Clover EFI to the Rescue

November 26, 2024
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By Martin Jansen, Owner of Jansen-PCINFO

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are a great upgrade from traditional hard drives offering at least three times the speed to the operating system. With no moving parts SSDs can write data at a rate of 400 to 450 Megabytes per second.

But the best upgrade to a computer system are M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs which are up to and sometimes exceeding 10 times the speed at 4,000 to 6,000 MB/s depending on quality and brand.  This website is a good source of information on SSDs.

The difference between SSDs, besides form factor, is how they connect to the motherboard.  The 2.5 inch SSD replacement for a hard drive connects through SATA ports, while M.2 drives connect through PCIe slots.  See this image of a newer desktop motherboard for reference:

Older Desktop Motherboards

Unfortunately, older motherboards do not have M.2 slots for direct installation of NVMe drives. Instead inexpensive adapters are available for installation in PCIe slots. An image of a drive and adapter is at the beginning of this article.

While installing the drive in the adapter and subsequently in the available PCIe slot works to add storage to the system, the ability to boot from the drive is sadly not available on the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) of older computers.  Some computers may include this capability by upgrading the BIOS firmware. Otherwise we are stuck finding another source to recognize and boot from the much faster NVMe drive.

Enter Clover EFI

Clover EFI will allow us to boot from the NVMe drive on our system.  These are the items I needed to get it to work:

  1. A working Linux Mint computer to download the Clover software.
  2. A USB 3.0 (or higher) drive to copy the Clover software.  I prefer SanDisk drives, specifically I used a 32GB SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive.  These are tiny USB drives taking little space when plugged into the computer.
  3. An older computer (I used a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7010) with NVMe drive and Adapter plugged into the (blue) PCI-e x16 Connector (SLOT1).  Make sure Secure Boot is disabled in the BIOS.

There are many articles about using Clover EFI to boot a variety of operating systems, most are old with inaccurate information.  After much trial and error these steps worked for me:

  1. Go ahead and install Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon on the older computer with the NVMe drive and adapter.  Although you can’t boot from the drive yet, Linux Mint will recognize the drive as  /dev/nvme0n1 and allow installation.  Here are complete directions on installing Linux Mint. After the install is completed GParted (an open source partition manager) will look something like this:
  1. On the working Linux Mint computer, download the CloverV2-5160.zip from the items list link above.  That’s the latest version as of this writing.
  2. Fully extract the zip file to a CloverV2 folder – usually within the Downloads folder.
  3. Plug in the USB drive and use the USB Stick Formatter to format the drive as Fat32 with a volume label of CLOVER. Warning: This action will wipe any data on the drive.
  4. Mount the empty clover drive by unplugging and then replugging the drive into the working computer.
  5. Use the file manager to find and open the CloverV2 folder.
  6. Copy the contents of the folder and paste it into the CLOVER USB drive.
  7. Within the clover USB drive, navigate to the /EFI/CLOVER/drivers/off/UEFI/Other folder
  8. Copy the NvmExpressDxe.efi driver and paste into two locations:
    1. /EFI/CLOVER/drivers/BIOS
    2. /EFI/CLOVER/drivers/UEFI
      (This is the magical driver that allows booting from the NVMe drive)
  9. Unmount the Clover USB drive and plug it into the older computer.
  10. Enter the BIOS on the older computer and change the boot order to allow booting only from the UEFI USB drive.
  11. Restart the older computer and, if all goes well, you should be greeted with this screen:

Clover recognizes the most likely boot option.  Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu so the selection is correct and the next screen verifies that it is indeed Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon:

The Enter key on both screens will speed along the boot process, otherwise do nothing and the computer will boot to Linux Mint in 15 seconds.

I’ll admit that it was a lot of work to get the older computer to boot from the NVMe drive, but the payoff is definitely worth it.  Applications load in the blink of an eye and all computer operations are enhanced making this old computer feel like a supercomputer.

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