I'm setting up a dual boot for 2 different Yosemite installs on a single, partitioned HD. By default, rEFInd has no problem discovering or booting to the 2 OSX installations. The issue I have is that they are listed exacly the same way in the boot menu, no way to tell one from the other.
I want to create a manual stanza in refind.conf to differientiate the 2 installations, but I can't get it to work. I think my issue is speficying the volume properly. I've tried using diskutil info to get the UUIDs, but they won't boot, unable to find boot.efi. I noticed the menu says Boot OSX from Recovery HD on the auto discovered options, and Boot OSX from EFI on the manual entry. I tried changing the volume to "recovery hd" and it will boot, but this doesn't help since both installations are listed as recovery hd. Any tips would be appreciated.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Offhand, I'm not sure if diskutil will return the partition GUID or the filesystem UUID. The two are entirely unrelated. Currently, rEFInd does not understand filesystem UUIDs, so if that's what you're getting, it won't work. You can find the partition GUID value with my GPT fdisk (gdisk) utility by using the i option, like this:
$ sudo gdisk /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.0
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Command (? forhelp): p
Disk /dev/sda: 488397168 sectors, 232.9 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 46F38CF7-746E-47FC-AEFB-EE9B43EF55C6
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 488397134
Partitions will be aligned on 1024-sector boundaries
Total free space is 990 sectors (495.0 KiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1102430711024.0 KiB EF02 BIOS boot partition
230721133567552.0 MiB EF00 EFI System
311335682159615501.0 MiB 8300 Xubuntu /boot
421596163185663501.0 MiB 8300 Ubuntu /boot
53185664488397134231.4 GiB 8E00 Linux LVM
Command (? forhelp): i
Partition number (1-5): 4
Partition GUID code: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 (Linux filesystem)
Partition unique GUID: 1BDD8362-508D-4585-A68B-0887C07914A0
First sector: 2159616(at 1.0 GiB)
Last sector: 3185663(at 1.5 GiB)
Partition size: 1026048 sectors (501.0 MiB)
Attribute flags: 0000000000000004
Partition name: 'Ubuntu /boot'
Command (? forhelp):
That example is from a Linux system. Under OS X, you'd specify /dev/disk0 (or possibly some other disk number) rather than /dev/sda. The p command shows you your partitions, and you'll need to figure out which ones you want to examine with i. In the output of i, the Partition unique GUID is what you want to extract.
Alternatively, you can give each of your partitions a unique filesystem name and use that to identify the volume in your manual boot stanza. For that matter, giving each filesystem a unique name will help you differentiate them when they're auto-detected, too. You can move this along one further step by giving each partition a unique auto-detected icon, as described here:
I'm setting up a dual boot for 2 different Yosemite installs on a single, partitioned HD. By default, rEFInd has no problem discovering or booting to the 2 OSX installations. The issue I have is that they are listed exacly the same way in the boot menu, no way to tell one from the other.
I want to create a manual stanza in refind.conf to differientiate the 2 installations, but I can't get it to work. I think my issue is speficying the volume properly. I've tried using diskutil info to get the UUIDs, but they won't boot, unable to find boot.efi. I noticed the menu says Boot OSX from Recovery HD on the auto discovered options, and Boot OSX from EFI on the manual entry. I tried changing the volume to "recovery hd" and it will boot, but this doesn't help since both installations are listed as recovery hd. Any tips would be appreciated.
Offhand, I'm not sure if
diskutilwill return the partition GUID or the filesystem UUID. The two are entirely unrelated. Currently, rEFInd does not understand filesystem UUIDs, so if that's what you're getting, it won't work. You can find the partition GUID value with my GPT fdisk (gdisk) utility by using theioption, like this:That example is from a Linux system. Under OS X, you'd specify
/dev/disk0(or possibly some other disk number) rather than/dev/sda. Thepcommand shows you your partitions, and you'll need to figure out which ones you want to examine withi. In the output ofi, thePartition unique GUIDis what you want to extract.Alternatively, you can give each of your partitions a unique filesystem name and use that to identify the volume in your manual boot stanza. For that matter, giving each filesystem a unique name will help you differentiate them when they're auto-detected, too. You can move this along one further step by giving each partition a unique auto-detected icon, as described here:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/configfile.html#icons
Chances are these two approaches, in combination, will do enough of what you want that manual boot stanzas will become less appealing.