rEFInd boot (multi-drive)

Bluefin
1

Hi!

So I dual boot windows (gaming - theres still some weird artefacts on the games I play using steam proton) and Linux (projects and development), but each of my OSes is on its own discrete drive.

Now I can get to both OSes using legacy boot, and spamming F12 during startup, but I’ll be frank - its a pain in the rear. I used to use rEFInd which was absolutely great until I updated my BIOS some months ago and I got stuck on Windows for some time.

Now that I have a bit of time to take back ownership of my pc, I thought I’d give BlueFin a go, but I’ve had some issues getting rEFInd workong.

I am a complete noob when it comes to immutable OSes - its been a lot of fun learning stuff over the past few days, but I don’t have that many more hours to burn on this so I’ll ask for help.

How can I set up rEFInd to point to the grub loader? I’d like to have my boot sequence look something like this: power-on → rEFInd → Windows/Bluefin - select bluefin → grub (to keep the rollback functinality) → desktop.

I only need to know what loader to select here:

menuentry BlueFin {
    icon EFI/refind/icons/bluefin.png
    volume "bluefin-boot"
    loader /boot/?
    os-type = "Linux"
    options "ro root=UUID=blablauniqueid123"
    disabled
}

As a recommendation I think it would be entirely possible for BlueFin to use rEFInd as its main bootloader, and simply maintain the rollback images in the hidden list - you just list them in the manual.conf file and include that in the refind.conf file.

2

I’ve been wondering if something like this is possible, as I’m booting Aurora from a fast USB.
When I reboot, I have to start pressing F2 yesterday for it to be seen by my bios, so rEFInd or something similar would be nice.

Following.

1 Like
3

Maybe something to ask first, is whether BlueFin installs GRUB in legacy or EFI mode?

Following that, if it is in legacy mode, is there a path/method to change it to EFI mode?

4

Bluefin uses EFI, and doesn’t support bios mode.

5

  1. You want Refind to chainload grub. That’s in the EFI directory under fedora/grubx64.efi.

  2. Why we don’t use refind. It isn’t signed with secureboot keys and it doesn’t support BLS. Currently the mechanism for generating boot entries is to use BLS. We are most likely going to look towards systemd-boot in the future which supports BLS and simplifies a lot of the grub complexities.

Grub should also be able to discover your windows install for dual booting.

1 Like
6

Belated response:

Chain boot was sort of what I had in mind, but I’ll be happy if I can get the grub to detect the win install - it didn’t do this by itself.

Also not sure how to remove the residual rEFInd data thats still on the other drive. Messing with boot is the thing thats broken most PCs for me… that and mixing core KDE and GTK apps in the early days :P.