UEFI Secure Boot & OS X Mavericks

[InActive962152]

I have a new Haswell 4670 system (Gigabyte Z87M-D3H MB) with a UEFI Windows 8. 1 Pro installation. All hardware follows CustoMac recommendations, so I'm looking to install Mavericks. My system currently has Secure Boot enabled in my UEFI/BIOS.

To install Mavericks I assume I'll need to disabled Secure Boot, but I can't find any categorical documentation substantiating this assumption, and also know that if I do that then Windows 8.1 will whinge about Secure Boot not being set up correctly and will place an annoying watermark on the Windows desktop.

Is my assumption that Secure Boot will need to be disabled (and CSM enabled) to install OS X correct, or will I be able to leave secure boot on and still install Mavericks?

Thanks.

 

[Stork]

Did you see the Guides menu at the top of the page? See the 10.9 UniBeast Installation Guide.

 

[InActive962152]

Yes, I did follow the guide to the letter. To give you a bit of background I have 3 physical drives: A 480 GB SSD with Windows 8.1 Pro UEFI install (This was what I installed first); A 320 GB platter hard drive containing my OSX Mavericks install (formatted exactly as the TonyMacX86 Mavericks guide advises); A 1.5 TB platter hard drive for all my data and personal docs formatted as exFAT.

With reference to BIOS setup for Gigabyte motherboards the guide says to load "Optimised defaults" which I did, but doesn't specifically speak about UEFI or Secure boot, nor Windows 8.1 UEFI installs for that matter. On my Gigabyte Z87M-D3H motherboard loading optimised defaults enables UEFI (and also enables Legacy Device Boot Support and disables Secure Boot). I can't work out a way of booting Mavericks with legacy bios disabled - That is UEFI boot only. I assume this is because Chimera is a MBR boot manager, and is not UEFI compatible. But that's only my guess, I can't seem to find any webpages that confirm or deny this categorically.

When I have UEFI enabled in BIOS (and Legacy Support also enabled) and have the OSX drive first in boot order priority it will boot the Windows 8.1 UEFI install in preference to OSX even though the OSX drive is first in the BIOS boot order. That is Chimera boot loader is completely ignored and it just jumps straight into Windows 8.1. In this BIOS configuration I can F12 boot to OSX, but that's hardly convenient, nor optimal, since I have to hammer F12 to get the 1-time boot menu. I'd prefer to boot into a boot loader (like Chimera or Grub) that gives me a menu of my installed operating systems and allows me to boot whichever I choose at the time (without having to mess around with BIOS settings). With legacy BIOS disabled it hides the OSX install completely from the boot F12 menu (assumedly because the Chimera boot loader is set up for MBR booting rather than UEFI). I can enable "Legacy only" (disables UEFI) and this will allow me to boot to OSX using Chimera, but this then disables booting of my UEFI Windows 8.1 Pro install. Chimera will show Windows in its boot menu, however when you try and boot Windows 8.1 from Chimera I get an error message stating that there's something wrong with my Windows installation, and advises me that I need to run Windows Recovery. Switching back to UEFI+Legacy configurations means that Windows 8.1 will load again, ignoring Chimera.

Chimera seems to hate UEFI Windows 8.1 I really don't want to have to reinstall Windows 8.1 again as non-UEFI, and I'd much prefer to have both OSX and Windows 8.1 booting in a UEFI only BIOS configuration. I'd also like to be able to enable secure boot if possible, since having secure boot disabled places a watermark over the desktop in Windows 8.1 UEFI installs.

I have also looked into Clover, but have been hesitant to give it a try since I've seen others having problems installing it over Chimera. I also don't know for sure if it would do any better in this situation. It appears to support EFI, but again I've been unable to find any documentation regarding how well it does booting Windows 8.1 UEFI installs.

 

[nguyenmac]

If you have UEFI enabled, you have to use Clover UEFI to boot to Mavericks. Chimera/Chameleon is legacy bootloader.

When you have UEFI enabled + Secure boot disabled, you can use Clover UEFI to boot Mavericks and Windows UEFI. However, you will get a watermark in Windows 8.1 that Secure boot is not configured properly. If you enable Secure boot in BIOS, the watermark disappears, but system will always boot to Windows and ignore Clover. That's how Secure boot works.

So there are possible solutions for you:

- UEFI enabled + Secure boot disabled+ Clover UEFI bootloader: you can keep your existing Windows UEFI, but the watermark will appear, you also have to find the correct way to config Clover.
- UEFI disabled + reinstall Legacy Windows + Chimera bootloader: you have to reinstall Windows in legacy mode, but no watermark and easier install.

 

[InActive962152]

Thank you very much your your response, Nguyenmac!

It looks like installing Clover might be my best option. Do you know of any straightforward guides? I've done some googling and have come up mostly empty-handed. I found your guide for installing Clover on HP Probook but wasn't sure which parts would/wouldn't apply in my circumstance. I also found this guide on Insanelymac but again wasn't sure which parts would apply because with the Unibeast install I didn't need to fuss with any DSDT fixes, everything pretty much worked out of the box: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/293574-uefi-dual-boot-osx-mavericks-and-win-881-with-clover/

Otherwise I'll just reinstall Win8 in legacy mode.

 

[nguyenmac]

Take a look here:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/alternate-bootloaders/113679-using-unibeast-create-clover-installer.html

http://www.tonymacx86.com/alternate...-user-clover-plz-read-configuring-clover.html

 

[InActive962152]

Thanks again!

 

[InActive962152]

I followed the guide in the first link, and everything appeared to worked fine when creating the Clover USB stick.

I created the USB partition as a GUID FAT32 partition as the first link advises, followed the Unibeast 10.9 guide otherwise the same, installed Clove to this USB stick, copied my kexts to the EFI/Clover/Kext/10.9 folder, and lastly copied Multibeast and Kext Wizard onto the same USB stick for after the reinstall. I didn't bother making my own config.plist as I couldn't make sense of Clover Configurator. I rebooted from UEFI:USB and Clover bootloader displayed, however the boot options did not list the USB Mavericks installer I had just created, and only three non-windows boot options displayed: "Mac OSX from Mac HDD" (this got me back into my chimera OSX install), "External UEFI from UEFI" and "Internal UEFI from UEFI. The second two just restarted Clover, so I was left no other option but to boot back into OSX. When I did I found that the USB stick no longer mounts (It did before booting Clover).

I opened Disk Utility and have found that the partition on the USB stick has a different partition name of "disk3s2" now, whereas before it was named "USB" as per the Unibeast guide. So I have no idea what happened. This partition isn't mountable anymore either.

 

[nguyenmac]

Try another USB stick

 

[InActive962152]

Still no good, even with a brand new USB stick. The Unibeast install works, as does the Clover install. No errors whatsoever. However as soon as I reboot into Clover the partition appears to be corrupted.

Clover appears to install correctly, the EFI partition mounts on the desktop, and I can copy over my kexts and even my additional tools like multibeast. But as soon as I reboot, while Clover will display, there is no "OSX Installer" boot option, so I can't kick off the Mavericks install. Also when I use Chimera to boot back into my existing Mavericks (non-uefi install) the USB stick refuses to mount like it did prior to installing Clover.

I've even used your HP Probook Clover guide to use as a cross-reference to make sure I'm doing things correctly, and I can't see why this isn't working.

Edit: An old-school stage 1 Gentoo Linux install is easier to get working than Clover.