rEFInd - Hiding Select Internal Hard Drives from Boot Menu? (RAID 10)

[Christoph Pfisterer]

Hello!

I have a fairly complex setup here in my office...it's a Mac Pro with a RAID 10 setup (Mac OSX 10.8.5 installed on it) and one additional drive for Windows 8.1 Enterprise / a backup Mac OSX partition / the Recovery HD. Anyway, I'm aware that RAID is pretty picky with rEFInd, however, with the default .conf file untouched, I can choose the emergency partition, four duplicate hard drives (the RAID 10), and then finally the Windows partition. My problem is that I don't particularly like seeing four identical drives all together because it's cluttered and annoying to pass by all 4 drives just to boot Windows. I've modified some of the icons for my own personal taste, but I'm having difficulties hiding 3 of the 4 RAID 10 internal hard drives...it looks like this: "EMERGENCY RAID RAID 2 RAID 3 RAID 4 WINDOWS"...and I want it to look like this "EMERGENCY RAID WINDOWS". Could any of you techno-exceptional pros lend a suggestion or two? Pleeeeease? Thanks!

[Roderick W. Smith]

If the filesystem you're using on this is ext2/3/4fs or ReiserFS, please try the latest test version (0.7.6.1). It's available in source form in the rEFInd git repository and as a binary package here:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind-bin-0.7.6.1.zip

This version examines the filesystem UUID values and hides any filesystem that has a UUID that rEFInd's already seen. This should take care of the problem; however, it depends on digging into the filesystem data "raw," and so far I've only implemented that for ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS.

[Christoph Pfisterer]

Thanks for your response! Unfortunately, I am not using any of those filesystems, just the standard HFS+ / NTFS file structures. Good news though, I did come up with a working solution. If you set the scan_delay token to a value of 1, it will load all of the RAID internal hard drives within rEFInd, just as shows all of the RAID volumes within the standard Mac Startup Manager (holding option on boot).

scan_delay 1

I still disliked seeing multiple internal hard drives for just one boot volume, so I went the menuentry route. The following stanza allows me to boot the Mac OS X version installed on the RAID:

menuentry "Mac OS X (RAID)" {
icon \EFI\refind\icons\os_mac.icns
volume "Boot OS X"
loader \System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi
}

Also, the following stanza allows me to boot the EMERGENCY internal hard drive:

menuentry "Mac OS X (EMERGENCY)" {
icon \EFI\refind\icons\Lifeboat.icns [custom icon]
volume "EMERGENCY"
loader \System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi
}

I also changed the scanfor token to:

scanfor hdbios,manual,external,biosexternal,optical,cd

This way, I can hide all of the HFS+ internal hard drives, including the four internal RAID drives. Now I can just rely on the menuentry token to display only one RAID internal hard drive and the EMERGENCY partition. The hdbios command may put Windows first, but I've changed the default_selection token to:

default_selection 2

Now when I boot, it delays for one second, then it shows Windows 8.1, Mac OS X (RAID), and Mac OS X (EMERGENCY), with the default selection parked on Mac OS X (RAID). It's a little crude, but it works for me.

I do have one request though, well, more of a suggestion...you may want to set the default scan_delay to 1 instead of 5. Nobody wants their boot time to be delayed by 5 whole seconds and 1 appears to be the equivalent of pressing the F2 (refresh) button when at the rEFInd boot menu. Perhaps you could include an automatic refresh during the boot process? Anyway, thanks for your help and thanks for keeping this project current.