[WARNING] Clover will break your REAL Mac, use with caution

[KanzakiMirai]

I did the same on both my MacBook Pro's - just a single boot from the Clover EFI Bootloader broke them. Now they are both in the service center.
I come to confirm that one should never use Clover on a real MacBook!

If you guys want to do a dual-boot usb stick, please do use rEFInd as your primary boot manager, and mark the clover boot option as "DONT BOOT ON REAL MAC"

 

[kazee]

I'm not an expert at all, but I think that Clover has nothing to do with the EFI eeprom chip on the logic board. It is just installed on the EFI partition of your hard drive, so probably the problem is more related to the EFI partition.

One time when I was working to install on a Lenovo laptop a hackintosh, I installed clover by error on my iMac's fusion drive, so I had to remove the drives from it and install os x on them again from another Mac. Then it booted again.

In fact there is an USB image that allows you to download El Capitan from the App Store on a Mac Pro 1.1 or 2.1 that it's an Clover USB with no injections, it only changes the Smbios for one of the Mac Pro 3.1, so you can download El Capitan on those Macs.

I guess that the only way that clover can brake your system is if any kind of SSDT, injection or something similar makes a hardware issue by overheating something. But I have no idea about this.

No expert either but as someone who accidentally booted using a clover boot loaded that led to an effed up iMac I will say you are wrong. The clover install went fine, it was on the reboot it was screwed up. The machine was never able to boot after that. No keyboard commands worked, nada. Just boots to a black screen. I replaced the bios chip and now it boots to a folder. Trying to boot from a USB disc still boots to clover boot loader. So that clover thing is still installed somewhere.

 

[charlesbelisle]

I send it to a local store to re-flash my BIOS/EFI bootrom

To what kind of shop did you sent your MBP? Apple Store? Or a local "PC" shop?

 

[Karl-Hungus]

rEFInd is for real macs, not clover lol

 

[vulgo]

rEFInd is for real macs, not clover lol

rEFInd is not only for real macs at all. Much less so than the original rEFIt.

 

[Karl-Hungus]

rEFInd is not only for real macs at all. Much less so than the original rEFIt.

What else can you use rEFInd on? Still though, I thought it was obvious which bootloader works with what hardware.

 

[vulgo]

What else can you use rEFInd on?

Anything with EFI firmware... http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ says:

As already noted, rEFInd is a boot manager for EFI and UEFI computers. (I use "EFI" to refer to either version unless the distinction is important.) You're likely to benefit from it on computers that boot multiple OSes, such as two or more of Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Still though, I thought it was obvious which bootloader works with what hardware.

Apparently Clover breaks real macs...

 

[Gen_]

3 things to observe about this because I'm a 2012 old hat.

1. Apple uses EFI 1.1 standard. UEFI is based on EFI 2.0 standard. This does not make them compatible (the complete opposite actually), but it does make them able to kind of understand each other. This is why one can break the other so easily. Your broken Macs are not Clover as much as they are UEFI being installed over your Apple EFI, and thus your internal NVRAM, real SMC and so many other parts no longer having 'drivers' to load in UEFI (see second sentence).

2. Some brave soul should attempt a MBR install on a disposable HDD and see if it boots. MBR Windows most certainly works so I don't see why that wouldn't (especially in that it creates a virtual 'EFI Partition' in RAM to load from/to rather than playing with the real NVRAM in your Mac).

3. If doing so, Clover is not actually helping with anything, and most of the help it would attempt would break things, so prior to this, a blank placeholder config.plist should be created. If loading safely but not booting, even auto-filled entries may need removing from Clover boot menu.

Clover used to work for Macs, not sure when that changed but probably El Cap.

 

[munky93]

Hello guys! I'm new with all this customac I've been fooling around with my home pc for some days, suddenly my macbook pro had some issues and there I went and ran my clover usb. Needless to say now its broken. After some tries reinstalling Ive reached a point where the mac just shows a folder with a question mark when turned on.

I setup a usb installer for mac, without clover this time and was able to boot with it.
I had some luck finding clover stuff in the efi volume of my HD, deleted the EFI folder completely on that volume (first mistake).

This made the clover loader disappear but now everytime I try to install macOS it reaches half progress and reboots. With no option to boot from hard drive, only usb. I've tried formatting it to FAT and back hoping to trigger a rebuild of the EFI.

Is there any way to check if I broke the ROM, or I'm just missing bootloader?
I think my issue might have another solution as I'm able to boot with an USB.
Did anyone had luck finding a way to solve this ? Maybe getting a EFI copy from another mac and placing that into my HD EFI volume could help?

 

[trs96]

I've heard of this issue for some time. What I don't understand is why those with real Macs ever try using the Clover bootloader when they can use the official Apple guide to make a createinstallmedia rescue drive/installer for their Macbook, iMac or Mac Pro. Isn't this just common sense ? Why not have one of these around the same way you keep a Unibeast drive handy for CustoMac issues ?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372