Hi guys, Im new to this.. but have been looking at this for years now.
I have 3 HDD's in my PC.
One SSD for Windows 10
2x 3TB HDD's for data.
I was wondering if it was possible to dualboot OSX to one of the 3TB HDD's without having to re-install Windows 10 and touching the SSD at all? Thanks.
Posted Jan 17, 2019, 6:59 AM UTC
I built an hackintosh for a friend one month ago and did the same, installed Windows 10 on the new m.2 SSD and High Sierra on the old sata one. You have to install osx and clover on the disk of choice and then set it as boot drive in the bios, clover should pick up windows on the other drive by itself and list it.
Got any good, in depth walk throughs for making a dual boot hackintosh? I'm a windows guy and my wife likes her apple products. I'm thinking of getting a mobo with two m.2 slots, one for each OS, and then two separate hdd's for each others files.
My situation was a little different because I choose an AMD cpu against all the best practices (didn't want to buy an Intel cpu+my friend only cares about Logic Pro), so I followed the install guide at amd-osx forums.
Truth is, Clover scans all your partitions for a bootable os, so you don't need to do more than install windows first, then osx on the other m.2 drive. It will sort all the needed bootable entries by itself.
unplug and install. set mobo default EFI load to clover. use clover to boot either apple or windows bootloader
If you have Clover Bootloader, you simply add the drive with Win10 on it to the system. Make sure the HD with Clover is the primary device and that's it. When you boot into Clover, you get to pick MacOS or Windows.
What everyone else said + search this site if you have any trouble with anything because you’ll likely need to edit at least one thing to get everything working: https://www.tonymacx86.com/
TL;DR: yes, by all means, you can. Have both systems present on separate physical drives (allowing both systems to have their own EFI) but make sure that macOS boots first to allow Clover to give you the choice which system you want to boot into.
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That’s exactly how I did it. Running macOS and Windows 10 comfortably together.
Well... together as in they are both installed and I can boot into either of them without affecting the other in any way.
It may not be necessary, but best practice would be to install either of them while the other is not present in the system.
You can start with whichever you want. But in this example I’m starting with Windows, as, most likely that’s what you already have installed. Leave the Windows drive as it is. No need to touch it in any way. Now take it out and leave it sitting on the side for now.
Start and walk through the wonderful adventure that is installing macOS on a PC. It’s a good idea to place that drive in the slot or plug it in the port where you intend to keep using it in the future. Now that you have macOS up and running, including the EFI and Clover copied over from the installer usb to the macOS drive, plug your windows drive back in and before booting anywhere, go into BIOS. Here you want to set the boot priorities to ensure that the macOS drive boots first! Reason being is because as long as macOS boots first, it also means that Clover will be able to do its thing and manage the boot devices for you.
Clover will then scan the storage devices and partitions to see what bootable systems are there and then you can select which one you want to boot into. You can also set a default boot system, so if left unattended, Clover will always boot that one. OR you can set Clover to boot into the system where you shut down your PC from (Last system or something).
It’s very much doable, and honestly, that’s what I adore about the whole process and how things work. From the very first mouse click to having used macOS as a daily driver, how to make things work, how hardware and behind the scenes stuff work, say that I’m a romantic, but there is certain beauty to all of it.
I can’t remember the person’s name but someone in this sub said this to me: it may be a challenge to get it to work and solve everything, but once you do, macOS runs better in an environment it was not designed for, than the other OS which was designed for it does. That other OS being windows. And oh boy, it’s true.
— off topic —
I have so many issues with Bluetooth and audio playback/microphone setup in windows; even if I fix it, the quality is of a 1980’s telephone; and then I don’t do anything, don’t change anything and the next time I want to use it, it’s broken again. That was the case even before macOS was installed.
In macOS? “Sure, pal, no problem! Want to have perfect call and microphone quality AND sound/music/game audio quality AT THE SAME TIME? Yeah, of course, here it is, have fun!”
Windows? “But I don’t waaant tooo! Why would you even want that? Leave me alooooone, I don’t caaare!!!”
Okay, I’m getting sidetracked here. What I wanted to say with this is that macOS and Clover combined are a beast, blowing windows out of the water without any care or remorse.
Easily. Just unplug the SSD (helps limit problems) and install MacOS normally.
Can not stress unplugging enough. I thought I knew exactly how to pick a specific drive from the bunch somehow I still whipped the wrong drive. That’s what I get for being lazy when I know better.
This is what i have been trying but ever time I put my drives (win and osx) in, the windows drive breaks and gives me a inaccesible boot device error.
I be perfectly fine using the bios to switch between drives for booting but even doing that the windows drive breaks.
So it’s been a while for me since I did all the initial setup. A long while, but this sounds familiar.
What I think I did was installed OS X with clover and then, Disconnected the OS X drive, but had all the clover stuff on a usb drive. Then I installed windows on a separate drive. And I think the trick was installing it from a uefi installer of windows. So I made a uefi windows usb installer. And then that installation was compatible. Something like this. https://m.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-bootable-media-uefi-support
This is all from memory. Hopefully there is enough there to get your research going though.
Did this for tripple boot, bear in mind the whole drive where you install mac needs to be erased
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I don't have a non-uefi board, but just out of curiosity: why?
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not true, there are legacy options in UEFI Clover, and if you have the correct boot order, you can boot legacy directly from UEFI Clover menu (I have done this myself with legacy Win 7).