EFI cloning (or: the no-install hackintosh)

With some patience, I got El Capitan to run perfectly on an XPS 8500 that I had lying around. Exciting, since it's newer and faster than my 08 Mac Pro. The reason I went with 10.11 is that I've gotten Sierra and High Sierra to run on this machine before, but always had issues with my HD 5770, and didn't feel like spending money on a newer GPU. Plus, this is what I have on my other machine.

So I installed El Capitan, and, after getting the ethernet/usb/sound to work, first impression is that it's...pretty solid. Like, I can't even tell it's non-Apple hardware. It's nice. So nice that I immediately began thinking "Well shit, is this gonna be my new recording rig?"

Which was then followed by an immediate "Oh yeah, shit. I gotta move all my my programs, plugins, and licenses over. Thats gonna take days. Ugh"

Then a lightbulb went off in my head: What if I stuck my Mac Pro's hard drive in my Dell, booted off the other one, went into my Mac HD's EFI partition, and just copied the contents of my Hackintosh's EFI partition into it, complete with clover and all my kexts? Would I be manually creating a bootable Hackintosh HD?

So I did, and it worked. Everything works.

Is this a method that pretty much every noob discovers early on? The express method?

If I wanted, could I clone this hard drive, empty out the new one's /EFI contents, use Multibeast to insert a legacy bootloader and the appropriate kexts, and then just stick this new drive in an old sandy bridge machine?

submitted by /u/SwimCoachMarty
[link] [comments]