rEFInd does not find my Mac hard drive

[Robin Haveneers]

Hi all

I'm trying to install rEFInd on my Macbook Pro (Early 2011) to dual-boot with Ubuntu. However, after completely erasing my hard drive (dd, zero-out) and re-installing Yosemite from a USB stick, I can't seem to be able to install rEFInd correctly. When running the install.sh script (after this clean install of Yosemite) it gives me the warning 'Warning: root device could not be found' and then continues. In the end it says: "Can not unmount disk. Resource busy". After this it says that it installed successfully.

Next, when I reboot my laptop I get the rEFInd menu, but no option to select my 'normal' hard drive (that I named "OS X", and where Yosemite is installed), but I can only select "Boot OS X from Recovery HD". Furthermore, when I try to install Ubuntu it does not give me the option to "Install alongside OS X", because it can not find an installed OS. However, when I boot while holding the Alt/Option key I can select my hard drive ("OS X") to boot OS X from.

Anyone has this issue or knows how to resolve it?

This is my outcome for "diskuttil list", should it be of any help.

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         192.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS OS X                   *191.7 GB   disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 2A233BBC-BAE7-465F-BC75-117690FD54A5
                                 Unencrypted

Kind regards

Robin

[Roderick W. Smith]

Have you tried selecting the option to boot OS X from the Recovery HD? Confusingly, that's where Apple stores its NON-recovery boot loader by default in Yosemite, so my suspicion is that this is just how you'll have to boot OS X.

As to installing Ubuntu, the problem is that Apple has changed to a proprietary Logical Volume Management (LVM) system by default for Yosemite, and Linux doesn't yet support that -- or at least, Linux installers can't yet recognize it. (I haven't looked into the details of Linux support.) You'll need to resize the partition in OS X and then tell the Ubuntu installer to install in the free space. (The "Something Else" option may be required.) A further tip: Boot the Ubuntu installer using the option to try it without installing, then open a Terminal window. In that window, type ubiquity -b. This will launch the installer in such a way that it will not attempt to install GRUB, which will likely just get in the way. Don't create a separate /boot partition and rEFInd will boot Ubuntu just fine when you restart.

[Robin Haveneers]

Hi Rod !

Thanks for your reply and thanks for making such an awesome tool. The install of Ubuntu seems to have succeeded with ubiquity -b, because when I run the installer again it says 'reinstall Ubuntu', so that's fine. However, rEFInd does not seem to be able to locate Ubuntu because it does not show up in the menu. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance !

[Roderick W. Smith]

Oops; I keep forgetting to tell people to be sure to install drivers. In OS X, the easiest way to do this is to re-install rEFInd after Linux is installed. If you used something exotic, though (other than ext4fs), you'll need to manually install the EFI driver for your filesystem.