Clover Bootloader For Windows

[Heike Fallago]

Also, the reason the guide has you boot the installation media with clover is that it puts it into efi mode, which will allow it to boot properly when it is installed. If you just install it in bios mode it will not boot properly when you try and use clover.

Is there any chance to use Clover from USB Stick to boot my existing Samsung 950 Pro WHILE RAID keeps active in BIOS and these SSDs are connected? It is stuck to black screen with only a 6. After adding legacy support it now sticks to a 7.

Clover is a little bit fussy about usb drive boot configuration I find I generally have more success with usbs made with the creation tool over those made with Rufus. In saying that alot of users here have reported success simply by switching to a different brand usb stick for the windows install. It seems clover prefers certain usb types over others maybe its a driver or usb controller thing ?

Since the Windows Installer USB drive that you have now created is UEFI compatible, it will not work when you try to boot directly from it ! This is normal because your system is not UEFI compatible.

However, it will work when you try to install Windows from Clover. This is because Clover creates a UEFI environment, even if your machine is not UEFI compatible.

What is Clover Bootloader? Perhaps it is too familiar for Hackintosh users, Clover is a specially designed boot loader that allows us to boot and install macOS on a non-Mac computer. Clover also supports booting many other OS such as Windows, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

With these simple steps, you can install the Clover Bootloader on Windows and Linux without using the installer on macOS. However, you can only boot it in UEFI mode, if you want to install Clover Legacy, use the Clover Legacy Installer.

Clover Legacy Installer is a program that I wrote to help us install Clover Legacy in just one click. However, currently it only supports running on Windows, for Linux you can use dd to install as instructed here. After installation, you will be able to boot Clover in Legacy BIOS mode. This makes it possible to boot and install macOS in this mode.

If Clover reports boot0ss: Error, try Active for the FAT32 drive where you installed Clover. Here I will use diskpart to do this. Run Command Prompt under Admin and use the following commands:

Clover Configurator is a well known application used to configure Clover. Unfortunately, this application does not support the Windows and Linux versions. We can configure Clover as guide from its official site, see here.

What is the point of this guide. Seemingly you lead people up to the point where you say to use an .exe file to load legacy. You claim the file is being seem as virus, w/e. Then you just continue the guide with no way to get the stuff needed to fulfill the steps. What is the point of this guide?

30 year tech pro here, who used to write technical documentation for elementary school teachers.

I have a legacy logic board and my windows drive has no UEFI partition. So I wished to run Clover with my Windows 7 Pro version and eventually do an OSX Snow Leopard install on yet another SSD.

I followed your directions exactly and installed Clover on both a USB stick and an internal Fat32 formatted drives.

Each time, your Legacy installer confirmed a successful installation. However I was never able to boot from either drive into Clover, no matter what I tried in settings. If you read the comments that have been made here, you must realize that your instructions above need to be completely rewritten. When creating this kind of documentation, one must never assume another persons level of knowledge. This is the biggest problem experienced most by inexperienced technical writers. They assume far too much regarding their audience. You should try watching a non-technical person follow your instructions and see where and why they fail. Then, you really need to carefully read what you have written above and completely rewrite it.

Maybe start with an explanation of the differences between UEFI and Legacy Bios and what these terms actually mean.

Also, how the user can perhaps understand which type of hardware they are dealing with.

Have a nice day.

Works great!!! Thank YOU.

I have an older UEFI motherboard that does not support NVME PCIE boot. By installing a Clover boot partition on a large mechanical GPT SATA hard drive I use for data only, and adding the nvme driver that comes with Clover, I am able to boot the NVME drive which has the Windows 10 OS. All this has sped up my computer performance 10X at least.

I think the clover legacy installer.exe file is a trojan. My computer scanned the file and it detected a trojan inside the file. Specifically, it went into win32 and tried to grab some of my stuff on chrome. It also said it got into a .A file.

I follow all the steps in this link and success. But every time I boot, I need a USB to fake UEFI, how to install the Clover Bootloader into the hard disk then next time I can boot it directly? I have only one hard disk anyway.

Tried your Clover Legacy installer files, both of them, but I keep getting an error message box saying: Missing file \usr\standalone\i386\boot0ss. The flash drive is MBR partitioned, formatted in FAT32 with a single ACTIVE partition. If I use AIO Boot Creator to install Clover and grub2, the installation is successful and grub2 loads successfully, but when I select Clover, nothing loads. The screen just goes blank, showing nothing except the grub2 background. This is in UEFI mode. In Legacy mode, selecting Clover ends with the dreaded x64 exception error! Any other ideas would be great.

This has been a slightly longer post, but I hope it is useful. The steps involved can take a while, but they are quite simple to follow. As always, if you need me to clarify anything, let me know in the comments.

Hey Hamish,

Thanks for the wonderful guide. I am currently stuck on the step of adding the .efi driver to the USB. Once I use Rufus to install the image of refind on my USB my windows 10 no longer recognizes the USB stick.

I think this can be resolved by either using the Windows Command Prompt, or using a Linux live disk. Are you comfortable with either of these options? If it comes to it, I could just upload an image of my USB stick that has the driver pre-installed.

Thanks for such a quick response! I have a basic understanding of Linux terminal. If you have an image of your USB stick that you can upload that would be amazing for me and it might also help other people that follow your guide in the future.

Hi- the title and contents of this post suggest that you are using rEFInd, yet the file paths you give are for the Clover bootloader, and the .img file seems to only contain Clover bootloader-related files. Am I crazy, or does this not have anything to do with rEFInd?

Thank you so much for such an informative post. I have cloned my Win 10 OS to an NVMe drive but my older computer can only see the drive as storage.

I tried to go the easy route that you included in your post and tried to download your file:

I left a reply earlier but it seems to have been deleted.

I followed your instruction for a Win 10 USB Clover boot disk, but no matter what I do I get no result.

My motherboard is an ASUS A88X Pro with an AMD A10 780K Processor. I have installed a WD Black SN750 1TB.

I downloaded your file: and followed your instruction, but not having any luck.

PS: if you were to supply this setup on a USB disk for Win 10 I would gladly pay for it. I have spent all day today trying to create the USB boot drive to be able to boot the NVMe which I have cloned my Win 10 OS onto.

When you have t waste that amount of time you have to consider it it is really worth the trouble.

I would have loved to have got this to work. Do you have any suggestions that may help.

One reason for this is that the USB method is a little fragile, meaning that if my kids leave their USB headphones or another thumb drive plugged in then it often stops the computer from booting up and I have to be there to troubleshoot.

Dear sir,

I have Linux loaded on a M2 and in adapter in PCIe slot. When clover boot screen comes up, I see see a picture of a hard drive and Boot Linux from Whole Disk Boot. The hard drive is highlighted and I push enter and the screen flashes and nothing happens.The Linux drive will work from a USB M2 holder.Appreciate any help, Dennis

Hello Hamish,

It is a Asus Z87-A. The Linux version is Manjaro Xfce 64bit with a Twister for PC loaded on top[Twister is used on Pi4]. And I have tried rEFind and did the same thing. Any further help would much appreciated, Dennis

What error or symptom do you have? Does the Windows installer tell you that no drives are detected? Please note that you will probably need to boot the Windows installer from Clover as well for it to know that the PC can boot from that drive, and offer to install on it.

Curious what firmware you have on your HP 800 G1. I have one too and I can install Linux on the M.2 drive however it is not available to boot no matter what settings I choose in the bios and use Clover or Refind. The drive never shows up.

I had difficulties installing Clover to boot on an NVMe SSD I installed on a 2008 Gigabyte MB. But I finally succeeded ! I created the Clover USB key using Boot Disk Utility v.023 and Clover v.4961. Nothing else worked for me.

Mr Hamish Mcintire-Bhatty,

Please tell me if the mainboard configuration GA B75M D3H, CPU INTEL G840 can boot from a PCIe slot with AXAGON COMPACT PCEM2-1U adapter and SSD M2 SPG256 after the changes in the article or other methods.

THANK YOU

CONSTANTIN BAZ

Would love to boot from my NVME SSD. I used AOMEI Back Upper to disk clone my sata SSD to my new NVME SSD. Last month I used AOMEI Back Upper to disk clone my windows 10 mechanical sata drive to my sata SSD. Been using the sata SSD about a month. I love the zippiness of the sata SSD & hope to get further improvement by making the new NVME SSD my bootable drive.

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