Dual Booting Hackintosh with other Operating Systems

The safest and easiest way to dual-boot your hackintosh with Windows/Linux is to have them installed on separate hard drives so that you do not have to worry about their boot files interfering with each other. If that choice is out of the question for you, then this little guide may be able to help. I use CLOVER bootloader for my hackintosh and EFI as the boot partition for all my operating systems.

Important

Before installing hackintosh on the same hard drive as another OS, you should backup everything in case you mess up. Also, make a backup of the boot partition. If you are on Windows, you can do this with cmd and Explorer++.

First, you need to mount the EFI boot partition. Open a command prompt and type:

diskpart
list disk

You will see a list of your computer disks. Choose the disk on which your OS is installed. If it's disk 2, then:

select disk 2

See the list of all the partitions on the selected disk:

list partition

Select the boot partition which is usually of type System and has the size of around 100~250MB:

select partition 1

Now you'll need to assign a letter to the selected partition so that the explorer can see it:

assign letter=z

Due to rights restriction, you cannot easily access the EFI partition with Windows Explorer, and that's where Explorer++ comes in. Run it as administrator to access the mounted partition in order to make a backup.

You can unmount the partition by selecting the partition and run the following command:

remove

Using the same boot partition

Most operation systems with EFI boot partition write their boot files to EFI/BOOT, which is also shared by Clover. What's important in this folder is BOOTX64.efi, and you need to make sure that it's always the file from Clover.

After a major update, it's possible that Windows/Linux will recreate the files again on the EFI partition, so you are going to have to redo the aforementioned operation. Just in case, always make a backup of BOOTX64.efi from Clover and use it to replace the file in EFI/BOOT.

Dual-booting with Windows

If the operation described above does not work, Windows keeps its boot file bootmgfw.efi in EFI/Microsoft/Boot, so you can try replacing this file with the BOOTX64.efi file from Clover and rename it to bootmgfw.efi.

Again, you'll probably need to redo this operation after each major update where Windows rewrites the boot files to the EFI partition, and make sure to back up any file before deleting/replacing it.

Listing other OSes in Clover's boot menu

If you do not see other operating systems listed in your Clover's boot menu, make sure to check your Clover's config.plist that it is correct. Here's what mine looks like to list all Windows and Linux OS:

<key>Boot</key>
<key>GUI</key>
<dict>
  <key>Scan</key>
  <dict>
    <key>Entries</key>
    <true/>
    <key>Legacy</key>
    <false/>
    <key>Linux</key>
    <true/>
    <key>Tool</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</dict>

I hope this guide is of help to you, and happy hackintoshing!