The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Using rEFInd

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 4/14/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.6

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This page is part of the documentation for the rEFInd boot manager. If a Web search has brought you here, you may want to start at the main page.


Using Basic rEFInd Features

With rEFInd in place and added to your firmware's list of boot utilities, you can reboot your computer. Depending on your configuration, rEFInd may come up immediately or you may need to select it from your firmware's boot options or reconfigure your firmware to present rEFInd automatically. Unfortunately, I can't offer much specific advice on this score, since EFI implementations differ so much in their user interfaces.

Assuming rEFInd starts up correctly, you should see its main screen, which resembles the following:


rEFInd presents a GUI menu for selecting your boot
    OS.

If you don't press any key before the timeout (shown on the last line) expires, the default boot loader will launch. This is normally the first item in the menu, but you can adjust the default by editing the configuration file. (In this example, it's the SUSE loader, which is further identified by text above the timeout as Linux 3.3.0-rc7 from ESP.)

This display is dominated by the central set of icons, which in this example includes icons for OS X, Windows, Ubuntu, a generic Linux installation (ELILO, in fact), SUSE, and an unkown boot loader. All but the last of these are on hard disks, but the unknown boot loader is on an optical disc, as revealed by the small icons (known as badges) in the lower-right corner of the OS icons.

In this example, the SUSE tag is selected. You can move the selection left by pressing the left or down arrow key and right by pressing the right or up arrow key. If your system has many boot loaders, an arrow icon will appear to the right of the boot loader list, indicating that the boot loader list will scroll when you move off the right edge. If you do this, an arrow icon will appear to the left of the icon list, indicating that you can scroll back in a similar manner. Moving past the final selection or using the Page Down key moves the selection to the second row of small icons, which launch ancillary programs or perform special actions. In this figure, these five icons are present:

The last three of these options are always available by default, but the first depends on the presence of the EFI shell program file, as described earlier. To get the gptsync icon, you must install gptsync.efi and adjust the showtools option in refind.conf, as well.

To launch an OS or utility, you should select its icon and then press the Enter key. If you press the Insert key, rEFInd will show a menu that may hold additional options, depending on the OS type. The following figure shows the submenu for Mac OS X. You can use this menu much like the main menu; move the cursor to select the option you want to use, then press the Enter key to launch the boot loader with the selected options. Press the Esc key or select Return to Main Menu to return to the main menu.


rEFInd submenus enable you to set session-specific
    options.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts

Although most rEFInd features can be activated via fairly obvious keyboard actions, some are not obvious. Table 1 summarizes the keystrokes that rEFInd accepts, and the action that each keystroke invokes.

Table 1: rEFInd Keyboard Shortcuts
Keystroke Explanation
left arrow or up arrow Moves the selection one icon to the left (or up the list in text mode)
right arrow or down arrow Moves the selection one icon to the right (or down the list in text mode)
Page Up or Home Moves the selection to the first item on the OS row
Page Down or End Moves the selection to the last item on the utilities row
Esc Returns from a sub-menu or redraws the screen
Insert, F2, or + Opens the selection's submenu, which is most useful for Mac OS X and ELILO
F10 Saves an image of the current screen in the file screenshot.bmp in the ESP's root directory
Enter or spacebar Launches the currently-selected OS, utility, or built-in feature
0 Launches the Linux rescue entry
1 through 9 Launches the specified boot loader by number
E Launches the EFI shell
L Launches the first Linux ELILO boot loader
M Launches the first Mac OS boot loader
P Launches gptsync
U Shuts down the computer (but note that this is buggy and reboots most UEFI-based PCs)
W Launches the first Windows boot loader
Other letters Launch OSes whose names begin with those letters, as described below

rEFInd assigns shortcut letters to most OS entries based on the first letter of the directory in which the OS's boot loader is stored. For instance, if you have a boot loader called /EFI/debian/elilo.efi, rEFInd attempts to assign it a shortcut letter of D. rEFInd overrides this default for Mac OS X, Windows, and for Linux ELILO boot loaders if the distribution can't be more precisely identified, as noted in the preceding table. This method works well for many installations, but it can produce conflicts. For instance, if you have a Macintosh that holds both Mac OS X and Mandriva, both OSes would normally use the M shortcut key. In practice, which works depends on the order in which rEFInd detects the OSes.


copyright © 2012 by Roderick W. Smith

This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.

If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at rodsmith@rodsbooks.com. Thanks.

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