I upgraded to High Sierra, and chose to reformat with an APFS filesystem. After all that was done, I installed rEFInd again, only to find that I can't boot to macOS anymore. The volume is not recognized anymore by the boot loader, and I can therefore not boot.
I am worried about my Mac, and would like to know how I could restore the macOS original boot loader until this bug is fixed?
I tried copying the apfs.efi file from /usr/standalone to the rEFInd drivers_x64 directory but that did not work. I read this somewhere on reddit, and thought it's worth a try.
Thanks for your help!
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For everyone else, with rEFInd issues, I found a relatively well working solution to restore the old bootloader. Luckily I remembered that I just would need to have to boot from somewhere, where I can go into "Startup Volume", normally available from System Preferences, and the macOS installer.
If you have a second Mac, then you can use createinstallmedia to create a bootable High Sierra USB key. Within the installer there is an option for "Startup Volume". Open it, and click your APFS volume. The original Apple bootloader will be restored. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372
If you don't have a second, then maybe you'll figure out a way how to virtualize a Mac, where you can create an installer USB key. Good luck to you!
Last edit: Zettt 2017-10-03
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I've been working on getting rEFInd to boot macOS 10.13. The problem is not with APFS per se, support for which Apple seems to have added to the firmware of upgraded computers. The problem is that Apple has changed where the boot loader is located, and in installation-specific ways, so rEFInd must now actively scan for the macOS boot loader, rather than just look in a fixed location. There's also a complication because of confusion about volume identification when rEFInd is compiled with GNU-EFI. (The code works as expected when compiled with Tianocore.) I don't know if this is a bug in Apple's firmware, in GNU-EFI, or in rEFInd; but it's proving difficult to debug. If it weren't for this problem, I'd have released a 0.11.1 version by now.
Because it is working when compiled with Tianocore, though, I'm making an interim semi-release for those who need it; you can download the binary here:
This version should work to boot macOS 10.13 without any special configuration, provided you use the binary I've compiled or you compile it with Tianocore; it might or might not work when compiled with GNU-EFI. On my test system, it shows two options to boot macOS 10.13. If you see two options, you can hide whichever one you don't want to see using any of the methods described in the rEFInd documentation:
Hello
I upgraded to High Sierra, and chose to reformat with an APFS filesystem. After all that was done, I installed rEFInd again, only to find that I can't boot to macOS anymore. The volume is not recognized anymore by the boot loader, and I can therefore not boot.
I am worried about my Mac, and would like to know how I could restore the macOS original boot loader until this bug is fixed?
I tried copying the
apfs.efifile from/usr/standaloneto the rEFInddrivers_x64directory but that did not work. I read this somewhere on reddit, and thought it's worth a try.Thanks for your help!
I got it working (at least for FileVault encrypted volumes) on APFS on High Sierra and posted my results to the reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/70mtb2/refind_with_apfs/dnsc7rk/
tim
only for filevault?
Thank you very much. I'll check it out.
For everyone else, with rEFInd issues, I found a relatively well working solution to restore the old bootloader. Luckily I remembered that I just would need to have to boot from somewhere, where I can go into "Startup Volume", normally available from System Preferences, and the macOS installer.
If you have a second Mac, then you can use
createinstallmediato create a bootable High Sierra USB key. Within the installer there is an option for "Startup Volume". Open it, and click your APFS volume. The original Apple bootloader will be restored. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372If you don't have a second, then maybe you'll figure out a way how to virtualize a Mac, where you can create an installer USB key. Good luck to you!
Last edit: Zettt 2017-10-03
I've been working on getting rEFInd to boot macOS 10.13. The problem is not with APFS per se, support for which Apple seems to have added to the firmware of upgraded computers. The problem is that Apple has changed where the boot loader is located, and in installation-specific ways, so rEFInd must now actively scan for the macOS boot loader, rather than just look in a fixed location. There's also a complication because of confusion about volume identification when rEFInd is compiled with GNU-EFI. (The code works as expected when compiled with Tianocore.) I don't know if this is a bug in Apple's firmware, in GNU-EFI, or in rEFInd; but it's proving difficult to debug. If it weren't for this problem, I'd have released a 0.11.1 version by now.
Because it is working when compiled with Tianocore, though, I'm making an interim semi-release for those who need it; you can download the binary here:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind-bin-0.11.0.6.zip
The source code is in the git archives:
https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/code/ci/master/tree/
This version should work to boot macOS 10.13 without any special configuration, provided you use the binary I've compiled or you compile it with Tianocore; it might or might not work when compiled with GNU-EFI. On my test system, it shows two options to boot macOS 10.13. If you see two options, you can hide whichever one you don't want to see using any of the methods described in the rEFInd documentation:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/configfile.html#hiding
Hi, Smith, I wonder know is the version of 0.11.2 support macOS 10.13.1 with APFS?