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<< Solved >> UEFI Hell... some specific questions

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Back again after another tedious win10 install. Here's what seems (right now) to have worked (magically!) for me.

A reminder: 2 internal SSDs. Mojave is on the M.2 NVME SSD on the mobo. The Win10 target is an SSD in a PCIe adapter in slot 3. ASUS MAXIMUS XI HERO.

SSDs cannot be disabled in ASUS BIOS. And it's a PITA to remove the one mounted right on the mobo which is where Mojave is installed. Therefore [drum roll]...

BEFORE YOU TOUCH WIN10 MEDIA (and get cooties):
On the MacOS side, do this:

If I had only done this first, I would have saved myself about three days of hair tearing and cussing.

Oh yes, of course make sure Clover is option #1 on your boot menu also.

OK, now your Clover is safe from Win10 stomping and you won't get into a scary catch-22 situation like I did. Now you can don your biohazard clothing and get into the Win10 stuff.

Step 0: Use Rufus to make a Win10 USB install stick (see note below)
Step 1: Disable SATA in ASUS BIOS so Win10 doesn't go scribbling boot loaders on your data disks
Step 2: Boot your Rufus stick, using UEFI Boot Menu (F8 key on my mobo)
Step 3: Get Windows Installer start screen
Step 4: Shift-F10 to get command shell
Step 5: Use diskpart to clean target disk, just to be sure
Step 6: Exit to installer
Step 7: Go through activation code blah blah, get to disk menu
Step 8: Choose the disk (should be obvious because it has no partitions any more)
Step 9: (for me this was important) Press New button, don't try to install directly into Unallocated Space
Step 10: Disk gets partitioned with MBR and primary, but don't panic... don't reformat, don't manually add EFI
Step 11: Now select Primary partition and Install
Step 12: Win10 install screen with progress bar. This is where it goes sideways if you've made an error.
Step 13: Assuming you made no errors, install continues with another boot. Not the stick this time, remove it.
Steo 14: And here the magic begins: at this point I was able to boot Win10 from Clover woo-hoo!
Step 14: Finish WinDoze setup, install driver for your GPU, disable auto updates, customise, whatever.
Step 15: Restart.
Step 16: Get back into BIOS. Turn SATA back on. Verify Clover is #1 boot option.
Step 17: If this works for you as it just did for me, you should now be able to boot into Win10 or Mojave from Clover.

So out of all the clever tricks from all the clever people who so generously help eejits like me, the one that really changed the game was using the UEFI Shell in Clover to make a hard coded boot entry for Clover, so that Win10 stomping the "Windows Boot Manager" no longer breaks anything. It can stomp all it wants.

About that Rufus boot stick: this seems like a chicken/egg problem and it is: without a Win10 machine you can't make the stick. I run Parallels VM on my Hackie and have for 3 years. It turns out that the through-access to USB devices is good enough to allow Win10 VM to format and write a USB stick, so I just ran Rufus in the VM and made my boot medium. If you didn't have a WinDoze machine (even virtual) then I guess you'd have to write the ISO to a DVD and try booting it from your optical drive (if you had one).

Ignorance is expensive (in time and grief) but sometimes banging your head on a problem stupidly is how you learn the shape of the problem :) After that painful education, the guides and comments make more sense. UEFI is not just initials to me now, and I have a much better -- far from expert, but better -- idea of what the boot sequence is really doing.

What I think happened to me the first time was this: not being able to hide my MacOS boot SSD because of the limitations of ASUS BIOS, I got stomped by Win10 right away, on the install or first boot. So I couldn't get back to Clover and lost my Mojave boot. That's when confusion and panic took over, and my blundering attempts to fix the problem ate three days when I could have been doing something way more fun. Ah well, as the Demotivators Calendar once said, Perhaps the Purpose of Your Life is to be a Warning to Others.

Many thanks to GoingBald whose answers were helpful and patient considering how ignorant some of the questions were :)

[I am hoping and praying and crossing my fingers that turning SATA back on will not derail the win10 boot. I'll be back here looking for shoulders to cry on if it does!]

[update: no harm done, sata disks no problem. Clover multiboot still working and all Win10 games running with great fps. success at last!]
 
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Suggest the first thing you do is disable the automatic updates for Win10.
2nd thing to do is de-bloat it - see
Expand the first comment below the video for links to text walk through and script files.
You only want to install the security updates - put off the "feature" updates as long as possible.
 
@GN thanks for the reminder, I did in fact "postpone" WinDoze updates immediately after boot, having been warned by other fora. I also Just Said No to all of their "let us surveil you" options at install time.

But I did not know about bloatware. Will read the comments and get educated. It won't remove stuff that I have deliberately installed, will it? I'd hate to corrupt my Steam or ASUS ROG GPU drivers/tools installation.

Everything working on new clean Win10 install, all games playing with terrific performance, finally happy.
 
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@GN thanks for the reminder, I did in fact "postpone" WinDoze updates immediately after boot, having been warned by other fora. I also Just Said No to all of their "let us surveil you" options at install time.

But I did not know about bloatware. Will read the comments and get educated. It won't remove stuff that I have deliberately installed, will it? I'd hate to corrupt my Steam or ASUS ROG GPU drivers/tools installation.

Everything working on new clean Win10 install, all games playing with terrific performance, finally happy.
No worries about anything you installed post installation of Win10 - only removes Win10 bloatware and spyware - also speeds up the system quite a bit. You will be surprised at how much faster it boots.
 
Well that will be something to look forward to, as the boot is a bit sluggish compared to Mojave.

The bloatware remover did ask me about installing something called .NET -- it sounded harmless enough and googling didn't turn up any reports of malware by that name, so I permitted it.

It's amazing how difficult it is to do certain simple and obvious things in Win10. Makes me really appreciate MacOS. For example, I want my Ctrl key to be just above the left Shift key -- in other words, swap Ctrl and CapsLock on most keyboards. Under MacOS this is easy, changing modifier key bindings in Preferences. In Win10 it's obscure and requires editing hex strings, unless (ta-da!) you obtain a nifty little tool kit called SysInternals :)

btw, should I turn my "recipe, solved" post above into a top level new post with a relevant Subject so it's easier for others to find? like "Dual Boot with Two Internal SSDs Active"?
 
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(...) I want my Ctrl key to be just above the left Shift key -- in other words, swap Ctrl and CapsLock on most keyboards. Under MacOS this is easy, changing modifier key bindings in Preferences. In Win10 it's obscure and requires editing hex strings, unless (ta-da!) you obtain a nifty little tool kit called SysInternals :)

Hey man! I wanted to reply to you because I've been reading some of your messages in the past few days, and I love how excited you are about the hackintosh world. Reminds me of myself a couple years ago when I got annoyed by Windows Vista and decided to give it a try and installed Snow Leopard on my machine. Bad news: You'll probably never go back to being a (full time) Windows user.

Also, even thought I have almost 10 years of hackintosh experience, your posts about dual booting have actually being very helpful to me. It's been years since I last did dual booting, and things have changed a bit, so you helped me learn about the new quirks introduced by Win 10. Thanks man! And happy hackintoshing!
 
Hi albertodlh -- Actually I'm very new to the WinDoze world, always avoided it like the plague but then I had to do a bit of devel with the Nextion device and the only editor tool was a Win10 app so... that got me into running Parallels under MacOS. Then I started wanting to run a couple of Win-only Steam games and... that got me into the whole dual-boot thing. But I started out with Linux, then drifted into MacOS (because it was still *nix under the hood). Win10 is a very weird world, to me. I try not to know anything about it :)
 
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