I often simulate a "sandbox" by cloning (using Macrium/Reflect) my Win11 boot drive to another SSD in the same system. Even though it succeeds and is bootable w/o REFIND, the latter maintains that I have only one Windows installation - i.e., I never get a 2nd (seemingly "deserved") Gray Flag. Is REFIND too smart for its own good - somehow filtering out the cloned drive? (Old Dell Precision Tower 5810, so I recognize, that may be the prob.) Last, I did modify the conf file to introduce a 5 second delay, since I read somewhere that some rigs need extra time to "complete their census" of installs.
Last edit: jimmy CHou 2024-03-13
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rEFInd automatically filters out duplicate partitions based on the filesystem's UUID or serial number. This is done so as to prevent the display of duplicate entries in software RAID 1 arrays. Chances are this is what's causing your issue -- your backup partition likely contains a duplicate serial number. You might want to check your backup software to see if it has an option to not duplicate the serial number when cloning a partition. As the point of a filesystem serial number is to uniquely identify it, IMO a backup should have a unique serial number, although that might require tweaking anything that refers to the filesystem by serial number.
In most cases, setting scan_delay is unnecessary. If setting it and commenting it out produce identical displays when rEFInd first starts, then it's doing nothing useful.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I often simulate a "sandbox" by cloning (using Macrium/Reflect) my Win11 boot drive to another SSD in the same system. Even though it succeeds and is bootable w/o REFIND, the latter maintains that I have only one Windows installation - i.e., I never get a 2nd (seemingly "deserved") Gray Flag. Is REFIND too smart for its own good - somehow filtering out the cloned drive? (Old Dell Precision Tower 5810, so I recognize, that may be the prob.) Last, I did modify the conf file to introduce a 5 second delay, since I read somewhere that some rigs need extra time to "complete their census" of installs.
Last edit: jimmy CHou 2024-03-13
rEFInd automatically filters out duplicate partitions based on the filesystem's UUID or serial number. This is done so as to prevent the display of duplicate entries in software RAID 1 arrays. Chances are this is what's causing your issue -- your backup partition likely contains a duplicate serial number. You might want to check your backup software to see if it has an option to not duplicate the serial number when cloning a partition. As the point of a filesystem serial number is to uniquely identify it, IMO a backup should have a unique serial number, although that might require tweaking anything that refers to the filesystem by serial number.
In most cases, setting
scan_delayis unnecessary. If setting it and commenting it out produce identical displays when rEFInd first starts, then it's doing nothing useful.