MacBookPro (Mid-2009) – issues for triple boot (OSX, Linux, Win) with rEFInd

[Tom Kraetschmer]

I have a MacBookPro5,4 (Mid 2009) with a Core2Duo and two SSDs in it. After finally retiring it I decided to give it a second life as an "alternative OS machine" just to find out about the bitter-sweet EFI and bootloader demands of the different operating systems out there. REFIND seems to be a perfect solution for that. I went through all the threads about MBP issues in this Discussion, but really couldn't wrap my head around this issue.

Basically I have: the first SSD (1 TB) = "SDA" for booting OS X and Linux. And another SSD (256 GB) = "SDB" for booting Windows 10. Here's what I did:
1. SDA was the original full use OS X device (consisting of a small EFI partition at the beginning and then a large OS X 10.13 (high sierra) - yes, using a dosdude patch - APFS partition.
2. SDB was setup as a full use Windows10 device. Windows did partition its crazy numbers of different partitions, but I didn't care (full size use of this SSD)
3. Then I partitioned SDA with disk utility in OS X: left the EFI partition alone, resized the OS X partition to a smaller size (700 GB) and reserved a new 300 GB FAT32 partition.
4. Decided to give ZORIN OS 16 Core (basically Ubuntu 20.04) a try, told the installer to reformat the 300 GB to EXT4 and not touch the APFS partition. Let's call it simply Linux for the moment.
5. Seemingly that worked but of course ZORIN OS decided to put GRUB on my MacBookPro. I could still get into the choice by starting mit mac with the option (ALT) key. But the ONLY partitions that were available to start from was (a) the Linux and (b) the Windows partition.
6. Downloaded the REFIND flashdrive (latest version) from this page and put it (using another Mac) with Balena Etcher onto an USB stick.
7. Plugging this in while in the ALT-mode (partition) on my MacBookPro I could choose the USB-device and started straight into REFIND. This found a lot of Linux / Ubuntu options and a lot of Windows options (partitions) but my OS X is no choice, neither after booting from the stick nor after installing REFIND in the EFI partition on SDA.

Any ideas what happened and why I am locked out of the OS X boot option? And whether I could possibly start into my APFS Mac partition through REFIND?

To make things clear, I attach a "tree" of my EFI partition at the beginning of SDA. Note the strange fact that therea are both a "apfs.efi" in the main EFI directory, and an specific "APPLE" directory there as well.

── EFI
    ├── apfs.efi
    ├── APPLE
    │   └── EXTENSIONS
    │       └── Firmware.scap
    ├── BOOT
    │   ├── BOOTX64.efi
    │   ├── fbx64.efi
    │   ├── mmx64.efi
    │   └── startup.nsh
    ├── refind
    │   ├── BOOT.CSV
    │   ├── drivers_x64
    │   │   └── ext4_x64.efi
    │   ├── icons
    │   │   ├── arrow_left.png
    │   │   ├── arrow_right.png
    │   │   ├── boot_linux.png
        ... (SHORTENED)
    │   │   └── vol_optical.png
    │   ├── icons-backup
    │   │   ├── arrow_left.png
    │   │   ├── arrow_right.png
    │   │   ├── boot_linux.png
        ... (SHORTENED)
    │   │   └── vol_optical.png
    │   ├── icons-old
    │   │   ├── arrow_left.png
    │   │   ├── arrow_right.png
    │   │   ├── boot_linux.png
        ... (SHORTENED)
    │   │   └── vol_optical.png
    │   ├── keys
    │   │   ├── altlinux.cer
    │   │   ├── canonical-uefi-ca.der
    │   │   ├── centos.cer
    │   │   ├── fedora-ca.cer
    │   │   ├── microsoft-kekca-public.der
    │   │   ├── microsoft-pca-public.der
    │   │   ├── microsoft-uefica-public.der
    │   │   ├── openSUSE-UEFI-CA-Certificate-4096.cer
    │   │   ├── openSUSE-UEFI-CA-Certificate.cer
    │   │   ├── refind.cer
    │   │   ├── refind_local.cer
    │   │   ├── refind_local.crt
    │   │   └── SLES-UEFI-CA-Certificate.cer
    │   ├── refind.conf
    │   ├── refind.conf-sample
    │   ├── refind_x64.efi
    │   └── vars
    │       ├── HiddenLegacy
    │       ├── HiddenTags
    │       └── PreviousBoot
    ├── tools
    └── ubuntu
        ├── BOOTX64.CSV
        ├── grub.cfg
        ├── grubx64.efi
        ├── mmx64.efi
        └── shimx64.efi

and a "lsblk" of my whole SDA and SDB partition configuration:

NAME   FSTYPE   LABEL                  UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT             SIZE OWNER GROUP MODE
loop0  squashfs                                                                   0   100% /rofs                  2.1G root  disk  brw-rw----
sda                                                                                                             931.5G root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sda1 vfat     EFI                    67E3-17ED                             174.3M    12% /mnt/67E3-17ED         200M root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sda2 apfs                            e3a9663b-12ca-49bd-8e04-01894264b0c8                                     651.9G root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sda3 vfat                            7A12-E9DC                                                                  100M root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sda4                                                                                                             16M root  disk  brw-rw----
└─sda5 ext4     LINUX                  1f9c5791-24ac-441f-b5c6-36b13c0bea3b                                     279.3G root  disk  brw-rw----
sdb                                                                                                             223.6G root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sdb1 vfat                            207F-1E91                                                                  100M root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sdb2                                                                                                             16M root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sdb3 ntfs                            C874A4FA74A4EBFE                                                           223G root  disk  brw-rw----
└─sdb4 ntfs                            CCF449CBF449B90A                                                           525M root  disk  brw-rw----

[joevt]

Where's the dosdude apfs patch? It should be in the EFI partition. I moved mine to a seperate HFS+ partition like in the picture.

Then I bless it like this in macOS:
sudo bless --folder /Volumes/Catalina\ Boot/macOSCatalinaPatcher --file /Volumes/Catalina\ Boot/macOSCatalinaPatcher/ShellX64.efi --setBoot --label "Catalina"

This way it will also have the icon and label of my choosing instead of the default icon and "EFI Boot" label.