Clover Bootloader is a great boot loader, it supports both UEFI and Legacy. This article will guide you how to install Clover Bootloader on USB from Windows and Linux.

Clover Bootloader

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.

How to install Clover Bootloader on USB from Windows and Linux

Clover Bootloader supports booting in both UEFI and Legacy modes. Interestingly, it supports UEFI firmware emulation, this allows us to boot into UEFI mode from Legacy mode. It is capable of booting .efi files even if Clover is booted in Legacy BIOS. You can also use the commands in UEFI Shell from Clover to do some things like moving, renaming files…

AIO Boot has been supporting Clover since its initial release. This is the solution you can use Clover, Grub2, Grub4dos, rEFInd and Enoch Chameleon on just one drive.

Clover has an installer and an ISO file. Its installer only supports macOS, so we just have to use the ISO file to install Clover on USB from Windows and Linux.

  1. You need to use a FAT32 formatted drive to support booting in both the UEFI and the Legacy BIOS. Supports USB and HDD, MBR and GPT.
  2. Download Clover Bootloader ISO here. Its ISO file was compressed into a file named CloverISO-4428.tar.lzma. This is a 64-bit version, the 32-bit version has been discontinued.
  3. Open this file and continue to open the folder until you see an ISO file. I use 7-Zip to do this.
  4. Continue to open the ISO file and copy all the folders to the drive. There are 3 directories that we need to extract: EFI, Library and usr.
    Clover Bootloader ISO

If you want to install Clover on the EFI partition on Windows, simply use the mountvol or diskpart and 7-Zip commands under Admin.

  1. Run Command Prompt under Admin (right click and select Run as Administrator). Use the following command to mount the EFI partition to the Z: drive.
    mountvol Z: /s
  2. Run 7-Zip File Manager under Admin and extract Clover to drive Z:.
  3. Unmount Z:.
    mountvol Z: /d

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

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.

  1. Download Clover Legacy Installer and extract the .exe files inside (password: aioboot).
  2. Copy the CloverLegacyInstaller.exe file to the drive where Clover was extracted.
  3. Run CloverLegacyInstaller.exe to install Clover Legacy. Supported on Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows 10.

Restart the machine or boot USB in VirtualBox and VMware virtual machine for testing.

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:

diskpart
select vol G:
active

G: is the drive where I installed Clover.

Configuration

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.

The Clover configuration file is /EFI/CLOVER/config.plist. You can edit this file to configure Clover such as change theme, SMBIOS, Arguments…

The Clover driver is located in the /EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI directory (for UEFI) and /EFI/CLOVER/drivers64 (for Legacy). Unused drivers will be located in /EFI/CLOVER/drivers-Off directory. You just need to move or delete the .efi file to enable or disable the driver. Since macOS High Sierra, Apple has announced a new filesystem called APFS. Clover will not support this partition until it has APFS driver (apfs.efi). The apfs.efi file can be found in the macOS installer or in the Clover.img file of the Clover Boot Disk. To boot macOS on the Hackintosh, copy the OsxAptioFix3Drv-64.efi file from the drivers-Off to drivers64UEFI directory.

With these simple steps, we can easily install Clover Bootloader from Windows and Linux. Good luck!

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42 Comments

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    1. 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?

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  5. you seem knowledgeable and you surely have put a lot of effort making this.
    however, i can’t understand what’s happening at all. i read every word, you’re just not making yourself clear.
    do i need to execute all three tasks: 1) clover bootloader 2) legacy installer, 3) config; or do i choose one based on my OS?
    in task 1 (clover bootloader) you’re saying mount to drive Z:, and the picture says you’re unzipping to drive G: and i have no idea what the hell each drive is.
    is Z: the USB drive i want to boot from? is G: the drive i want to boot from?
    i haven’t made it past the first 2 steps.

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  6. Hi please Add CloverLegacyInstaller.exe file to the guide or send it via email to me.

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  8. I don’t know what all this fuss is about a virus in the last few comments. I used the 2018-04-09 build of CloverLegacyInstaller_x64.exe downloaded from this site quite a few months ago with no problems flagged by Avast anti-virus. I think that was still the build available here until recently. Everything is still running smoothly. Pretty soon one will not be able to download any software that manipulates boot sectors with all those second rate anti-virus programmes running around.

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    1. How to get this file now?
      I need the Clover Legacy Installer or at least I need to know how to proceed manually.

      Reply
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  10. Nice. You should get arrested for spreading of Danabot trojan through your cloverlegacyinstaller.
    The file is infected.
    Blacklisting site.

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  13. 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.

    Reply
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  15. 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.

    Reply

  16. 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.

    Reply
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  18. Let’s not get lost in translation here.. I could be wrong, but perhaps the mysterious “Z” drive, is in fact meant to be the “C” drive.. “zee” “seee” ? a non native speaker could easily confuse the two, in other words, ‘Z:/ = C:/ Ah Ha!

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  20. Damn, maybe I´m too dumb. But I only get an .pkg and an .pkg.md5 with the newest clover. Opened with 7zip the files are all over the place and also .pkg files.
    What to do with this version??

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      1. Come on! We all know that Macs don’t get viruses.
        Oh, wait. You’re on a PC “trying” to run macOS. LOL.

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  23. Hi again!

    When you say: Run 7-Zip File Manager under Admin and extract Clover to drive Z:.
    did you mean with it?

    Which files do I extract into drive Z:?

    Clover-v2.4k-4961-X64.iso?
    EFI & Library & usr folder contents?
    Is the content of this directory? : \Clover_v2.4k_r4961\CloverISO-4961\EFI\CLOVER

    Could you specify the content to be extracted into this Z: drive?

    How could I delete the content of this drive?

    After I have extracted this content, how should I boot my computer?

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  25. If Clover reports “boot0ss: Error“…..

    Although I had this error after setting active, Clover was on the AIOBoot menu, and it works.

    Thanks!

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  26. 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.

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  27. 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.

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  28. Boot0ss: error

    Marking EFI partition active by diskpart????????????????
    How can we mark EFI partition active in diskpart, I don’t think this command work on GPT disks?

    All in all Clover is not working on GPT disk for booting in BIOS system.

    Reply

    1. All in all Clover is not working on GPT disk for booting in BIOS system.?????????????

      What are you doing trying to boot GPT from BIOS?

      Reply
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  30. Hi. Great guide, much appreciated.

    When I run the Clover Legacy Installer, it creates a file called “boot7” that wasn’t present in the demonstration video, and when the drive is booted, nothing happens except that a “7” is printed on the screen.

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  31. I got error message, missing file d:\DVD-Re\OS\OSX\Clover-v2.4k-4439-X64\usr\standalone\i386\boot0ss. But the d:\DVD-Re\OS\OSX\Clover-v2.4k-4439-X64\CloverLegacyInstaller_x64.exe is here.

    Reply
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