I just finished installing Mac OS and Linux Mint to a GPT-partitioned disk, and am booting them using the Clover EFI bootloader. The bootloader is also able to boot a UEFI Windows 8 installation on another disk, though unable to boot Windows 7 on a separate, MBR-partitioned disk. I am writing what I did here since I didn’t follow any single tutorial to the letter, I know the process worked for me, and so I can reference this page in the future. For the record, I am using an Asus P8Z77 V-Pro motherboard with a PMPatched 1805 bios from here, along with an i7 3770k CPU (in case someone googles those parts looking for a guide).

I went for this configuration after having previously installed OS X with the Chimera bootloader using the Unibeast/Multibeast method. While that method of installation is simple and works well, I elected to start over with Clover so I could boot Linux Mint, OS X, and Windows 8 all via the same EFI bootloader.

These pages by Rod Smith and the Clover wiki helped me get a grasp on what I was actually setting up, and I basically followed an amalgamation of this tutorial and this forum post to get the job done. The key piece of information I first missed was that, when making a bootable USB OS X installer using Clover, you need to augment EFI/Clover/kexts with whatever kexts you would typically install via Multibeast to get OS X to boot and have network access. For me, that meant ensuring that FakeSMC.kext, AHCI_3rdParty_SATA.kext, and the modified IONetworkingFamily.kext packaged with Multibeast were placed in EFI/Clover/kexts/10.9 on the EFI partition of my USB stick.

My Mavericks installation

The installation was done using a USB thumb stick, a second Mac (to prepare the USB stick), and the target machine, and went as follows:

1. Prepare the USB stick with a GUID Partition table and a single, “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” (HFS+)-formatted partition
2. Use the Clover installer pkg to install the bootloader to the thumb stick (Using “Change Install Location…”). I used the options “Install for UEFI Booting only”, “Drivers64UEFI/DataHubDxe-64”, “Drivers64UEFI/OsxAptioFixDrv-64”, and “Install RC scripts on target volume”.
3. Copy FakeSMC.kext, AHCI_3rdParty_SATA.kext, and the modified IONetworkingFamily.kext to EFI/Clover/kexts/10.9 on the EFI partition of the USB stick. At this point, I was able to boot off the USB stick into the Mavericks installer. The USB stick must be booted as an EFI device (in my case, this meant selecting “UEFI: Sandisk Cruzer Glide” from the BIOS boot menu).
4. Use the installer to partition the target disk and set up Mavericks. The installation requires a restart, so the PC must again boot from the USB stick (back into the OS X installer) to complete the installation.
5. At the end of the previous step, you should be brought to the desktop of your Mavericks installation. Run Multibeast to install the aforementioned kexts to /System/Library/Extensions. Then, install Clover to the hard drive with the same settings as used to prepare the USB stick. As noted in the aforementioned forum post, you do not need to move any kexts to the EFI partition of your hard drive, as they are now present in S/L/E.

After all that, I was able to boot into the Clover bootloader on my hard drive and, subsequently, into Mavericks.

Getting SpeedStep to work

The thrill of having successfully booted Mavericks from my HD was quickly overcome by a sinking feeling: Everything. Was. Going. Very. Very. Slowly.

HWMonitor revealed that OS X had my CPU running at a fixed 800MHz clock speed, just a couple thousand cycles lower than acceptable. After some experimentation with the auto-generated config.plist file, I found that deleting the PLimitDict, UnderVoltStep, MinMultiplier, and MaxMultiplier keys under ACPI/SSDT resulted in Mavericks intelligently scaling clockspeed in the range of 1.6-3.7GHz.

Installing Linux Mint

After getting everything in order with Mavericks, I installed Mint to a different partition on the same drive. This part was super straight forward, I just used the “USB Image Writer” in Mint (on a different machine) to write the Mint 16 iso to the USB drive, booted the drive as an EFI device, and used the GUI installer. The only important part to remember is to have the installer place the boot loader in the ESP (the EFI System Partition), as per Rod Smith’s guide.