Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: -11/1/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.9.3
+12/12/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.10.1This 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!
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Many casual users will be able to use rEFInd without making changes to its settings; in its default configuration, the boot manager automatically detects all the EFI boot loader programs you have on your EFI System Partition (ESP) (or your OS X boot partition, in the case of Macs) and displays icons for them. On Macs, rEFInd also presents legacy BIOS boot options by default. Sometimes, though, you may want to tweak rEFInd's configuration. Sometimes you can obtain your desired results by adjusting the filenames of your boot loaders. Other times, you can edit rEFInd's configuration file, refind.conf, which resides in the same directory as its binary file (refind_x64.efi or whatever you've renamed it).
+Many casual users will be able to use rEFInd without making changes to its settings; in its default configuration, the boot manager automatically detects all the EFI boot loader programs you have on your EFI System Partition (ESP) (or your OS X boot partition, in the case of Macs) in conventional locations and displays icons for them. On Macs, rEFInd also presents legacy BIOS boot options by default. Sometimes, though, you may want to tweak rEFInd's configuration. Sometimes you can obtain your desired results by adjusting the filenames of your boot loaders. Other times, you can edit rEFInd's configuration file, refind.conf, which resides in the same directory as its binary file (refind_x64.efi or whatever you've renamed it).
You can adjust many of rEFInd's options by editing its configuration file. This file is called refind.conf by default; but you can use another filename by passing -c filename as an option, as in refind_x64.efi -c myrefind.conf to use myrefind.conf in rEFInd's main directory. You can specify a configuration file in another directory, but to do so, you must use backslashes as directory separators, as in -c \EFI\other\refind.conf. This feature is intended for users who want to have rEFInd appear in its own menu, with the version launched in this way behaving differently from the original—for instance, to have a secondary rEFInd that provides boot options hidden by the main one. In this scenario, the default refind.conf would have a manual boot stanza defining the new rEFInd instance, including its -c option.
+ + +You can adjust many of rEFInd's options by editing its configuration file, which is called refind.conf. You must first find this file, though. It is located in the rEFInd directory. On a UEFI-based PC, this directory will be located on the EFI System Partition (ESP), which can be in any number of places:
+ +As a further twist, on Macs rEFInd can exist on its own partition or on the main OS X partition, depending on the version of rEFInd you've installed and the options you passed to the installation script. rEFInd has installed to the ESP by default since version 0.8.4. rEFInd typically lives on the ESP in the EFI/refind directory, or sometimes in EFI/BOOT or elsewhere. Thus, the rEFInd configuration file might be /boot/efi/EFI/refind/refind.conf, /boot/EFI/BOOT/refind.conf, /Volumes/ESP/EFI/refind/refind.conf, S:\EFI\refind\refind.conf, or something else, depending on your OS and mount point.
You can use any text editor you like to edit refind.conf, but be sure it saves the file in plain ASCII text, not in a word processing format. (In theory, a UTF-16 encoding should also work, but this has been poorly tested.) Note that the EFI shell includes its own editor. If you need to make a change before you launch an OS, you can launch a shell, change to the rEFInd directory, and type edit refind.conf to edit the file. This EFI editor is quite primitive, but it gets the job done. After editing, you'll need to reboot or re-launch rEFInd for rEFInd to read the changed configuration file.
@@ -278,8 +286,8 @@ timeout 20Prior to version 0.2.4, rEFInd supported a token called disable, whose function partially overlapped with hideui. Version 0.2.4 merges many of the features of these two tokens into hideui and creates the new showtools option, which provides the remaining functionality in a more flexible way.
-As an example of rEFInd configuration, consider the following refind.conf file:
@@ -486,7 +497,7 @@ default_selection eliloAs an example, consider the following entries:
-menuentry "Ubuntu Linux" { +menuentry "Ubuntu" { loader /EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi disabled } @@ -506,7 +517,7 @@ menuentry "Windows via shell script" { }-This example sets up three entries: one for Ubuntu Linux, one for Arch Linux, and one to launch a shell script. Note that the final entry uses different directory separators from the first two, simply to demonstrate the fact that it's possible. (The form of directory separators in options lines is important, though, because the program being launched may expect a particular directory separator character.) The Ubuntu entry sets no icon, since rEFInd will note that the boot loader is stored in the ubuntu directory, and it will automatically find the appropriate Ubuntu icon (os_ubuntu.png). This option is, however, disabled, so no matching icon will appear when you reboot unless you first comment out or delete the disabled line.
+This example sets up three entries: one for Ubuntu, one for Arch Linux, and one to launch a shell script. Note that the final entry uses different directory separators from the first two, simply to demonstrate the fact that it's possible. (The form of directory separators in options lines is important, though, because the program being launched may expect a particular directory separator character.) The Ubuntu entry sets no icon, since rEFInd will note that the boot loader is stored in the ubuntu directory, and it will automatically find the appropriate Ubuntu icon (os_ubuntu.png). This entire entry is, however, disabled, so no matching icon will appear when you reboot unless you first comment out or delete the disabled line.
@@ -622,7 +633,7 @@ menuentry Arch {Adjusting the Default Boot Option
-Just before launching an OS, rEFInd stores the description in the EFI variable PreviousBoot with a GUID of 36d08fa7-cf0b-42f5-8f14-68df73ed3740. The next time it launches, it reads that same variable and sets the default boot loader to that value, if it's still available and if the first item in default_selection in the refind.conf file is a plus sign (+).
+Just before launching an OS, rEFInd stores the description in the EFI variable PreviousBoot with a GUID of 36d08fa7-cf0b-42f5-8f14-68df73ed3740. The next time rEFInd launches, it reads that same variable and sets the default boot loader to that value, if it's still available and if the first item in default_selection in the refind.conf file is a plus sign (+).
Under Linux, the variable that rEFInd uses to store this information is accessible as /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/PreviousBoot-36d08fa7-cf0b-42f5-8f14-68df73ed3740. Thus, you can back up this value, modify it, and write it back out to adjust your next-booted OS. Getting this string just right can be a bit tricky, though, and if the kernel doesn't like its format, it will not let you modify the variable. If you try to modify the variable, be aware that it's stored in UTF-16 format. As with the default_selection token in refind.conf, you can enter any substring that uniquely identifies the entry you want to boot.