Stuck on “Scanning for bootloaders, please wait…”

[Wesley Moore]

I've been running rEFInd (0.11.2) for many months now without issue. Last night I resized and deleted a few partitions on my system. Afterwards everything seemed fine but at some point Windows crashed and after rebooting rEFInd now hangs with the, "Scanning for bootloaders, please wait…”, message. I've tried using the default config. I've removed and reinstalled refind with refind-install. I've fscked and chkdisked the EFI and other filesystems. I've verifed the GPT in gdisk.

Other info:

Machine Dell XPS 15 -- It's possible a Dell update of some sort was installed last night as well since I was logged into Windows which I don't do often.
Primary OS: Arch Linux
Other OSes on machine: OpenBSD, Void Linux, Windows

My original rEFInd install had all drivers installed. The new one has none of them (I don't need them as far as I can tell).

There's another person reporting similar issues on SuperUser: https://superuser.com/questions/1279367/refind-stuck-on-scanning-for-bootloaders-please-wait

Any ideas for what to try next or what might be wrong?

[mcloaked]

On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 11:33 PM, Wesley Moore wjmoore@users.sf.net wrote:

I've been running rEFInd (0.11.2) for many months now without issue. Last
night I resized and deleted a few partitions on my system. Afterwards
everything seemed fine but at some point Windows crashed and after
rebooting rEFInd now hangs with the, "Scanning for bootloaders, please
wait…”, message. I've tried using the default config. I've removed and
reinstalled refind with refind-install. I've fscked and chkdisked the EFI
and other filesystems. I've verifed the GPT in gdisk.

Other info:

Machine Dell XPS 15 -- It's possible a Dell update of some sort was
installed last night as well since I was logged into Windows which I don't
do often.
Primary OS: Arch Linux
Other OSes on machine: OpenBSD, Void Linux, Windows

My original rEFInd install had all drivers installed. The new one has none
of them (I don't need them as far as I can tell).

There's another person reporting similar issues on SuperUser:
https://superuser.com/questions/1279367/refind-stuck-on-
scanning-for-bootloaders-please-wait

Any ideas for what to try next or what might be wrong?

This looks like a more general issue with the new refind code - on all my
machines (running arch linux, and some dual boot arch linux and Windows 10)
I briefly get the "Scanning for bootloaders..." message for a fraction of a
second before the refind graphical screen comes up - but in all my machines
it is only a momentary display before everything runs as it used to prior
to 0.11.2. Clearly something has changed in this version in the speed and
detail that the refind code uses to find bootloaders. I guess that if you
have explicit stanzas but no scanning it might not give that message, but
no doubt Rod will reply and explain what is happening here.

--
mike c

[Harrison Waltman]

I'm going to bump this. Experiencing the same issue on an Acer E15. Primary OS is Windows, but I installed Refind using an Ubuntu install on an external drive. Any ideas for next steps?

[Matthew Janik]

Thought I'd chime in here. Decided to update refind today. Running MacOS 10.12.6 (Sierra). After properly updating, refind boots, but I'm stuck at the blue "Scanning for bootloaders; please wait..." message. I left it for about 30 minutes to be sure. My SSD Mac Pro with loads of RAM shouldn't take more than a minute, so it's something wrong with the refind code/default conf for my system. Don't want to mess about with the scanfor in the .conf. It's worked 'out of box' before, so I'll keep it that way.

Luckily I had backed up my previous installation (not sure which version) off the ESP before installing 0.11.2. After removing 0.11.2 totally and putting the old version back, it scans and boots within a second.

Not sure what was added to the new version, or if it only really works with High Sierra, but I found going back to an older version fixed this issue. Older versions can be found here.