Clover NVRAM problems

[naquaada]

There are some issues with Clover's NVRAM saving method if you are using an enchanced system. A real Mac handles its NVRAM very easy: It's a flash memory chip with the settings for every installed operating system, which is usually one, and you have one hardware configuration which is fully supported.

 

On a Hackintosh the NVRAM must be more flexible. You can use multiple harddrives with lots of different operating systems and the hardware components can be very different. On modern boards you also can select between UEFI and Legacy BIOS.

 

My Gigabyte Z77 boards have trouble saving the NVRAM and so the Clover settings. Boards from Asus, Zotac, Supermicro and a Thinkpad X61t does not have these problems. All systems are using Legacy BIOS, boot mode 7. On the Gigabyte boards I often had problems with saving the theme and the boot drive, now the boot selector is stuck on Sierra although Mavericks is entered in Clover Configurator. If I put an USB stick with Clover in an Z77 USB 3.0 port, Clover only uses default settings with the grey standard theme.

 

The system I'm using is not a very standard one. Usually Clover is installed on the boot partition. But if your boot system crashes or you want to reinstall, your Clover settings are gone, too. So I installed Clover on a very small HFS+ partition, MBR, primary, active, first partition of the drive. I also tested FAT32. This works great, but Clover still saves the NVRAM to the boot partition. I also have an USB stick with my personal data on the drive which contains a copy of Clover. If this small boot partition crashes, there's still a backup on USB. Weirdly, the Gigabyte boards prefer to boot from this stick than from the HD, although it is disabled in the BIOS boot list. To make it more complicated, I have installed several OS X versions, Sierra, Mavericks, Snow Leopard, Leopard. All have special features I need, so I want to keep them. But now it's possible to have four NVRAM settings...

 

I don't know if anybody has more than OS X version installed, but as you can see it can be problematic to save NVRAM data to the boot partition. I tried some Clover NVRAM path settings, but they also didn't work - bad to write NVRAM settings in the NVRAM if NVRAM writing doesn't work correctly... So what about saving it to the partition Clover is installed on? This would eliminate the problem to have multiple NVRAM settings. If you have this on an USB-Stick it would be as close to a real Mac as possible: a flash memory chip with the settings for all operating systems - which could be more than one. Maybe the USB 3.0 problem will fixed this way too because it has the NVRAM settings directy available.

 

This method can also be expanded: There could be a list to add bootable volumes to save the NVRAM to multiple drives at once. This would make the system safer: A HFS+ data partition on any drive could be made bootable and the Clover EFI folder will be copied to it. So you have many bootloader backups. It's also possible to try different configurations because only the NVRAM is automatically saved on all partitions. To dectect the partitions, the volumes should be entered in Clover Configurator with the volume name, but then be automatically translated to its corresponding GUID value. The paths for the NVRAM must of course be in Clover's plist file.

 

Greets, naquaada.

[liujianwei]

legacy clover prefer boot usb than hdd

my ga-h61m nvram works as expect like auto select last boot partition

[naquaada]

I have five boards and Clover doesn't save the boot volume and the timeout. The last version 3889 is installed, older boards need the last 32bit-version 3882. Setting the BIOS to UEFI and 'LastBootVolume' in Clover has no effect. Even using the GUID doesn't work.