HP Laptop finding Windows and defaulting to it.

[sailerboy]

Windows has a separate boot manager, and even if I delete it using efibootmgr, the laptop finds it, adds it to the list, and pushes it to the top. I tried renaming the Microsoft folder, which prevents the auto-override of the boot choice, but it means that rEFInd doesn't find Windows. How can I rename the Microsoft folder to keep rEFInd's pretty picture for Microsoft, and so that it doesn't find many generic files.

[Roderick W. Smith]

I have two suggestions:

1. Any boot loader called bootmgfw.efi in a subdirectory of EFI should pick up a Microsoft icon in the rEFInd menu, unless that's overridden by something else, such as a subdirectory name (e.g., EFI/freebsd/bootmgfw.efi will acquire a FreeBSD icon). Thus, you could move EFI/Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi to, say, EFI/MS/bootmgfw.efi, and it should work. You might need to juggle some support files if you do this, though.

2. You can rename bootmgfw.efi to some other name (say, msboot.efi), but keep it in the EFI/Microsoft/boot directory. You can then create a manual boot stanza for it that references the Microsoft icon file.

In either case, it's possible that a software update from Microsoft will restore its boot loader file, so you should be aware of that possibility and be prepared to correct matters if this occurs.