Manually Installing Clover on EFI Partition

By Akbar

Once I had the Mountain Lion up and running on my HP Envy 15t-J001 machine, the next step was to setup a boot loader, so that I can boot it without the USB every time.


clover-theme

I was using Clover, and it has pretty good support for the EFI Motherboards. However, my only concern was I didn’t wanted to loose the HP Recovery partition by accident or incorrect configuration. Plus I wanted to keep the current boot loader, but still somehow boot to OS-X without using USB.

I found a workaround, when I saw the Boot from EFI file option in my BIOS start-up options. When using that option, I found that system was mounting the EFI drive, and showing all the boot loaders in that drive. This gave me clue that how if I some how manually move the Clover EFI boot-loader to this volume. Then I can select that boot-loader at my choice, and all existing system will still keep working as it’s now.

And as I found that it’s was pretty easy to do. You can mount the EFI drive easily in OS-X (it’s just FAT32 partition). Here is a very good tutorial on this:
Mounting the EFI Boot Partition on Mac OS X

The key commands here are (please go through above article first to understand what you are doing):

mkdir /Volumes/efi
sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/efi

Once the EFI drive is mounted, simply copy the EFI/Clover folder from your USB or OS-X partition (if you installed Clover on OS-X too) to root of the EFI partition. Safely, Unmount this:

sudo umount /Volumes/efi

And you are done. Now when choosing the boot options, select “Boot From EFI File”, browse to correct folder and select the Clover efi-boot loader file (32 or 64 bit depending on your OS and installation).

It should boot the Clover boot loader, and now you can choose OS-X, Windows or whatever other option you have.

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