This is to be expected as the BDU has been updated since this article was published however. The BDU should work fine running in 32 bit also for the purpose of our use it makes no difference as the Windows boot loader will determine it’s own setting a once clover has called it. Umm I actually suspect clover hasn’t installed correctly due to the missing folders but I will check the current working configuration for you in about 12 hours when I am back at my computer. I will post a follow-up for here alternatively try going back to comment #402 I think I covered what the folder changes are which may or may not help you.
In short the BDU now uses the layout as follows under efi/clover/drivers you should have atleast 3 folders bios off uefi or some variation on that depending on if you are running 64 bit.
ok. thank you very much
Listen friends. I really got lost here.
Can anyone help me step by step what to do? I’m pretty new at that. I don’t have all the skills.
If I listen to sibliss from the previous posts and ignore the missing folders. Even then I will lost with other steps.
Steps 5, 6, 6a and so on are unclear to me.
How do I install Windows if my flash disk already has the clover installed. Do I also need to install windows on this flash disk with clover? But if I install the windows, it deletes everything included clover.
I really lost friends
Thank you very much sibliss, I would think on the SSD
i’m realy sorry , but i dont understand nothing
need some help here
either I don’t know what to do or i dont know, but clover does not detect my windows installation on my nvme drive. I tried copying EFI\CLOVER\drivers\off\NvmExpressDxe.efi to EFI\CLOVER\drivers32UEFI but no luck.
anyone knows how to solve this?
@justanyone
Hi this is normally a simple fix… please try also copying the nvmexpressdxe driver to both clover\drivers\bios and clover\drivers\uefi
And report back here
well after doing it it seems that it does detect my ssd but it gets stuck in black screen, but i read in a few pages back that this is a common issue and i need to reinstall windows again right
the black screen after selecting the os/drive/partition to boot is usually because of an issue with the os installation (specifically the windows bootloader), depending on how windows came to be installed on your nvme could effect how to fix this.
the black screen typically happens because the windows bootloader itself (remember clover does not replace the windows bootloader) has the wrong instructions to correctly boot windows and therefore just hangs so with that in mind.
if you cloned windows to the ssd from another drive that will require a heap of work to fix that is well outside the scope of this thread (MS deliberately breaks cloned OS’s in favor of their enterprise deployment tools)
nvme ssd’s only seem to work with clover if the ssd is using gpt not mbr partition tables (there is a windows utility from MS to convert mbr installs to gpt)
when performing a clean install as recommended in this guide the advice has always been to install clover then only once clover is working install windows from boot media via clover boot options.
hope this information shines a light on the issue for you and you manage to get it working, good luck and happy modding of course you can always report back if you have more clover questions
OK so maybe i’m being daft when I bought an older laptop I wrote off being able to run NVMe because I was on an older Gen processor but seems this does not matter? Can someone give me a theoretical hat tip that I might be able to make this work…
Lenovo L540 - i7-4712MQ Haswell 4th Gen CPU
Modern UEFI type bios
M.2 2242 slot with a B key supporting B, and M/B cards - only 2pcie lanes available!
The impression i’m getting is that I can run it in full native NVMe mode as long as a driver is loaded. I can either insert the module into the bios little risky or use this bootloader method. I’m not too fussed about boot times but if the boot-loader method works ill probably not be able to resist the bios mod approach.
Do we see full potential performance of the drive NVMe mode, don’t want to confuse anyone but its not some magical AHIC mode? I’m going to drill some little holes near the port to aid in cooling and avoid throttling too but since I only have two lanes might not matter.
Cant see any drives of B type most seem to be M but a limited number of M/B cards some SATA and some PCIE so ill have to choose wisely I already have a SATA M/B in there working.
@alexhore :
you are quite right in that the cpu is not relevant however to use nvme it is vital that the m2 port is infact a pcie port not a sata one as they are very different one connects to the pci bus thus directly to the cpu the other connects to the sata controller therefore you will never find an nvme card with a b type connector as they do not exist.
clover simply loads a bios driver for the pcie device that the bios doesn’t have.
there are however pcie sata cards as you have mentioned although they are not nvme are pcie and thus faster than a sata controller but not as fast as nvme the issue for becomes the way the port it self is wired on the board i doubt that you can run an nvme drive in this port due to the way the port is wired on the board sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
however if you are willing to spend the money on a gamble you may be lucky an you may get away with a nvme card in the port and use the clover driver to get around the bios issue.
i am going to provide a link to another forum which details drives that they have found and worked for them on a hp and why i believe it has something to do with oproms ? this is beyond my expertise and is well beyond the scope of this forum.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/nvme-drive-booting-in-ahci-mode.2500796/
my advice is ti check out the Samsung mentioned
this will either help you or confuse you i am sorry it’s not a clear cut thing. as always you are welcome to pm me about this.
EDIT by Fernando: Fully quoted post removed to save space
Thanking you
Hearing you regarding ports but the B version does also have PCIE lanes available just not 4 lanes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2 The M.2 standard for a B key gives you all of this -> PCIe ×2, SATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0, audio, UIM, HSIC, SSIC, I2C and SMBus on the one connector. Most people including myself will just end up connecting a SATA M.2 card to it but there are NVMe cards in the M/B format that will fit, not not very popular in the smaller sizes though.
As long as the motherboard has all the traces conforming to that standard I should get my 2 PCIE lanes.
As long I pick a M/B key drive that specifically utilises the PCIe lanes I should be able to communicate with it e.g. make sure I pick a drive specified as NVMe and not SATA.
The rom thing I read up on, loads its own rom driver on boot bringing the card online in the slower AHCI mode. I had an old revodrive in a desktop once that did this super long boot times loading a rom. Think there were like you say some samsung M.2 drives around that had this.
Anyway, took the gamble and order a bargain NMVe drive ill report back for anyone else reading this some day.
Additional statement to the guide (= start post of this thread): (edited by Fernando)
Clarification of what clover is and how this method works!
Clover is an efi bootloader designed for hachintosh’s which we are going to leverage the nvme driver capabilities of to call the windows bootloader and ultimately boot windows from your nvme drive.
BIOS/UEFI->Clover-EFI->NvmExpressDxe-driver->bootpartition@NVMe-drive->OS (boot partition being where the windows os bootloader is stored and run from)
If you are trying to clone Windows please ensure to sysprep the os before trying to clone it.
Prerequisites
- you may need a pcie nvme m2 adapter card if you haven’t got an onboard m2 port
- Your PCIe SSD should be installed into your machine. (partition table must be gpt type. the nvme drive won’t show in clover unless it has had the partition table set to gpt and blankly formatted in Windows first. The tip is to use diskpart to see if the drive is set to gpt not mbr)
-IMPORTANT! the clover BDU must be run on the computer you intend to boot via clover as it will automatically generate a config.plist based on your computers hardware.
3a Part one ( -Updated Step from the original guide)
(NOTE: users may not have All of these directories currently present in their installation and may need to create them, Users that are using older versions of clover seem to also have x64 variants of these in which case the driver copying procedure below will need be replicated with the EFI\CLOVER\drivers64 path aswell )
The newer Clover Drivers Directory structure is as follows below. ( This is the same for both 32bit and 64bit in newer versions of clover )
Efi\CLOVER\drivers
BIOS
Off
UEFI
Copy the NvmExpressDxe driver in the Off directory to BOTH the BIOS and UEFI directories mentioned above. (Note the Off directory simply contains a heap of unused drivers)
3a Part two
You will also need to create the following directory(s) (unless you already have one or both) and copy the NvmExpressDxe driver to them aswell.
Efi\CLOVER\drivers32uefi
(If using a 64bit system i recommend also creating this directory and placing the driver here aswell)
Efi\CLOVER\drivers64uefi
Since there is no harm in just putting the driver in all four (or up to six in older versions) locations anyway i strongly recommend doing this just to be safe. (if you have trouble the first thing i will ask is have you put the driver in all 4 locations)
There are hundreds if not thousands of pages on various forums on the Web about how to configure clover’s config.plist but the best resource I can link to is the wiki
https://sourceforge.net/p/cloverefiboot/wiki/Home/
ASK FOR HELP!
If you have trouble beyond this however please ask questions in the forum and i will respond when i can, I am no expert but i have done many of these installs with success now and i will do my best to help.
Hello! I managed to get quite far in my project of cloning Win 10 from HDD to a NVME SSD. I managed to get Clover running and I was able to perform a fresh install of Win 8.1 (I had a license for that). I ran into some problems (I think with the Windows Updates and it become unusable after some hours). I tried Macrium Reflect and a few other softwares to clone my existing OS from my HDD (MBR partition table). None of the cloned versions were recognised in Clover (I assume because they were MBR. I tried to convert the cloned partition to GPT but it didn’t work as well). I even tried to copy the Windows partition over the old corrupted one (and keep the partition that Windows 8.1 did during installation) and that resulted in a Windows logo and a black screen with a disappearing pointer. I saw (on MrLithium’s blog) that you need to tweak some registry. HOWEVER, I tried the steps he (very) poorly described there and now I am restoring my system. Luckily, it was a succes thanks to a recent update. I do believe Win 7 was better. I was much easier to control it. Please take into consideration that I have some experience with my PC. I (mistankenly) thought that by searching for “regedit” in the Windows folder of my cloned OS (the one on the SSD) and opening regedit.exe, from the results, I would modify the Registry of my cloned OS. WRONG! Can you please describe me what MrLithium means on his solutions? If someone could rewrite the solution in a more specific way, IT WOULD MEAN A LOT! If that takes too long, maybe rewriting the 2nd and the 8th step would also be enough. Maybe you can help me.
@mariustelcean
First welcome to the forum,
although cloning is beyond the scope of this thread, windows 10 is never supposed to be cloned as such any attempt to do so will break the os image this is deliberate from microsoft to favor their deployment tools.
I have found the easiest way to clone windows 10 is to use the Microsoft tool to convert MBR to GPT then simply run sysprep on the OS before cloning it.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/mbr-to-gpt
https://www.petri.com/using-syspre-windows-10
since you’ve found my post about mrlithium you will note that he references remote/offline mounting registry hives. a simple websearch will show you how to do so
https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-edit-the-registry-on-a-secondary-drive
please note that even if you are successful in editing the registry it still will not boot yet you will need to run various pe tools to repair the installation before it will boot
@sibliss thank you for your quick response. It is so wrong that all those softwares allow users to clone the OS without noticing them that they have to run Sysprep first and the run their cloning software from a live-CD.
“The disk does not have any extended/logical partition”. I have 4 logical partitions that I need to deal with before any attempts. (I have: System Reserved, Win 10 partition, two for storage, and 3 for Ubuntu ). For now, let’s assume I have dealt with this issue.
If I do the conversion, the old OS will no longer boot in legacy BIOS but both old and new should show up in Clover, right? Also, once the conversion is done I will have to use Sysprep. The only modification that Sysrep will to is that I will have to use the OOBE again (on both the old OS and the cloned one) and my files/programs won’t be changed, right?
@mariustelcean
Unless you have a really old motherboard I would be surprised if it can’t boot the old drive once it’s converted to gpt and yes you can always boot it through clover.
The use of sysprep if you can get it to work is alot more than just the oobe sysprep actually removes all the identifiers from the os image, thus hopefully you shouldn’t need to stuff around with registry hives. To the best of my knowledge you shouldn’t loose any data from doing the sysprep, just remember there is a limit to how many times an image can be set in sysprep but you get a few go’s and it only counts if sysprep works there are a heap of reasons why sysprep may fail though so you will have fun with that.
Good luck and happy modding.
@sibliss My motherboard: https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/760GM-GS3/
I read on the link you provided that you can’t revert the partition table back to MBR and be able to boot again. So much trouble for not being able to transfer some programs that were tailored to my needs…
“here is a limit to how many times an image can be set in sysprep but you get a few go’s and it only counts if sysprep works there are a heap of reasons why sysprep may fail though” I will watch some YT videos before doing it. Maybe it will help.
Hi all, my first post here and thanks for all the information.
Here is my setup:
My motherboard: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A785DM_PRO/
Specs: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A785…specifications/
Its has : AMI Bios ver. 1001, with an AMD Phenom II X4 9650 processor, windows 10 dual boot option of a linux Dist.
From reading ths thread i was confidient enough to buy a NVMe ssd with an adapter off Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07J…0?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07R…0?ie=UTF8&psc=1
First i hope it will all work for me given my setup above, what i want to know is this:…can i partition the nvme ssd in 2 partitions ? before insalling windows… one for windows and one for linux for dual boot?
Thanks for your help,
D
@Damoedge
Hi and welcome to the forum I see no reason why that ssd and adapter won’t work with your setup.
I also have a dual boot setup on one of mine incidentally also and Asus m4 series board.
The easiest way is just to install Windows first as normal then simply shrink the large partition via partition manager leaving the free unused space at the end of the drive.
then you can just tell Linux to install to that space as usual during setup it’s not much different to normal dualboot except that we use clover as the bootloader.
…my clover shows both Windows and Linux partitions and boots them just fine. One of the reasons I prefer the clover option.