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It's scary to hear how a supposedly well-educated Apple Genius will claim that rEFIt "killed EFI". At boot time the only thing rEFIt writes to is the MBR sector of the hard disk, and at Mac OS X runtime it uses command-line tools written by Apple and shipped with Mac OS X to change the boot volume / boot loader. I don't see how any of this could affect your machine to the point where Mac OS X...
2009-09-28 16:12:02 UTC in rEFIt
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Good to hear you were able to resolve the problem.
What scares me is that an Apple tech believes that rEFIt could be the source of the problem, or that it would change "the EFI on the motherboard". rEFIt is installed on the hard disk, and uses command line tools provided by Apple to get itself into the boot sequence. It only uses high-level API functions specified by an industry organization...
2009-06-16 09:28:58 UTC in rEFIt
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By and large rEFIt should already support this. It doesn't care if a disk is internal or external, so if it detects the disk at all, it should display all partitions and operating systems on it, and allow selection of a specific operating system by setting the active partition flag in the MBR.
There are several known problems with Apple's firmware and with the operating systems that may...
2009-06-16 09:20:59 UTC in rEFIt
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What's listed in the MBR is not actually the EFI system partition. It is a so-called EFI Protective entry, and it covers both the GPT table itself (starting at sector 1) and the EFI system partition (starting at sector 40 usually). The MBR convention is that any sector not listed as part of a partition is considered "free". So this entry is needed to protect the GPT partition table itself from...
2009-06-16 09:11:06 UTC in rEFIt
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I'm afraid rEFIt has no feature to reset the NVRAM. Since this is a special function of the firmware that is activated before booting, it is unlikely that there ever will be such a function in a tool like rEFIt.
I'm sure there is a way to reset the NVRAM even with the EFI password enabled. This really is independent of whether you have rEFIt installed or not. Have you tried Apple's support...
2009-06-02 17:07:02 UTC in rEFIt
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There is no Linux boot loader on your system, so the Linux install is not bootable (with or without rEFIt). I'd assume this happens when you install Linux first, and it puts GRUB into the MBR by default, which is then wiped out when you install Windows because Windows puts a generic chainloader into the MBR.
Generally the fix is to boot into Linux from CD, and tell it to reinstall GRUB...
2009-04-07 07:59:10 UTC in rEFIt
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Good suggestion, may make an appearance once the big config rewrite happens.
Part of that config rewrite is discovering partitions not just by position, but by volume label, UUID, and installed OS, because that's pretty much a requirement for avoiding the breakage you describe.
2009-04-05 16:22:18 UTC in rEFIt
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Never heard back, marking as closed.
2009-04-05 16:19:21 UTC in rEFIt
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If you're comfortable doing this manually from Linux, you can get rid of it with a command like this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=512 count=1
You'll need to make absolutely, positively sure it's the right partition though, otherwise you'll lose data.
Writing a tool to get rid of unwanted boot code is somewhere on the TODO list, but as you can see, this is quite dangerous and will take...
2009-04-05 16:17:46 UTC in rEFIt
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This would be dependent on the big config file rewrite that has been on the TODO list for a while now. Once there's a way to point at specific partitions or OSes to specify what to boot by default, adding timings is a small step.
2009-04-05 16:10:21 UTC in rEFIt
