#28 Boot menu wraps around
I have used rEFIt extensively while testing a MacPro for compatibility with Windows XP and now FreeBSD. So far, refit has given me a number of fits due to the complexity of the whole partitioning process.
First off, it is easy to fill up the screen with too many icons, making it difficult to see which OS is being selected. The easy way to reproduct this is to stick in a few Windows bootable setup discs, like Windows Xp and Windows 98. Additionally, a few hard disk partitions full of OSes, and your menu is full. Why can't it be in two or three levels? Or even in "categories"? Could you sort the OSes into groups of the same physical hard disk? If I have Windows and MAc on the same disk, they could show up one above the other, maybe.
Also, the icons could be scaled down a lot. They are huge! Most of us have good vision, and so even a 60x60 pixel image would be plenty.
The other thing which I will say more about in another bug is that the volume label for a disk is almost a must-have piece of information when selecting a disk. Can't we pick a partition using its volume name, or its Bay number (for a Mac Pro) or its ATA number? Once we get the feel for your nomenclature, we could always pick the right OS. The way it is now, I guess which one is which.
Logged In: YES
user_id=51640
Originator: NO
Thanks for this post. I certainly never imagined someone would load up a Mac to the point where the menu would spill over. (But then, I wrote rEFIt before the Mac Pro came out.)
So yes, the graphics library and the menu code could use some improvement. But there are a lot of other items on my list that will be done first, because they affect all users. And I still believe the bulk of users have just two or three OSes plus occasionally one bootable CD, and I'm sure they appreciate the nice, large icons.
rEFIt actually displays the volume label of partitions, _if_ it is known to EFI. By default, that applies only to FAT and HFS+ volumes, because that's the file systems for which the firmware has a driver built-in. I am in fact thinking about adding a bit of code to extract volume labels from a bunch of other common file systems as well.
You do have a point about the drive identification. Doing "bays" would be specific for the Mac Pro (and possibly break on future models of that as well), but it would certainly be reasonable to add ATA bus info and an USB/Firewire/whatever indication on external disks.