href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-1/3/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.7.7</p>
+5/15/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.1</p>
-<p>I'm a technical writer and consultant specializing in Linux technologies. This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads; however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks!</p>
+<p>This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads; however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks!</p>
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<p>For all such cases, rEFInd supports booting legacy OSes; however, the details vary between Macs and UEFI PCs. Also, be aware that some UEFI PCs lack the Compatibility Support Module (CSM) that's required for this feature to work. This is true even of some computers that can boot BIOS-based OSes natively. This can happen because the firmware is basically a BIOS with a UEFI implementation tacked on top of it; such systems rely on the native BIOS to boot, and may not provide a way for EFI applications to access the BIOS features via CSM mechanisms. If you have such a computer and if you enable a legacy boot option in the configuration file, rEFInd notifies you of its inability to present legacy boot options when it starts up. rEFInd's legacy boot support also depends on features that are not available in the GNU-EFI development package, so you may see a similar notice if you run a version of rEFInd compiled with that package. (The primary build available on the <a href="getting.html">Getting rEFInd</a> page is compiled with the TianoCore EDK2 package, which does support the BIOS boot features.)</p>
-<p>The <tt>scanfor</tt> option, described on the <a href="configfile.html">Configuring the Boot Manager</a> page, controls rEFInd's detection of legacy OSes. On Macs, the default is to scan for such OSes, since a common boot scenario on Macs is dual-booting OS X and Windows, and of course BIOS support is required for this. (rEFInd 0.4.5 and earlier did <i>not</i> scan for legacy OSes by default, though, so you may need to change this option if you're upgrading and don't want to scan for legacy OSes.) On UEFI PCs, rEFInd defaults to <i>not</i> scanning for legacy OSes; thus, you must edit the <tt>scanfor</tt> item in the configuration file if you want to boot a legacy OS on a UEFI PC.</p>
+<p>The <tt>scanfor</tt> option, described on the <a href="configfile.html">Configuring the Boot Manager</a> page, controls rEFInd's detection of legacy OSes. On Macs, the default is to scan for such OSes, since a common boot scenario on Macs is dual-booting OS X and Windows, and of course BIOS support is required for this. On UEFI PCs, rEFInd defaults to <i>not</i> scanning for legacy OSes; thus, you must edit the <tt>scanfor</tt> item in the configuration file if you want to boot a legacy OS on a UEFI PC.</p>
<img src="os_legacy.png" align="right" width="128" height="128"
alt="The legacy OS icon is identical for all OSes on UEFI-based PCs."
border=2 background="gray"/>
-<p>On Macs, rEFInd uses a flexible scanning algorithm inherited from rEFIt. This procedure detects most legacy OSes on most disks, although it can sometimes miss an OS. This scanning algorithm can often identify the legacy OS you've installed and present a suitable icon. On UEFI PCs, rEFInd relies on the computer's NVRAM settings to determine which legacy boot loaders to scan; if an OS isn't listed in the NVRAM settings, rEFInd won't present it as an option. On most UEFI PCs, at least one hard disk and your optical drive appear as options. The two computers I've tested have failed to present USB flash drives as boot options when inserted, though. You may be able to get additional options to appear by editing your boot list in your firmware's setup utility, but I can make no promises about this. The UEFI scanning procedure is also incapable of detecting the OS type, so you'll see a generic legacy OS icon, as shown at the right.</p>
+<p>On Macs, rEFInd uses a flexible scanning algorithm inherited from rEFIt. This procedure detects most legacy OSes on most disks, although it can sometimes miss an OS. This scanning algorithm can often identify the legacy OS you've installed and present a suitable icon. On UEFI PCs, rEFInd relies on the computer's NVRAM settings to determine which legacy boot loaders to scan, but rEFInd does tell the firmware to find every BIOS-mode boot option and add it to its NVRAM list. On most UEFI PCs, at least one hard disk and your optical drive appear as options. On one computer I tested (a Lenovo laptop), the internal hard disk appears in the rEFInd menu as a removable disk, and selecting any BIOS-mode option causes the computer to attempt a network boot. Three other computers I've tested behave more sensibly. If you opt to scan for BIOS-mode optical disks (<tt>scanfor cd</tt>) on UEFI-based PCs, an icon will appear whether or not your drive holds a CD. The UEFI scanning procedure is also incapable of detecting the OS type, so you'll see a generic legacy OS icon, as shown at the right.</p>
+
+<p>On both PCs and Macs, if you see non-functional legacy boot options, you can remove them by using the <tt>dont_scan_volumes</tt> token in <tt>refind.conf</tt>: Add any substring from the description that appears when you highlight the non-functional option to the set of options to have rEFInd ignore that entry. (Note that you must provide a complete volume name when excluding EFI volumes from scanning. The legacy-mode exclusion operation is more flexible in this regard.)</p>
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