rEFInd - white screen on new MacBook Pro 10,2
An EFI boot manager utility
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Hello folks,
I have new MacBook Pro with Retina display and updated to OS X 10.8.3 and latest EFI firmware 1.1.
I tried to install rEFInd boot manager but only got white screen after restarted. I searched through that discussion and found out that another guy have same problem with his new MacBook Pro Retina. I uncommented textonly in refind.conf and restarted system. I got white screen then black screen. It displayed nothing. It did not detect Mac OS X partition and just displayed complete black screen.
Does anyone have any solution with that?
Thanks,
Tim
I have no immediate solution. If you're willing to try a test/debug version of rEFInd, I can create one that displays debugging messages that might help resolve the problem, but it will take some back-and-forth to test several versions. E-mail me if you want to do that.
I'm seeing no issue using rEFInd 0.6.11 on a MacBookPro10,1 MacBook Pro 15" Retina, Mid 2012. It has Boot ROM version MBP101.00EE.B03 which is a newer version than the BP101.00EE.B02 (EFI 1.0) listed at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237. I think it came with
Thunderbolt Firmware Update v1.2. Does that Firmware Update affect the MacbookPro10,2?
I tried both graphics mode (2880x1800) and textonly mode.
One interesting note: The EFI console uses a Retina sized font. Available text modes are 80x25 and 176x47. Pressing F10 in rEFInd will create a screenshot - it now works for text mode as well. On the 15" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, it creates a 2880x1800 png file (15.6 MB for each screenshot created). This means each character is about 16x38 pixels.
Yes, I have Firmware Update v1.2 for Thunderbolt issues. I think that it did affected MacBookPro 10,2 because it will not show menu or text mode and program was blindly active in background. Rod and I tried to get it working but we can't get. The 'Hello World' EFI program failed test.
I had reformatted entire internal drive and re-installed everything but it still resulted the same. Joe, keep us posted to getting it working on MacBookPro 10,2. Thanks.
Ok, I will try F10 key and see what happens...
Update:
I enabled textonly in refind.conf and it went black screen after select 'EFI boot'. I tried different text mode 0,1 and 2 and it always display black screen. I tried press F10 key but it did not work. It seems hung after it went into text mode.
Boot ROM version: MBP102.0106.B03
SMC Version: 2.6f57
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Last edit: Tim Stark 2013-05-25
Interesting note #2: REFInd on Retina MacBook Pro doesn't show the up and down arrow when there are items to scroll. I believe the EFI console font for Retina display Macs doesn't have the glyphs for the unicode arrows and box drawing characters.
I used BBEdit to create a UTF-16 Little-Endian file with no BOM and used the "type -u" command in the EFI Shell to display the contents. On my old Mac Pro, the supported characters displayed properly (arrows and some box drawing characters). The unsupported characters displayed as a checkerboard character. On the Retina MacBook Pro, all the arrows and box drawing characters displayed as blank.
There's a TestBoxDraw project in the EFI Toolkit 2.0 but I haven't tried compiling it.
Our Retina MacBook Pros have different firmware. rEFInd works on my MacBookPro10,1 but not on your MacBookPro10,2.
There could be a problem with the "textmode" option. Leave it commented out of the .conf file and just use "textonly" by itself. rEFInd will use the default text mode.
Have you tried rEFInd on an HFS partition?
Disable all the rEFInd drivers as well.
I'm not sure any of that will help if the "Hello World" program doesn't even work but I think there is some hope since rEFInd managed to make the screen go black.
Yeah! Good news!!! Without rEFInd drivers, it finally went through and displayed menu.
Everything had been finally resolved!
That is good news. I wonder which driver was causing the problem? You don't need the HFS driver since the Mac EFI firmware has an HFS driver already (and there may be some bugs in rEFInd's HFS driver). The other drivers are for Unix operating systems. Do you have any Unix OS's installed?
I believe rEFInd previously showed the drivers and partitions it was loading (when using "textonly") before the menu was displayed but it doesn't do that anymore.
These are the drivers I have enabled even though I don't have any Unix partitions:
Maybe one of the drivers doesn't like one of your partitions. Use "diskutil list" to get a list of your partitions.
What text modes does the rEFInd show for your 13" Retina MacBook Pro? Use the "mode" command in the EFI Shell. Type "help" for other commands. Type "exit" to leave the Shell. From your screen resolution, I would guess 80x25 (default for all EFI shell's) and 160x42 (using Retina sized font of 16x38).
I do not have Unix OS installed for Mac yet. I have EFI, Macintosh HD, and Recovery HD partitions on 128gb SSD internal drive at this time.
Yeah. I tried textonly and it worked now. It displayed colorful menu in text mode.
In graphics mode, fonts are so tiny. I had looked them closely. How do I make fonts bigger for retina screen?
How do I enter EFI shell?
I plugged USB stick (Ubuntu 13.04 amd64+mac) into MBP and I turned it on. It displayed additional icons after 2nd reboot. I tried to boot Ubuntu 13.04 but got 'no bootable drive - insert boot disk and press any key to continue'... after I selected that icon. I checked Ubuntu website and noticed that too many complaint about same message when they tried to boot USB media on their Mac computers. They only works on thunderbolt drives. I do not have thunderbolt drives yet.
Graphics mode uses different fonts than the text mode. Graphics mode uses the fonts in the rEFInd folder. Text mode uses the font from the EFI console.
I think rEFInd would need some modifications to use different sized fonts in graphics mode. It might be nice if it could use the console font. It would also need to have icons that are twice the size. The other alternative is to have rEFInd change the screen resolution but I don't know if that's possible. The Mac's Startup Manager (hold option at startup) uses larger icons and fonts for Retina display.
The EFI Shell is one of the options in the rEFInd menu. Just make sure it's enabled with the "showtools" option in the conf file.
Can you select the USB stick from the Startup Disk preferences panel (System Preferences.app)?
Can you select the USB stick from the Startup Manager (hold option key at startup - and select the Windows option which has a USB hard disk icon, there might also be an EFI boot option with the same USB hard disk icon).
There might be a problem with the way you created the USB stick. What instructions did you use? Use "diskutil list" to see how the USB stick was formatted. Maybe examine it with gdisk if it has partitions (https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/). You can use "sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 count=1 | xxd" to examine the boot code on the USB stick which is necessary to have if it doesn't have an EFI boot or you want to use the Boot Camp method of booting it.
Ok, I checked documents on this website. I downloaded shellx64.efi and placed it into /efi/tools. It now displayed shell icon and was able enter shell prompt. I executed 'mode' and it showed two modes - 80x25 or 160x42. Help command is so long. How do I pause it each page?
I examined first block of USB stick by using xxd command and it looks like MBR boot. I checked diskutil list and it said unknown type - 0x17.
Ok I pressed and hold Options to get Firmware menu. Then I plugged USB stick into it and it displayed orange disk icon marked 'Windows'. I selected it and it booted into Ubuntu system. It worked ok but... Then I shut it down and restart computer. I entered Firmware menu by using Options key and plugged it in. It displayed orange disk icon. I selected it and got 'No bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key to continue'. Something is not reliable in firmware, not rEFInd. Some times, it boots normally or not. 50/50 chance.
I do not have bootcamp setup yet. Does it require bootcamp setup to boot it normally?
Thanks again!
Last edit: Tim Stark 2013-05-28
First, type "mode 160 42" to increase the console text width and height to the max. I believe "textmode 1" in the conf file should do the same thing ("textmode 0" is the default 80x25). When you exit the Shell, rEFInd will use the new mode for it's text menu.
When the help commands are listing, you can press escape to stop it. You can also type something like "help [-g]" to get a list of commands that start with any character up to the letter g. "help [h-~]" will list all commands start with any character after the letter h. Finally, you can type "help -b" to make it pause after each page. You can see these options when you type "help help". The "map" command will give you a list of file systems (fs0-fs#). Type "vol fs0" to get the name of the volume of the first file system. If it's a FAT file system such as "EFI", then it's read/write. Other partitions that are HFS will be read only. Type "fs0:" to set the current directory to the first file system which will probably be the EFI partition. This is where screen shots are saved. Type "ls" for a list of files. If the partition is writable then you can pipe the output of commands to a new file on the partition. For example: "help > help.txt" will dump the output of the help command to a file named help.txt. Then you can use "type help.txt" to see the contents of the file.
The Boot Camp Assistant is just a partitioning utility which can create a partition for you to put Windows on. You could put any legacy OS such as Linux onto that partition. It shrinks your Mac OS X partition to make room for the new partition, and creates a hybrid MBR with boot code. You can use Boot Camp Assistant to create a partition where you can install Ubuntu. When you install Ubuntu, you need to install to the new partition (reformat the new partition without affecting the entire hard drive using the Linux file system that you want to use), and make sure Ubuntu puts grub on the partition instead of the MBR.
The Boot Camp firmware already exists in your Mac's EFI firmware. rEFInd and the Startup Manager uses it to boot legacy OS's such as Windows and Linux. It loads a BIOS type firmware emulation that is used to boot Windows and Linux. That BIOS loads and executes the boot code from the MBR which then loads and executes the boot code of the active partition that is set in the MBR (if the disk has partitions).
Some Windows and Linux OS's allow booting directly from EFI, skipping the old BIOS stuff. For example, the Windows 8 USB stick that the Boot Camp Assistant creates from the Windows 8 iso image can be booted using either Boot Camp or EFI.
Actually, rEFInd says textmode 1 is invalid and that I should use textmode 0 or textmode 2. I tried "textmode 2" but it causes strange behavior in rEFInd. The console text is still confined to 80x25 but rEFInd thinks there are 47 lines. The Shell behaves the same. I have to type "mode 80 25" to get the Shell and rEFInd to agree with the console. Then I can type "mode 176 47" to get the max width and height to work properly. So avoid the textmode option in the conf file for now.
I put Ubuntu 13.04 amd64 live on USB stick by using USB installer on PC. I tried boot it on MacBook pro (10,2) but ended up grub> prompt. I typed 'ls' and saw some partitions listed. I tried to access (hd1,gpt2) and (hd1,gpt3) and got invalid filename `' message. Also, I tried (hd1,gpt1) and see EFI filesystem clearly. All partitions were formatted in FAT32.
I put ext2_x64.efi and ext4_x64.efi into /efi/refind/drivers_x64 and rebooted system. It crashed and failed to display boot menu like that same problem before. I booted to Recovery 10.8.3 and enter terminal to remove drivers from /efi/refind/drivers_x64 and everything returned back to normal. It boots normally. I believe either driver cause the problem.
Also, I played shellx64.efi before. First attempt I entered shell and it boots ok. Then I exited and re-enter it and it entered text mode and displayed empty settings then crashed. I had turned it off then on. Then I entered and exited shellx64.efi and tried to boot Mac OS X system. It crashed. I believed that 2nd attempt to enter crashed. Only first attempt worked. I think something messed up memory allocations during exit from shellx64.efi.
Update:
I tried (hd0,msdos1) and finally found Ubuntu files. i googled it and found something about grub> prompt. I entered some commands and it finally booted into Ubuntu system. During grub-efi boot, hd0 and hd1 were virtually swapped. I figured why MBR boot failed due to 'no bootable device'.
grub> set root=(hd0,msdos1)
grub> linux /casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/pressed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity quiet splash --
grub> initrd /casper/initrd.lz
grub> boot
Thanks again!!
Last edit: Tim Stark 2013-06-02