rEFInd doesn't find bios/mbr Windows operating systems
An EFI boot manager utility
Status: Beta
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This is a great utility, and it would be able to do everything that I want if only it would be able to find bios/mbr Windows operating systems and boot them.
I have a Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H motherboard with an American Megatrends bios, v7. From the UEFI shell, I get shell Version 2.0, Intel, and Version 2.3x (can't remember last digit) UEFI firmware by American Megatrends.
I can run a Windows XP (32 bit) install or a Windows 8 (64 bit) install by selecting the appropriate hard drive in the bios. rEFInd can see those hard drives and displays them in the UI when I enable scanfor hdbios, but they are greyed out. When I select them, I get an "Insert boot drive" error, and I have to shutdown the computer.
I tried writing separate boot stanzas, and after loading the ntfs driver, I was able to see an icon for each stanza. When I selected the icon, it looks like I got a shell error saying that the file was not found. The boot stanzas that I created for locations in the system EFI volume worked fine (after I labeled the volume as "SYSTEM").
I also tried loading an Ubuntu install, but rEFInd wasn't able to find that either.
Any help would be appreciated.
There is no such thing as a "grayed out" entry in the rEFInd menu, although icons can be (and some are) done in grayscale. Unfortunately, the rEFInd BIOS/CSM/legacy boot options are primitive. I've tried improving them, but the relevant EFI calls are not well documented and are awkward to use, so progress has been slow. As a general rule, the existing code works best when the computer has a single hard disk; it's often impossible to launch the boot loader on the second disk.
Manual boot stanzas for BIOS/CSM/legacy are not currently possible. I'm waiting to improve the PC/UEFI BIOS/CSM/legacy boot code to do this.
It's not clear what the problem is with your Ubuntu install, since you've given no details. If this was a BIOS/CSM/legacy-mode install, I recommend you install the appropriate EFI filesystem driver and boot in EFI mode instead.
Thanks for the reply and the information.
I installed a Win 7 and Win 8 dual UEFI boot (on a GPT-formated disk of course) on HD0. Then I installed Win XP and Ubuntu on an MBR-formatted disk. Both the Win XP install and the Ubuntu install boot via legacy bios (with CSM support).
I could convert the Ubuntu install to a UEFI boot (at least I think I can by adding the EFI drivers, a grub2 EFI boot, and a fat32 system EFI partition). If I did this, do you think I could boot the Win XP install via Grub2?
I tried looking up more information on EFI and the EFI shell, but as you mentioned, documentation seems pretty scarce. rEFInd is a very interesting project. I am going to take a look at the source code and see if I can figure anything out.
The EFI version of GRUB can't chainload a BIOS-mode boot loader. To the best of my knowledge, only the boot managers built into some EFIs, rEFInd, and rEFIt can do this, and in the case of rEFIt, this feature works only on Macs.
You might have luck by swapping the disks so that the firmware thinks the MBR disk is the first one; that's the disk that usually boots most reliable in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode from rEFInd.
Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try ...
Well, I made the MBR disk the first one. With the HDBIOS scan on, rEFInd showed the MBR disk as a boot option, but it would not load the OS loader. I do not remember what the error was.
So I gave up on UEFI for now. I converted my Win 7 and Win 8 installs to BIOS boot on an MBR formatted disk, and I use the Win 8 bootloader to load Win 8, Win 7, Win XP, and Ubuntu.