Unable to rename multiple mac entries

[Jamie-Rhys Edwards]

Hi guys,

So I have two macOS partitions on my macbook pro. One is for work, the other, personal.

After installing rEFInd, and it being successful, I then restart the mac and get to the boot screen. However, once there I notice that I do have two entries but they are both named exactly the same.

Is there a way to rename them so that they both read Personal and Work respectively?

Thanks.

Jamie.

[Roderick W. Smith]

It's almost certainly possible, but you haven't provided sufficient detail -- most importantly, what the existing entries are named. The OS X version(s) you're running may also be important. You may be able to do it by renaming one or both of the partitions; or you may need to create manual boot stanzas.

(Unfortunately, Apple has moved its boot loader around over the years, which means that it could reside in any of at least three places.)

[Jamie-Rhys Edwards]

The first partition is called "work" and the second "personal" and they are both MacOSX Sierra 10.12.6

[Roderick W. Smith]

But what are the rEFInd boot entries called?

[Jamie-Rhys Edwards]

Boot MacOS

[Roderick W. Smith]

If they're both named that, then each macOS installation has its own Recovery HD volume for booting. (rEFInd deliberately hides that name because people have been confused by it.) There are at least three ways to give each entry a unique name:

• Rename one or both Recovery HD volumes -- If you rename Recovery HD to something else, the new name will appear in rEFInd's menu. For instance, if you rename Recovery HD to Personal boot, then rEFInd will display the loader name as Boot macOS from Personal boot. The caveat is that I don't know if any macOS tools might misbehave after this volume is given an unusual name. To rename the volume, do the following:
• Create a mount point. Typing sudo mkdir /Volumes/rhd will do this. (You can use another name if you like; it's just temporary.)
• Mount the volume. Typing sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/rhd, with the disk device identifier and mount point adjusted, will do this. Note that you'll need some way to identify which Recovery HD volume is associated with which OS. If you can't do that, you might need to guess and adjust later if you guess wrong.
• Rename the volume. You can do this normally using the Finder.
• Use rEFInd's HFS+ driver -- rEFInd's HFS+ driver has the unusual feature of being able to read HFS+ in Apple's LVM, which they've been using recently, whereas the Mac firmware's own HFS+ driver can't do this. Thus, if you use rEFInd's HFS+ driver on a Mac, that might enable you to boot from the installations HFS+ volume directly, which should show the name of the boot volume rather than being empty or reading as Recovery HD. See the rEFInd drivers documentation for more on installing drivers. Be aware, though, that the HFS+ driver causes problems on some Macs; I've seen reports of rEFInd not even coming up when this driver is installed on some recent Macs. Also, if and when you convert from HFS+ to APFS, this approach will stop working. One more complication is that you'll be left with two entries to boot each installation, so you'll probably want to hide one of them. You can do this with dont_scan_volumes "Recovery HD" in refind.conf.
• Create manual boot stanzas -- You can create manual boot stanzas to boot each boot loader, giving each one a unique name. You'd need to identify each Recovery HD boot volume via a GUID value, which is a new feature in rEFInd 0.11.0, which I expect to release later today. See this section of the documentation for information on creating manual boot stanzas. As with the previous option, this one will leave multiple entries for each macOS installation, so you'll want to hide the old ones with dont_scan_volumes or some other method.

Renaming one or both Recovery HD volumes is likely to be the easiest solution, but might have some hidden cost I don't know about. (I just tried it on one system and it worked OK, but my total testing time with the new name is about two minutes.) Creating manual boot stanzas is the safest approach, since it does not require modifying your installation in any way other than editing refind.conf; but this is the approach that has the heaviest learning curve. Using rEFInd's HFS+ driver may seem appealing in some ways, but it's likely to be a short-term solution at best, since my understanding is that Apple intends to force everybody to use its new APFS once macOS 10.13 is released; and I'm wary of problems that the HFS+ driver might cause on some Macs.