peterwholesale Posted January 20, 2016 Share Posted January 20, 2016 Hey guys, I was wondering if it would be possible for me to use clover to be able to boot windows and have it see a full 4tb HDD on legacy hardware? I have used a UEFI enabled computer to install Windows on the 4TB hard drive, but obviously when I plug that drive into the non-uefi computer it won't load. I was wondering if I could use clover to make it work? I tried using a mac with a HDD caddy to install clover to it, but I think it says that clover couldn't be installed to that drive. Yet when I format that drive in apple's disk manager then I am able to install clover to the drive. I believe I need to somehow do a "protective mbr" or "hybrid mbr" as the motherboard is non-uefi so it won't read a GPT disk, so I need to probably have clover install into a MBR partition on the disk so it can then start the GPT partition that contains windows (I can have different partitioning schemes on one drive right?) So far: I have been able to successfully boot up the UEFI version of windows in the legacy boot hardware by using a USB drive with clover on it. The computer starts up, loads up clover and then I select to boot off the drive and it loads up no problem. Thing is I need to do is somehow have the 4tb drive contain clover. I've been working on this for a couple days, if anyone can point me the right way I would extremely appreciate it!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterwholesale Posted January 20, 2016 Author Share Posted January 20, 2016 I am using gdisk to take my windows UEFI install that I made on a UEFI computer and I am writing the protective MBR to it. now I guess I would need to mount the EFI partition and have clover to install to it. However clover does not see the mounted drive in the installer and is unable to install clover to it this is the output of gdisk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacUser2525 Posted January 20, 2016 Share Posted January 20, 2016 A BIOS limitation is just that the BIOS will never allow the whole capacity to be seen to the OS as it will never have the ability to read the entire disk that is unless you can find updated AHCI driver to hack into the BIOS or one already in newer manufacturers one. You need similar to what I have in my z800 to allow it to use my 4tb drives an add in card mine are based on the marvell 8192 chipset I think it is added bonus since they are SATA3 disks and so is the cards onboard BIOS they run at that speed and are bootable as the BIOS now sees the disks attached to the card as a boot option. Edit: If only wanting windows only then most drive manufactures have software to allow you to trick the machine into seeing the whole capacity do not believe they are bootable though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterwholesale Posted January 20, 2016 Author Share Posted January 20, 2016 The thing is I can see the whole capacity of the drive if I use my USB drive to boot clover (on the non-uefi computer) and start the UEFI version of Windows off the local hard drive. It will boot up and show the full 4TB hdd accessible. However if I don't use clover to start up the computer it will fail to boot, as it cannot read the GPT disk. The only thing is is how do I get clover to be on the 4TB hdd, and not have to have a USB drive to boot up the computer? I believe it's something to do with protective mbr, or hybrid mbr? Either way, the windows install will create an EFI partition but it will be on a GPT disk. I am guessing I should be able to use gdisk to convert that disk to have a protective mbr, so that now the motherboard can read the EFI partition, then I should be able to mount the EFI partition and copy over the EFI files from clover to it. Does this sound like how it should be done? BTW: I can try whatever you guys suggest, I don't care about the data on the drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterwholesale Posted January 21, 2016 Author Share Posted January 21, 2016 Okay i think i may have figured it out: I will try taking my 4tb hdd and install windows to it on a uefi computer, then i will shrink the partition size, then i'll take that drive and plug it into my non-uefi computer and boot it up with the clover usb drive with a mac os x iso, install mac os x on the computer in the remaining partition, then boot up in mac os x to run clover, then clover will stay resident on the hdd, then i can delete the mac os x partition and boot back into windows and extend the partition the rest of the way... does that sound like it would work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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