href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-2/3/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.7</p>
+6/8/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.2</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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+</table>
<hr />
<p>Assuming rEFInd starts up correctly, you should see its main screen, which resembles the following:</p>
- <br /><center><img src="refind.png" align="center" width="712"
- height="550" alt="rEFInd presents a GUI menu for selecting your boot
+ <br /><center><img src="refind.png" align="center" width="734"
+ height="552" alt="rEFInd presents a GUI menu for selecting your boot
OS." border=2 /></center> <br />
-<p>If you don't press any key before the timeout (shown below the icons and description 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 Linux Mint loader, which is further identified by text above the timeout as <i>vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic from LINUXMINT.</i>)</p>
+<p>If you don't press any key before the timeout (shown below the icons and description line) expires, the default boot loader will launch. This is normally the item that you launched the last time rEFInd ran, but you can adjust the default by editing the configuration file. (In this example, it's the Ubuntu Linux loader, which is further identified by text above the timeout as <i>vmlinuz-3.5.0-27-generic from UBUNTU BOOT</i>.)</p>
-<p>This display is dominated by the central set of OS <i>tags</i> (icons), which in this example includes tags for OS X, Windows, Mint, 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 <i>badges</i>) in the lower-right corner of the OS icons.</p>
+<p>This display is dominated by the central set of OS <i>tags</i> (icons), which in this example includes tags for an unknown boot loader, OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu. All but the first of these are on hard disks, but the unknown boot loader is on an optical disc, as revealed by the small icons (known as <i>badges</i>) in the lower-right corner of the OS icons.</p>
-<p>In this example, the Linux Mint tag is selected. You can move the selection left by pressing the left arrow key and right by pressing the right arrow key. If your system has many boot loaders, an arrow icon will appear to the right and/or left of the boot loader list, indicating that the boot loader list will scroll when you move off the edge. (Such an arrow is visible to the right in the sample screen, but not to the left.) You can scroll the list by one line full of icons by using the Page Up or Page Down keys to move left and right, respectively. Moving past the final selection or using the down arrow key moves the selection to the second row of small tags, which launch ancillary programs or perform special actions. If you've moved the selection cursor to the second row, pressing the up arrow key or scrolling past the left edge of the second row moves the cursor to the top row. In this figure, these four tags are present:</p>
+<p>In this example, the Ubuntu tag is selected. You can move the selection left by pressing the left arrow key and right by pressing the right arrow key. If your system has many boot loaders, an arrow icon will appear to the right and/or left of the boot loader list, indicating that the boot loader list will scroll when you move off the edge. (Such arrows are visible to the right and left in the sample screen.) You can scroll the list by one line full of icons by using the Page Up or Page Down keys to move left and right, respectively. Moving past the final selection or using the down arrow key moves the selection to the second row of small tags, which launch ancillary programs or perform special actions. If you've moved the selection cursor to the second row, pressing the up arrow key or scrolling past the left edge of the second row moves the cursor to the top row. In this figure, these five tags are present:</p>
<ul>
<li>Launch the EFI shell</li>
-<li>Produce an information page</li>
+<li>Launch the tool to create a hybrid MBR (<tt>gptsync</tt>)
-<li>Shut down the computer</li>
+<li>Produce an information page</li>
<li>Reboot the computer</li>
+<li>Exit from rEFInd</li>
+
</ul>
-<p>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. Other ancillary tags may be present on some computers.</p>
+<p>By default, the options to display an information page, shutdown the computer, and reboot the computer are present. Options to launch a shell, launch the Apple recovery utility, and launch the Machine Owner Key (MOK) utility will also appear automatically if these utilities are installed. Options to launch the hybrid MBR tool and to exit from rEFInd are not displayed by default; you must edit the configuration file to enable these features, or to disable those that are displayed by default.</p>
<p>To launch an OS or utility, you should select its tag and then press the Enter key or the space bar.</p>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><i>F10</i></td>
- <td>Saves an image of the current screen in the file <tt>screenshot.bmp</tt> in the ESP's root directory</td>
+ <td>Saves an image of the current screen in the file <tt>screenshot_<tt class="variable">###</tt>.bmp</tt>, where <tt class="variable">###</tt> is a sequence number starting with <tt>001</tt>, in the ESP's root directory</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><i>F12</i> or (on some keyboards) <i>Eject</i></td>
<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>
<hr />
-<p>copyright © 2012–2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
+<p>copyright © 2012–2014 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
<p>This document is licensed under the terms of the <a href="FDL-1.3.txt">GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.</a></p>