<< Solved >> USB Stick Does Not Reach Clover Installer

[jazzman16]

Hi everyone,
I have kind of a weird problem that I've never run into before. My USB stick shows up as a boot device in the BIOS. I select it, then it never gets to Clover. It's as if the drive is blank. The drive is definitely not blank - it's a bootable stick created with the instructions on this site. I know my USB ports are working fine, since I have a Windows installation running on a different hard drive. I made sure to disconnect that drive when I was trying to get my USB stick to boot.
I've tried all the different types of USB ports on the back panel: 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 and get the same result no matter which I use. My only thought is that a 32GB stick is freaking it out for some reason. I don't have a 16GB stick laying around, so I may try ordering one from Amazon and see if that helps.

The USB stick is a 32GB SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0

The MoBo is a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro Wifi.

Any ideas? I'm at a dead end and would appreciate any help or suggestions you all may have.

 

[jazzman16]

I tried a 16GB stick and it will not boot either.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

I tried a 16GB stick and it will not boot either.

Hi there.

Run Disk Utility on the Mac you used to create the installer USB and check what partition scheme the drive is using. It might be formatted correctly but missing the EFI folder and partition.

 

[jazzman16]

Hi there.

Run Disk Utility on the Mac you used to create the installer USB and check what partition scheme the drive is using. It might be formatted correctly but missing the EFI folder and partition.

What is the partition scheme supposed to be? The UniBeast part of the installation guide explicitly mentions MacOS Extended (Journaled) but it doesn't say anything about the partition scheme.

If there's a particular one, it may be helpful to call it out. I assumed I didn't need to change anything but apparently the MBR option wasn't correct (which was the default).

I'll give this a whirl and report back. Thanks for the ideas!

 

[UtterDisbelief]

What is the partition scheme supposed to be? The UniBeast part of the installation guide explicitly mentions MacOS Extended (Journaled) but it doesn't say anything about the partition scheme.

If there's a particular one, it may be helpful to call it out. I assumed I didn't need to change anything but apparently the MBR option wasn't correct (which was the default).

I'll give this a whirl and report back. Thanks for the ideas!

With the problem you described your USB partition scheme sounds like it's MBR, but it should be GUID.

Clover installs boot files into a hidden partition within the GUID scheme. That's where the Clover menu comes from.

 

[jazzman16]

Yep. It needed to be the GUID scheme. I had it set up as MBR, which was the default for some reason and the instructions don't say anything about checking on that.
The screenshot attached to the instructions shows it, but apparently I only read and not look at screenshots!
Thanks for the help!