[How To] Remove Extra Clover BIOS Boot Entries & Prevent Further Problems

[Adventuro-3]

Clover is a great boot loader, however, some people are still having problems. I think a lot of this has to do with the design of the systems. Many have extra backup internal hard drives or partitions with legacy boot loaders or previous Clover systems. While this may have been fine in the past, with Clover and the newer OS X's, this does not work on many motherboards. 

 

Often it happens that Clover and El Capitan (or Yosemite) will install and seem to work fine, but then degenerate to an unusable state. I chased this problem for quite a while before I found the solution (see Source #1 below).

 

Look at the boot options list in your BIOS. If you see entries that are not physical drives, it is likely that you are encountering some form of this problem.

 

First, remove all of the extra boot entries.

 

0. You COULD try to reflash the BIOS and you MAY be done. This worked on my 6 series board, but not on my current 9 series. If it works for you, skip to the second section on preventing the problem from happening again. If this does not work, or if you really don't want to have to flash the BIOS, then continue.

 

1. Disconnect all drives except one with only one instance of Clover. If you only have a partitioned drive with ANY backups on the partitions, it is probably best to boot with only the Clover Install USB stick and no other drives attached.

 

2. Boot your system and press the right arrow key when the Clover boot loader appears.

 

2b. If you cannot get to Clover, reset your CMOS and try again, this time going into the BIOS and selecting your physical drive for boot override. DO NOT touch any other entries at this point as it may lock the BIOS and you will need to reset the CMOS and start over again. It SHOULD work, so keep trying – I don't know another way.

 

3. Use the right and left arrow keys to select the Clover UEFI Shell and hit enter. The following screen should appear, and either let it time out, or press a key:

 

 

4. At the Shell> prompt type

bcfg boot dump

the results should look something like this:

 

 

5. You need to remove any entry that is not a physical hard drive. As far as I know, if it is a real physical disk, it will list as DevPath - HD.

 

 

 

The code to remove an entry looks like this:

bcfg boot rm XX

where XX is the Option number. In this example, I remove Option 02 with

bcfg boot rm 02

 

 

 

If you have a LOT of bogus entries, it is best to do just a few, and then type the command

bcfg boot dump

again before repeating the process. When I first did this on my ASUS H97 board, I had at least 10 entries to clear so it took several iterations of this process.

 

6. When your have removed all entries that are not physical hard drives, type

exit

and press the return key. This will get you back to the main Clover screen. At this point, I would choose restart from the Clover choices and enter the BIOS to check if your work was successful.

 

 

 

Second, rethink your system design and backup scheme to prevent this from happening again.

 

• Design your system so that there is only one disk (an SSD if you like speed) that has an EFI partition that contains the Clover boot loader. Of course in OS X, all (I think) formatted drives will have an EFI partition, but you do not want two EFI partitions that contain ANY boot loader – that includes Clover, Chameleon, Chimera or whatever.

 

• On some boards, it may help to set the boot options for all devices to UEFI Only (didn't make a difference on my board, but did speed up boot time).

 

• Currently, I have a 250 GB M.2 SSD as my boot disk, and the others are just for data. For backups I use EXTERNAL DISKS, so that I don't reencounter the same problems. The external drives are connected only when I need to backup. [i am working on a GUIDE for Clonezilla.] External USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 drive enclosures are quite reasonably priced at the moment, so I encourage you to do this as well. I think you could use Time Machine for data backup, but I have no experience with this.

 

• Currently I am only running Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. It would be great to hear about successful system designs in the same way I am discussing here from others who are also running Windows, Linux or other versions of Mac OS X

 

 

 

Source #1 - Thanks to trioset

[vusun123]

Or you could use EasyUEFI on Windows ( requires UEFI-based Windows to be installed ) to remove it

[84mac]

THAT ^^^^^  bit of detective work SO totally rocks, sir... I've been running down this ghost-in-the-machine for over two years...

 

I knew there was something goofy going on - (besides myself - mea culpa)...

 

thanks for that!!!... thank you, thank you... anachronaut... THANK YOU !!!!...

 

everybody/anybody else?  - comments?...

[xenophon]

At last, a strategy that makes sense and does not involve voodoo.

 

Thank you.

[PippoX0]

Yeah, i will try it

[xenophon]

Can't claim expertise on this subject, but what I found is that:

 

- you select "Disabled" under "Boot Priority" for all, except the boot disk

- under Clover, you remove the entries, as per Anachronaut's advice

- you reboot, enter BIOS and sure enough they are disabled

- retry "bcfg" in Clover, and the entries are back!

 

What am I doing wrong? How can one make this stick?

 

TIA

 

Xen

[Adventuro-3]

Can't claim expertise on this subject, but what I found is that:

 

- you select "Disabled" under "Boot Priority" for all, except the boot disk

- under Clover, you remove the entries, as per Anachronaut's advice

- you reboot, enter BIOS and sure enough they are disabled

- retry "bcfg" in Clover, and the entries are back!

 

What am I doing wrong? How can one make this stick?

 

TIA

 

Xen

 

I think you misunderstood. You do not disable all of the internal hard drives except one in the BIOS. To make this work, you need to physically disconnect the drives, leaving only one drive with a boot loader connected to the system. Then you need to look at your boot list in the BIOS. If you still have entries there other than your hard disk, then remove them.

 

To make it stick, you need to remove the boot loaders from the other disks before you connect them back to your system. This probably means saving the data elsewhere, reformatting the disks and then restoring the data (probably other methods, but I am no expert on this). Or, you could put the drives in an external USB 2.0 or 3.0 case with the boot loaders intact and connect them only when you need them. You shouldn't have a problem with either method.

 

Here is what my BIOS looked like after doing this. The only real boot drive is my M.2 Samsung. [Well, except the other Samsung at the sata1 port - but this is and IDENTICAL CLONE to the boot M.2 drive at sata5, so I think the BIOS is ignoring it in the boot list.] The other "boot" entry is a blank MS-DOS formatted 8GB flash drive that the BIOS thinks for some reason is bootable - this does go away when it is removed. (The 2TB drive is about to be removed and the Samsung at sata1 normally sits in an external case now.)

 

 

 

[xenophon]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'll try to figure this out - the part about physical removal, I don't like at all...

[Adventuro-3]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'll try to figure this out - the part about physical removal, I don't like at all...

 

Great. Here is a bit more on this. After messing about with this, I noticed that the entries that I had on the above screen shots did not all look like physical disks. "UEFI OS(238475MB)" is not a physical disk. So I removed the Samsung SSD from sata1, and put it back in its external case. Since it is about to be removed anyway when I get the chance, I disconnected the SATA  and power connectors to the 2TB drive at the same time (it is blank at the moment anyway, and I do not need the storage space). After boot, here is what the relevant parts of the BIOS looked like:

 

 

 

After the first attempt to remove the offending items, it looked like this:

 

 

 

This time there was no physical drive listed with bcfg boot dump, so I deleted all entries and restarted. This is the final result:

 

 

 

Now the system is happy again and back to its stable state.

 

If I had kept everything connected on my system, it would have just kept adding another "UEFI OS(238475MB)" to the system every time I rebooted. Eventually (as happened before) it would "lock" the BIOS requiring me to go through the "reset CMOS" and then delete the extra entries.

[xenophon]

Now the system is happy again and back to its stable state.

Still, it's hard to swallow that one must remove storage disks from a personal computer in order to achieve stable function.

 

Based on your experience about this procedure, does it resolve the infamous "wake after sleep reboot" issue? If so, can one re-attach the disks and get away with it?  Prevent Clover from populating the damn bcfg list, maybe? What about the meaning of life - do we get any closer?

 

Thanks for documenting your efforts on this one.

[Adventuro-3]

Still, it's hard to swallow that one must remove storage disks from a personal computer in order to achieve stable function.

 

Based on your experience about this procedure, does it resolve the infamous "wake after sleep reboot" issue? If so, can one re-attach the disks and get away with it?  Prevent Clover from populating the damn bcfg list, maybe? What about the meaning of life - do we get any closer?

 

Thanks for documenting your efforts on this one.

 

You just need to remove the storage disks until they have the boot loader removed, at least on my system. If there is no boot loader installed on the drives, they should cause no problems.

 

My system never had the "wake after sleep reboot" problem, but it did have a black screen after sleep that required a hard reset (with the switch). This has mostly solved this problem (still shows up once in a while, and I don't know why).

[xenophon]

You're right. I was hoping that this Clover bcfg procedure was the elusive fix for the freeze you mentioned in your other thread.

 

Can't hurt to hope.

 

On the EFI boot loader issue: all Disk Utility-formatted disks have an (empty) EFI partition, which, I guess, does not cause BIOS trouble, unless a bootloader resides there. In my case, I had a genuine Apple /EFI/BOOT folder (containing a "firmware" file), on one of my backup disks, and I promptly removed it.

 

Clover's "bcfg dump" lists all disks, even ones I have disabled under BIOS Boot Priority.

 

Trivial issues aside, I think that your statement that Clover Z97 systems may "degenerate to an unusable state" is an important one.

[Adventuro-3]

You're right. I was hoping that this Clover bcfg procedure was the elusive fix for the freeze you mentioned in your other thread.

 

Can't hurt to hope.

 

On the EFI boot loader issue: all Disk Utility-formatted disks have an (empty) EFI partition, which, I guess, does not cause BIOS trouble, unless a bootloader resides there. In my case, I had a genuine Apple /EFI/BOOT folder (containing a "firmware" file), on one of my backup disks, and I promptly removed it.

 

Clover's "bcfg dump" lists all disks, even ones I have disabled under BIOS Boot Priority.

 

Trivial issues aside, I think that your statement that Clover Z97 systems may "degenerate to an unusable state" is an important one.

 

It actually might be the solution to the freeze issue, but that other post was with my Gigabyte Z68 board. I have put that aside for now, as I originally thought it was broken. When I have time (and buy a new cheap case to house it) I will try to resurrect it. I will post the results of my efforts when (if) I get them.

 

My current computer did not wake the display from sleep this morning, requiring a reset. Since then, however, sleep is working properly. 

 

My Z97 board certainly did degenerate into an unusable state. Resetting the CMOS, I was just able to boot Clover and fix the problem. If I touched any of the "phantom" items in the boot priority list, the BIOS would freeze and I would have to start over. There were so many of the "phantom" items in the boot list it was "full", and I think it was almost overwriting itself, causing the problem.

 

A side note. With the Samsung SSD attached to sata1, Mac OS X would choose this as the boot drive, no matter which drive I chose in Clover. My main boot drive, the Samsung M.2 SSD was attached at sata5 due to the design of the motherboard. It seems that on this system, Mac OS X prioritizes to the drive with the lowest sata number, given that all other things are equal. There are certainly some strange things going on that should be researched by people who know a lot more about these things than I do.

[PPCnostalgic]

@Anachronaut I'm on a non uefi motherboard and I need to remove some entries, if I choose uefi shell at clover boot screen nothing happens, the screen turns into black and I have to force shut down....

[ANGGAX]

Exactly what I'm need. I'm curious why my boot entry like "Mac OS X" is always show even I'm remove all physical disk. Have several identical entry is bit annoying. Windows easy UEFI looks make this job easier, but my windows still legacy, so i'll try clover UEFI shell  instead. Thank you for this solution ♪

[Adventuro-3]

@Anachronaut I'm on a non uefi motherboard and I need to remove some entries, if I choose uefi shell at clover boot screen nothing happens, the screen turns into black and I have to force shut down....

 

I don't know much about using this with a non uefi motherboard. It is likely that this method will not work without a uefi bios. I would try reflashing the bios and see if that does the trick. Make sure to make note of any particular bios settings before the reflash.

[PPCnostalgic]

Thank you for your replay. You said << Make sure to make note of any particular bios settings before the reflash. >> True. My Bios has tons of settings, many of them have been modified to make the machine stable and reliable after Overclock, for sure I've better to skip unwanted entries with arrow keys than doing a reflash and redoing all those settings.... Moreover if I'll upgrade the system from Apple Store installer I'll get unwanted entrie(s) again, as the Installer icon at Clover bootscreen will stay even after upgrade is done. This is the downside of an old X58 motherboard (non Uefi) like mine, but it's not that deal breaker, the machine still runs like a champ!

 

GA-X58A-UD7 Xeon W3680 @4,40Ghz 24Gb GTX760 Geekbench 19500pts

[kawaxi]

Just wondering if there is any update on the solution  matter??? I have windows legacy on my SSD and MacOs in another hardrive, Reinstalling windows is not an option for me.... Is there any other way to fix the multiple volumes problem (multiple boot entries)?    

[SavageAUS]

I have done this method and I still end up getting a new phantom every reboot from osx. I removed all physical drives and only left the one with clover (ssd) and removed all entries via clover rebooted then shut down and added my drives back and it's still happening. Could this be because I have a windows 10 install on another ssd? Windows is on port 0, osx on port 1.

I'm wondering if I need to reinstall both operating systems and if I do in which order should I do it to stop these entries from reoccurring?

[Adventuro-3]

I have done this method and I still end up getting a new phantom every reboot from osx. I removed all physical drives and only left the one with clover (ssd) and removed all entries via clover rebooted then shut down and added my drives back and it's still happening. Could this be because I have a windows 10 install on another ssd? Windows is on port 0, osx on port 1.

I'm wondering if I need to reinstall both operating systems and if I do in which order should I do it to stop these entries from reoccurring?

 

This behavior is apparently due to a bug in the bios, as it reportedly also affects Linux machines. The Windows drive contains its own boot loader on the boot partition of the drive from the install of Windows. This is probably why it still adds entries after reconnecting the drives. From my understanding, the solution is to remove the boot loader from the Windows drive, and just let Clover handle everything. I have no idea how to do this and still keep the Windows drive bootable. If you try something like this and are successful, please post your method so others can benefit. Apparently, you need to have only one installed boot loader (Clover) for all of your operating system drives.

[SavageAUS]

This behavior is apparently due to a bug in the bios, as it reportedly also affects Linux machines. The Windows drive contains its own boot loader on the boot partition of the drive from the install of Windows. This is probably why it still adds entries after reconnecting the drives. From my understanding, the solution is to remove the boot loader from the Windows drive, and just let Clover handle everything. I have no idea how to do this and still keep the Windows drive bootable. If you try something like this and are successful, please post your method so others can benefit. Apparently, you need to have only one installed boot loader (Clover) for all of your operating system drives.

Yeah I thought as much but I have no idea how to remove the windows bootloader and keep it bootable. Would it help to install osx on one drive first then keep it connected and install windows on the other? Maybe windows will then use the efi partition on the osx drive?

Just a thought.

[isotropy]

Hey guys, I just wanted to bump this thread to see if there was any new information on this and/or how to fix it. I'm getting the same thing - A duplicate Boot Option entry every time I reboot OSX. I'm up to 46 entries now. - I have a GA-Z170X-UD5-TH motherboard and a 256GB SSD for Windows and 512GB SSD for OSX in the machine with a bunch of other drives as well. I've attached some picts. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Cerberus73]

I have exactly the same Motherboard as isotropy, and am having exactly the same issues. Surely there has to be some way to prevent all these extra boot option entries so it only reflects drives with bootable operating systems on them. The other solutions offered such as only using external drives.. No use to me. i need to dual boot to windows, and i need to have large amounts of storage. Surely the coders of clover have more than 1 drive attached to there rigs. and have included this in there code.

[fusion71au]

@Cerberus73, @isotropy,

 

My suggestion would be to set your BIOS to boot from only the one hard drive and keep all the EFI boot-loaders in that drive's EFI System Partition. 

 

The easiest approach would be to set the Windows Hard Drive as the boot drive and only use its EFI to boot:

 

1.  Move the EFI folder containing Clover from the OSX hard drive over to the EFI Partition on the Windows Hard Drive - see Manually install Clover in Windows.

2.  Boot to Windows and install EasyUEFI

3.  Use EasyUEFI to create an entry for CLOVERX64.efi and give it first priority in UEFI booting

4.  Delete all the other duplicate entries

5.  Reboot and use Clover to launch OSX or UEFI Windows

 

Good Luck!

[scj312]

I also had this issue on my Z170 mobo, used EasyUEFI to remove the existing entries, added one pointing to CLOVERX64.efi, and renamed the BOOT folder in my EFI partition and the extra entries stopped appearing.