rEFInd is stuck at "rEFInd - Initializing"

[computerworm]

Hello Rod,
I installed the latest version of rEFInd yesterday using the refind-install script, and it was working fine until earlier today. I did some disk operations, and I'm sure I didn't do anything to the EFI partition, because GRUB still works. What I did was I shrank one of my Linux installs and restored another from an .img file. After that rEFInd started booting to just a banner screen with no icons. I'm still able to boot through GRUB, so I played around with the config file some more, and finally decided to enable text mode to see if any helpful output would appear. Upon booting text mode, I found that rEFInd gets stuck at "rEFInd - Initializing". I have completely reinstalled rEFInd twice, even removing the local MOK and re-registering it. I also checked my efi drivers - my Linux installs are both on btrfs partitions, and I have the btrfs efi driver installed; the only other drivers I have are ext4 and iso-9660. I have searched and searched Google but I can't find any solution. Please help.

Kind regards,
computerworm

[Roderick W. Smith]

This is almost certainly a filesystem issue -- either damage to the filesystem caused by the resize or restore operation or a bug in the filesystem driver. I recommend running disk checks (with fsck) on the filesystems you modified. If that doesn't help, then as a diagnostic measure, try removing the rEFInd filesystem drivers (from the ESP's EFI/refind/drivers_x64 directory). If that helps, then you can try restoring only the one that you need to read the kernel. If the problem recurs, then it's either lingering filesystem damage that fsck didn't correct or a driver bug. You could work around this by putting the kernel on another filesystem (such as FAT, which requires no extra drivers) or by booting Linux by chainloading GRUB.