Two Linux icons, one boots Ubuntu, the other boots Windows
An EFI boot manager utility
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Hi All,
I recently upgraded to a 2TB HD on my early-2013 MBP. I am using Yosemite and trying to triple boot Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7 as per this guide.
I created my Windows partition at the top of the drive (350 GB), added a shared partition right after (500 GB FAT32), and then installed Ubuntu in the free space before OS X (which is at the bottom of the disk).
I created a swap space (16 GB), / partition (20 GB ext4), and /home partition (300 GB ext4) as standard partitions.
When I installed Ubuntu, I made sure to install the boot loader to the same device as / (I believe it was sda6).
Everything works well and fine, however there are two issues.
1) There are four icons instead of three, in order: Mac, Ubuntu, Windows, Linux (the penguin)
The Ubuntu icon says:
Windows:
Linux:
The main issue here is that when I select the Linux icon, it boots me into Windows. When I select the Ubuntu icon, I get Ubuntu.
Aside from that, the title under Ubuntu is rather ugly. Also I'm not sure why it is a FAT volume when it is obviously ext4.
Also relevant, I installed/upgraded with the NTFS driver as per this thread). The Windows subtitle used to be much uglier. However, it does show up as Windows 8 for some reason when I actually have 7 installed.
The goal here is to somehow remove the last icon (it gives little information about which path I should block), and to fix up the titles so that they look nice and make sense.
2) After booting into Linux, GRUB does not appear. It goes straight through the scrolling white letters until I get the Ubuntu login screen. I installed GRUB as Ubuntu does not give you the option not to, and made sure to put it in sda6 (/).
My googling has yielded a lot of cases where GRUB takes over rEFInd, but I haven't found anything very helpful about the reverse issue.
The goal is to access GRUB so I can boot in safe mode, etc. after booting from rEFInd
I appreciate any input, this has been going smoothly so far but I am not experienced enough to fix these last issues. Thanks.
On a side note, does anyone know if there is a way for me to ensure that Ubuntu was installed in EFI mode? Also, I've been reading up on Hybrid MBRs--would installing Windows 8 be worth it so that the entire system was uEFI?
I am including these Mac terminal outputs as they may help you visualize all this...
Forgive the bad formatting, I don't think Markdown has a way to preserve whitespace.
Thanks.
Last edit: Steven 2015-02-05
I didn't write the BIOS/CSM/legacy boot code in rEFInd, and I confess that I barely understand it, so I try to modify it as little as possible. Based on my limited understanding, though, I suspect that rEFInd is detecting GRUB, trying to set its matching hybrid MBR partition as bootable, and then launching the boot loader in the MBR, which remains your Windows boot loader. If the partition in which GRUB is installed is not in your hybrid MBR, this won't quite work, and you'll end up booting Windows. It might work as expected if your Ubuntu (
/dev/sda6) partition were in your hybrid MBR, but I can't promise that. You can use my GPT fdisk (gdisk) program to edit your hybrid MBR.As the bigger issue, though, is simply getting rid of that malfunctioning entry, you can do so with the
dont_scan_volumesoption inrefind.conf: use any unique portion of the description to hide the entry.The identification as FAT is unusual. Are you using rEFInd 0.8.6 or something earlier? I made changes in 0.8.6 that may have created a new bug; or if you're using something earlier, it's conceivable that upgrading will fix it. You could also try bypassing the issue by giving either the filesystem or the partition a name. (You can use
tune2fsor GParted to give the filesystem a name, orgdiskto give the partition a name.)The title is what it is. I've considered ways to make it more pretty, but the only solutions I've thought of would come at the expense of losing precision, a high probability of buggy names, or additional configuration. Thus, I'm afraid it will stay as it is -- unless you switch from auto-detection to a manual boot stanza. This will be more effort to set up and might need maintenance to deal with kernel upgrades, but you'll have more flexibility when it comes to naming. Alternatively, you can use
hideui labelto hide all the descriptions and rely on the icons alone to figure out what you're booting.This makes it pretty clear that you installed in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode. In theory, launching the Linux option should boot GRUB -- but as you say, that's not working. As an alternative, you could install an EFI version of GRUB. In Ubuntu, that's the
grub-efipackage. This will create another boot option.Really, though, why install GRUB? It won't do anything for you. You can run
mkrlconf.shin Ubuntu to create a/boot/refind_linux.conffile that will give you three options to boot Ubuntu directly from rEFInd. (Hit F2 or Insert after highlighting the Linux option to get these options.) The default option will be a prettier boot (without the scrolling text). You can edit these options or add more by editing/boot/refind_linux.conf.As I said, you almost certainly installed in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, not in EFI mode. This is pretty much irrelevant, though, because you can switch boot modes by installing (and using) the appropriate boot loader.
I'm not sure anything is worth coping with the Windows 8 user interface! ;-)
Seriously, though, hybrid MBRs are nasty things. Some people have succeeded in getting Windows 7 to boot in EFI mode on Macs, but it's pretty tricky at best and success depends in part on your specific Mac model. I used to have a long Web forum thread on the subject bookmarked, but I can't seem to find it now. Windows 8 seems to be easier to get booting in EFI mode on Macs, but success is not 100% universal. As to whether it's "worth it" to use Windows 8 just to be rid of a hybrid MBR, only you can decide.