href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-5/9/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.3.4</p>
+10/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.6</p>
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<li>User-configurable graphics and icons—you can set your own background, set new icons, and so on.</li>
-<li>Launch EFI boot loaders or, on Macs, launch BIOS-based boot loaders. (I have yet to get the BIOS-launching feature to work on a UEFI-based PC, but it might work on a model I don't own.)</li>
+<li>Launch EFI boot loaders</li>
+
+<li>Launch legacy (BIOS) boot loaders on Macs and on some UEFI-based PCs. On the latter, the BIOS boot device must be listed in the firmware's boot options. Often only the hard disk and optical disc are listed by default. Scanning for legacy OSes is more thorough on Macs.</li>
<li>Launch options for an external EFI shell or disk partitioner. (See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)</li>
<li>Load EFI drivers for filesystems or hardware devices not supported natively by your firmware. (This feature is absent in some builds of rEFIt and in rEFInd prior to version 0.2.7.)</li>
+<li>Inclusion of drivers for the Linux ReiserFS and ext2 filesystems in the
+ main package. (These drivers are absent from rEFInd prior to version
+ 0.4.0; and the rEFInd versions don't work on at least some Macs.)</li>
+
</ul>
<p>I've used rEFIt on a couple of computers for over a year, but I've found that it has some frustrating limitations. It tends to flood the screen with non-functional BIOS boot options, for instance; and it has a number of bugs on UEFI-based systems. I therefore expanded on rEFIt, giving rEFInd features that improve on or go beyond those of rEFIt, such as:</p>
<li>The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).</li>
+<li>The ability to specify directories to <i>not</i> be scanned for boot loaders, even if they would ordinarily be scanned (as of version 0.4.2).</li>
+
+<li>The ability to re-scan boot loaders, to assist when changing removable media or after making a change to the configuration file with an EFI shell (as of version 0.3.5).</li>
+
+<li>A configurable delay before scanning for boot loaders, for systems on which there's a delay before disks become available (as of version 0.4.6).</li>
+
<li>The ability to specify an additional icon storage directory, to assist in efforts to customize rEFInd's appearance (as of version 0.3.4).</li>
<li>The ability to set the screen's resolution, within limits imposed by the EFI (as of rEFInd 0.3.0).</li>
<li>An "exit" option (disabled by default), so that you can return to whatever shell or boot manager you used to launch rEFInd, should this ability be desirable. (This feature first appeared in rEFInd 0.2.4.)</li>
+<li>Drivers for ISO-9660 and HFS+, which are not included in rEFIt. (The ISO-9660 driver is based on code from the rEFIt project, but was never completed by its original author. It was completed by Oracle for VirtualBox.)</li>
+
</ul>
<p>On the flip side, at least for Mac users, rEFInd comes with less sophisticated Mac installation tools than does rEFIt, in favor of more OS-agnostic packaging.</p>