Manually Installing Clover on EFI Partition
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.
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.
Giving command for this would have def made the process easier to understand.
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.
Can I install Clover on OS X partition NOT efi partition?
Yes, I think you can install Clover on that OS-X partition, but if you don’t put the bootloader on MBR, then it will not give you the option to choose from the preferred OS at the boot time. I hope this makes sense.
Regards, Akbar
Thanks for the response,I have a third party bootloader I just want to boot Clover from the MBR partition, trying to search guide how to install Clover manually on MBR partition.
Thanks Again.