I installed 2 OS; rEFInd says I have 3. Please help me rid imaginary "Legacy OS"

[Thomas]

Hello Mr. Smith and rEFInd users,

For the past week, my attempt at removing an auto-detect "legacy OS" from the rEFInd boot screen has been an epic failure. Please help!

I'm dual-booting Windows 7 and Maverick with a shared ExFAT data partition on my MacBook Pro. Below is the diskutil output:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data Data                    60.0 GB    disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 50.0 GB    disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Mac                     49.0 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s5

The rEFInd boot screen, in addition to Mac and Windows, has a legacy option with the description "Boot legacy OS from partition 2." Selecting the legacy icon takes me to a black screen.

I haven't been able to figure how to remove that legacy menu item from the boot screen. I've tried using both variant of the dont_scan_volumes tokens (dont_scan_volumes "Data" and don't_scan_volumes "Data") with no success.

I'd be forever grateful if you can help me solve this problem.

Thank you,
Thomas

[Roderick W. Smith]

Unfortunately, rEFInd's handling of BIOS/legacy OSes is still rather crude. If rEFInd discovers what looks like bootable code in a partition, it usually creates a boot loader entry. It sounds like rEFInd has found something that looks like boot loader code in partition 2 (/dev/disk0s2 under OS X). It might be possible to add the code that's triggering this to a blacklist to keep it from appearing; however, if the code is a legitimate boot loader, the only way to get rid of it will be to erase the boot loader code. This is easy with Linux filesystems, which are usually empty in the first sector, but I'm not sure offhand how to do it with NTFS, which should have data in its first sector.

If you care to send me the first sector of that partition, I can take a look at it and perhaps fix it for the next version of rEFInd. To get that to me, issue the following command in a Terminal window in OS X:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=disk0s2.img bs=512 count=1

This will create a file called disk0s2.img. E-mail it to me or post it on a Web site and send me the URL.

[Thomas]

Mr. Smith: Thank you for the quick response. Attached is the image file of the ExFAT partition. In the meantime, I will attempt to hide the ghost "Legacy OS" by composing two OS stanzas to boot Windows and Mac. Thanks for looking into this and I look forward to your response.

[Roderick W. Smith]

Could you please try the following test version:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind-bin-0.7.4.5.zip

The source code is in the rEFInd git repository.

[Christine Prefontaine]

I've been having the same issue. I tried to remove rEFInd and re-install but was not even able to uninstall. Ugh I am such a noob. And I did type in that stupid bless command (was troubleshooting on another website and forgot), but my computer seems to be working fine.

I am trying to install either Elementary OS from a CD (says it can't find) or Mint from a USB (just hangs).

Here's my disk util output:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            399.8 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   99.5 GB    disk0s4

[Christine Prefontaine]

I've been having the same issue. I tried to remove rEFInd and re-install but was not even able to uninstall. Ugh I am such a noob. And I did type in that stupid bless command (was troubleshooting on another website and forgot), but my computer seems to be working fine.

I am trying to install either Elementary OS from a CD (says it can't find) or Mint from a USB (just hangs).

Here's my disk util output:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            399.8 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   99.5 GB    disk0s4

[Roderick W. Smith]

Christine,

It's unlikely that you're having the exact same issue because Thomas's problem was with an exFAT partition, and your diskutil output doesn't indicate any likely exFAT partitions. It appears that you're attempting to dual-boot OS X and Linux. If so, I recommend you get Linux booting in EFI mode (see the rEFInd documentation on booting Linux for details) and then edit refind.conf to ensure that hdbios is not among the options on the scanfor line.

[Thomas]

I installed the latest version and everything works flawlessly. Thank you, Mr. Smith.