 10. I'd definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer! BTW am not sure of the exact version of Clover that I had, I know it was 45xx and had just been updated, as mentioned, this past July so it was whatever was available at that time.

 

[MysticalOS]

https://sourceforge.net/p/cloverefiboot/tickets/501/

 

[jerryy2345]

Clover 4699 rearranged the UEFI drivers in a major way, if you were just doing a normal upgrade it would be easy to miss that some of the things did not get updated as they used to. A lot of drivers are now listed in a separate heading called something like FileVault 2 UEFI.

Unibeast, (found on the front page) will give you a bootable USB drive that can "see" your boot drive and maybe let you swap out the older Clover version for the new one. Any bootable usb drive will be an easier approach.

Are you able to get Clover to boot far enough so that you see the main Clover screen? if so, you can use the option to open a terminal window and issue commands to copy the older Clover over the new one. Assuming you can open the terminal window the first command you will want to issue is:

/sbin/fsck -fy         <-- then press the return key. This makes sure the file system is healthy enough to run.

follow this by issuing:

/sbin/mount -uw /     <-- then press the return key. This mounts the main disk.

From here on out you will be issuing the ls -la and cp (or mv) commands to copy the files you need from one place to the other. Keep a note pad handy, you will have to also mount the efi disk to use as a target disk. All pathnames have to be typed exactly as the ls -la option tells you. It may be helpful to review some Linux or older macOS help files on the internets about single-user mode. You will be using the terminal and not the GUI for doing all of the heavy lifting until the files are copied over. Then reboot and try again.

 

[buddyjack2]

Holy cow.

I do have the USB Unibeast (for High Sierra) installer I originally used, and just now I attached an external hard drive that is hopefully going to accept a fresh High Sierra install from it. So far so good, I finished the install and Mac setup, then installed Multibeast with the options I'd originally used. Fingers crossed, I'm currentlywaiting to see if I can actually boot off the external... it seems way slower than my usual internal SSD boot, but thewhite bar does seem to be slowly advancing.

Assuming I successfully boot, my plan is to revert to Clover 45xx. I kept that installer, so I hope I can just run it and have it replace 4699 on my SSD. Then I should be able to mount EFI and replace its contents with the contents of my 45xx backup. Hoping that'll at least get me back up & running... unless you foresee a problem with my plan?

 

[jerryy2345]

Sounds good. If you go to Clover's SourceForge site you can download other versions as well as the latest, from the 'files' section. You may have better results with v4630 or v4674.

 

[buddyjack2]

Thanks for the great tips. High Sierra finally launched fron the external and I was able to proceed as hoped. Am now back up & running 10.13.6 off internal SSD with old Clover 4586. At least now I have an emergency external drive ready to rescue any future mishaps so maybe I can be a little more adventurous with Clover upgrades.