href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-8/12/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.5</p>
+10/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.6</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>
<hr />
-<p>Many casual users will be able to use rEFInd without making further changes; in its default configuration, the boot manager automatically detects all the EFI boot loader programs you have on your ESP (or your OS X boot partition, in the case of Macs) and displays icons for them. 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, <tt>refind.conf</tt>, which resides in the same directory as its binary file (<tt>refind.efi</tt> or whatever you've renamed it).</p>
+<p>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 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, <tt>refind.conf</tt>, which resides in the same directory as its binary file (<tt>refind.efi</tt> or whatever you've renamed it).</p>
<p>Broadly speaking, rEFInd's configuration file is broken down into two sections: <i>global options</i> and <i>OS stanzas.</i> The global options section sets options that apply globally—to set the timeout period, enable graphics or text mode, and so on. OS stanzas are optional, but if present, they enable you to add new boot options or replace the auto-detected options with customized ones. Both sections include configuration lines and comment lines, the latter being denoted by a leading hash mark (<tt>#</tt>). rEFInd ignores comment lines, so you can add explanatory text. The default configuration file includes numerous comments explaining each of the options.</p>
<p class="sidebar">ESPs use the FAT filesystem, which is case-insensitive. Unfortunately, at least one EFI implementation (Gigabyte's <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Hybrid EFI</a>) contains a bug that causes string comparisons that should be case-insensitive to actually be done in a case-sensitive way. This can cause files that are present to appear to be missing. rEFInd includes code to work around this bug in some situations, but not in all of them. If boot loaders appear to be missing, try changing the case on their filenames or on the <tt>EFI</tt> directory in the ESP. (It's coded as uppercase in rEFInd; but EFI loader filename extensions are coded as lowercase <tt>.efi</tt>. I made these choices because they seem to be the most common uses on real-world installations.)</p>
-<p>Before delving into the configuration file, you should be aware of what you can do by renaming files. By default, rEFInd scans all the filesystems it can read for boot loaders. It scans most of the subdirectories of the <tt>EFI</tt> directory on every filesystem it can access for files with names that end in <tt>.efi</tt>. (rEFIt gives special treatment to the <tt>TOOLS</tt> subdirectory, where it looks for system tools rather than boot loaders.)</p>
+<p>Before delving into the configuration file, you should be aware of what you can do by renaming files. By default, rEFInd scans all the filesystems it can read for boot loaders. It scans most of the subdirectories of the <tt>EFI</tt> directory on every filesystem it can access for files with names that end in <tt>.efi</tt>. (rEFInd gives special treatment to the <tt>tools</tt> subdirectory, where it looks for system tools rather than boot loaders.)</p>
<p>If you're like me, you may sometimes want to hide a boot loader from rEFInd's menu for a brief period—say, because you're testing a variety of configurations but you don't want them all to clutter the menu at once. You might also want to hide a boot loader if you want to override its default settings using a custom entry in <tt>refind.conf</tt> and you don't want an automatic search to duplicate that entry. You can easily hide a boot loader by removing or changing its <tt>.efi</tt> filename extension—for instance, changing <tt>grub.efi</tt> to <tt>grub</tt>.</p>
<tr>
<td><tt>scan_driver_dirs</tt></td>
<td>directory path(s)</td>
- <td>Scans the specified directory or directories for EFI driver files. If rEFInd discovers <tt>.efi</tt> files in those directories, they're loaded and activated as drivers. This option sets directories to scan <i>in addition to</i> the <tt>drivers</tt> subdirectory of the rEFInd installation directory, which is always scanned, if present.</td>
+ <td>Scans the specified directory or directories for EFI driver files. If rEFInd discovers <tt>.efi</tt> files in those directories, they're loaded and activated as drivers. This option sets directories to scan <i>in addition to</i> the <tt>drivers</tt> and <tt>drivers_<i>arch</i></tt> subdirectories of the rEFInd installation directory, which are always scanned, if present.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>scanfor</tt></td>
<td><tt>internal</tt>, <tt>external</tt>, <tt>optical</tt>, <tt>hdbios</tt>, <tt>biosexternal</tt>, <tt>cd</tt>, and <tt>manual</tt></td>
- <td>Tells rEFInd what methods to use to locate boot loaders. The <tt>internal</tt>, <tt>external</tt>, and <tt>optical</tt> parameters tell rEFInd to scan for EFI boot loaders on internal, external, and optical (CD, DVD, and Blu-ray) devices, respectively. The <tt>hdbios</tt>, <tt>biosexternal</tt>, and <tt>cd</tt> parameters are similar, but scan for BIOS boot loaders. (Note that the BIOS options are likely to be useless on UEFI PCs.) The <tt>manual</tt> parameter tells rEFInd to scan the configuration file for manual settings. You can specify multiple parameters to have the program scan for multiple boot loader types. When you do so, the order determines the order in which the boot loaders appear in the menu. The default is <tt>internal, external, optical</tt>.</td>
+ <td>Tells rEFInd what methods to use to locate boot loaders. The <tt>internal</tt>, <tt>external</tt>, and <tt>optical</tt> parameters tell rEFInd to scan for EFI boot loaders on internal, external, and optical (CD, DVD, and Blu-ray) devices, respectively. The <tt>hdbios</tt>, <tt>biosexternal</tt>, and <tt>cd</tt> parameters are similar, but scan for BIOS boot loaders. (Note that the BIOS options scan more thoroughly and actively on Macs than on UEFI-based PCs; for the latter, only options in the firmware's boot list are scanned, as described on the <a href="using.html">Using rEFInd</a> page.) The <tt>manual</tt> parameter tells rEFInd to scan the configuration file for manual settings. You can specify multiple parameters to have the program scan for multiple boot loader types. When you do so, the order determines the order in which the boot loaders appear in the menu. The default is <tt>internal, external, optical, manual</tt> on most systems, but <tt>internal, hdbios, external, biosexternal, optical, cd, manual</tt> on Macs.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>scan_delay</tt></td>
<tr>
<td><tt>scan_all_linux_kernels</tt></td>
<td>None</td>
- <td>When set, causes rEFInd to add Linux kernels (files with names that begin with <tt>vmlinuz</tt> or <tt>bzImage</tt>) to the list of EFI boot loaders, even if they lack <tt>.efi</tt> filename extensions. The hope is that this will simplify use of rEFInd on distributions that provide kernels with EFI stub loader support but that don't give those kernels names that end in <tt>.efi</tt>. Of course, the kernels must still be stored on a filesystem that rEFInd can read, and in a directory that it scans. (<a href="drivers.html">Drivers</a> and the <tt>also_scan_dirs</tt> options can help with those issues.) Note that this option can cause unwanted files to be improperly detected and given loader tags, such as older kernels without EFI stub loader support. For this reason, it's disabled by default.</td>
+ <td>When set, causes rEFInd to add Linux kernels (files with names that begin with <tt>vmlinuz</tt> or <tt>bzImage</tt>) to the list of EFI boot loaders, even if they lack <tt>.efi</tt> filename extensions. The hope is that this will simplify use of rEFInd on distributions that provide kernels with EFI stub loader support but that don't give those kernels names that end in <tt>.efi</tt>. Of course, the kernels must still be stored on a filesystem that rEFInd can read, and in a directory that it scans. (<a href="drivers.html">Drivers</a> and the <tt>also_scan_dirs</tt> options can help with those issues.) Note that this option can cause unwanted files to be improperly detected and given loader tags, such as older kernels without EFI stub loader support. For this reason, it's disabled by default, but that may change in the future.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>default_selection</tt></td>
<td>A substring of a boot loader's title; or a numeric position</td>
- <td>Sets the default boot OS based on the loader's title, which appears in the main menu beneath the icons when you select the loader. You can enter any substring of the title as the <tt>default_selection</tt>, so long as it's two or more characters in length. It's best to use a unique substring, since rEFInd stops searching when it finds the first match. Because rEFInd sorts entries within a directory in descending order by file modification time, if you specify a directory (or volume name, for loaders in a partition's root directory) as the <tt>default_selection</tt>, the most recent loader in that directory will be the default. One-character entries are matched against the first character of the title, except for digits, which refer to the numeric order of the boot loader entries. (Note: In version 0.2.0, only the first character of this entry was used, and was matched against the first character of the title.)</td>
+ <td>Sets the default boot OS based on the loader's title, which appears in the main menu beneath the icons when you select the loader. You can enter any substring of the title as the <tt>default_selection</tt>, so long as it's two or more characters in length. It's best to use a unique substring, since rEFInd stops searching when it finds the first match. Because rEFInd sorts entries within a directory in descending order by file modification time, if you specify a directory (or volume name, for loaders in a partition's root directory) as the <tt>default_selection</tt>, the most recent loader in that directory will be the default. One-character entries are matched against the first character of the title, except for digits, which refer to the numeric order of the boot loader entries.</td>
</tr>
</table>