random-name Posted April 25, 2013 Share Posted April 25, 2013 Hello, I want to buy a motherboard for my first hackintosh, it will have UEFI. Is it better to use Clover instead of Chameleon? Can anyone tell me the exact differences between Clover and Chameleon? As far as I know, apple's booloader is loaded after Clover/Chameleon, so they take information from UEFI and "transform" it to be an original apple's EFI (smbios.plist is important), then pass it to apple's bootloader. Clover has mouse support, automatic kext patching etc. and wants to keep /S/L/E vanilla. What are other differences between those 2 bottloaders?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted April 25, 2013 Share Posted April 25, 2013 Chameleon doesn't take any info from the UEFI. Chameleon is booted in legacy BIOS mode, just like a standard Windows install. It then emulates Apple's efi. Clover actually directly communicates with UEFI to an extent and can be booted natively in UEFI mode, although you can also do a non-EFI install of Clover. You pretty much got all the main differences. Just a few things I can think of that Clover has: Ability to reboot to Windows via the startup disk menu, iMessage fix (I think chameleon has this now as well, though), Booting any OS in EFI mode, as well as booting any OS in legacy BIOS mode (which means you can boot chameleon through Clover if you want to), I can't really think of much else but if you search Clover has a long list of features. That doesn't mean Chameleon is bad, though, it also has its benefits. The main one being that it's much simpler to set up and it's tried-and-true. Honestly, I had a lot of trouble getting Clover working properly (mostly operator error though)... But it's working great now and I love it. But I definitely wouldn't recommend it immediately for your first hackintosh. I would get it up and running with Chameleon, use it for a few months, and once you are confident that it's stable and fully funcitonal, you can go ahead and start getting Clover working. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3.14r2 Posted April 25, 2013 Share Posted April 25, 2013 Basically if you want to use UEFI boot only, then Chameleon is NOT for you. Only Clover (AFAIK) can boot OS X with UEFI enabled, Chameleon can't. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted May 5, 2013 Share Posted May 5, 2013 Chameleon works just fine, it just has to be booted as a legacy bios disk. All UEFI boards have an option for this. So Chameleon doesn't work natively with UEFI, but it works just fine booted as a legacy disk. For what it's worth, I was using Clover but I switched back to Chameleon recently after having some odd issues with Clover I couldn't resolve (I'm on UEFI). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slice Posted May 6, 2013 Share Posted May 6, 2013 Toshiba Z930 has no legacy boot option. UEFI only. And it will be our nearest future. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlweed Posted June 4, 2013 Share Posted June 4, 2013 jamiethemorris, Can you tell me the method of booting a Gigabyte GA-x79-UD? board in legacy BIOS mode for for a particular boot target? I can change the whole board into legacy BIOS mode, but then I cannot boot my UEFI Windows installation without changing it back. On my GA-x79-UD7, it sure seems like Chameleon cannot be used when the board is in UEFI mode. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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