rEFInd boot menu on Mac with unsupported graphics card

[Peter Gutbrod]

Have a Mac Pro with a non-flashed GTX 980 and thus see no boot screen in rEFInd.

Tried to set rEFInd to textmode but that didn't work either. Seems the Mac only switches to textmode when booted from a bootcamp hybrid-MBR volume.

I wonder, whether it would be possible to use textmode with an rEFInd installation on a specially formated thumbdrive?

Or whether I could load NVIDIA EFI drivers during the rEFInd boot process?

If anyone has tried one of these solutions, I'd like to hear how you did it and whether it worked.

Peter

[Roderick W. Smith]

In theory, if you've got Nvidia EFI drivers in the form of a .efi file, loading them MIGHT work. There might be issues related to the order in which drivers are loaded an video is initialized in rEFInd, though; and I've never tested rEFInd's driver-loading features with anything but filesystem drivers, so there may be unexpected "gotchas" with other types of drivers.

You might want to contact the video card manufacturer and/or Nvidia to see if you can find EFI-compatble firmware to flash on the video card.

[Thomas Tempelmann]

I have the same issue. Got a Mac Pro with a GTX 660. And no, there is no EFI firmware for that card, that's what everyone agrees on who has looked into this before (there are several forums about using non-EFI-flashed cards in Mac Pros).

I had just sent an email to Roderick asking before I had the better idea to look here.

I wonder, however, if it's possible to have rEFInd use the graphic card's PC BIOS API that it must certainly have, right? That way, any PC compatible card could at least be used in rEFInd in text mode, as the BIOS INT functions for that are pretty simple (they are, I believe, emulating a 80x24 chars terminal).

Or is there some reason why this can't work at all?

[Roderick W. Smith]

No, BIOS and EFI code are entirely different; you can't just drop one in and use it in place of the other. That would be like running a DOS program in OS X -- you need a boatload of extra stuff to get something like that to work.