Cheap thrills: Dual boot dual Xeon workstation; Dell Precision T5610 Windows 10 and Hackintosh

I like building and playing with very fast computers but I can't afford new ones. In the past, I have built a dual Xeon from components but even that was quite expensive. However, it is possible to buy old servers and workstations for a reasonable cost and upgrade them with modern components, first off, an SSD.

Xeon

The machine I bought was a Dell Precision T5610 Workstation 2 x XEON E5-2650 v2 CPUs 64Gb 240Gb SSD 1Tb HDD $900 on eBay AU March 2020. It was first available in 2014 but still quite capable with a total of 16 cores and 32 threads.

The machine was booting to a cheap 2.5" SSD via a RAID card. The RAID card is of limited use now as a RAID 1 mirror can be achieved with two nvme SSD drivers in Windows "Storage Spaces". Raid 0 stripping is of little use now as the speed of nvme drives is high. So I removed the RAID card and installed a nvme SSD drive on a cheap generic pci express card.

Windows 10 on NVME SSD

The first job is to get Windows to run on a fast NVMe SSD. The usual process of creating install media on a USB stick/drive works fine. The installer can find the NVMe drive and will install on to it but it won't boot natively from it. The link below shows attempts to do it but the most recent posts use the Clover Bootloader, which is what I ended up doing. The Clover boot loader is needed for a dual boot anyway.

https://www.dell.com/community/Precision-Fixed-Workstations/Booting-from-Samsun-NVMe-M-2-w-DELL-T7610-Workstation/td-p/5708407

To create a Clover boot loader USB drive/stick. Use bootdisk utility below. It does almost everything including installing the latest version of Clover.

The only extra task is to find the nvme driver in the Clover "OFF" directory and copy it to the Clover "driver" directory. The Clover directory structure changes with time so older instructions can be out of date.

The Clover boot loader drive needs to always stay in the machine and the BIOS can point to it if it is an SSD on a SATA cable. For a USB drive, the boot drive can't be found, so push F1 when asked and the machine will boot from the Clover USB drive. Multiple drives come up as there are 4 partitions on the nvme drive, but Clover boots from the first one after a delay. After booting the first time, Windows installation on the nvme drive can be finished.

Bootdisk utility to create a bootable drive (USB or SSD) with Clover boot loader for unsupported SSD and MacOs
http://cvad-mac.narod.ru/index/bootdiskutility_exe/0-5

The general process of modifying Clover boot loader for nvme drives but is out of date for specific directory locations.
https://www.win-raid.com/t2375f50-Guide-NVMe-boot-without-modding-your-UEFI-BIOS-Clover-EFI-bootloader-method.html

Hackintosh links
https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/331372-write-up-installing-os-x-1012-sierra-on-dell-t5610-dual-xeon-uefi/