1

I have rEFInd installed on the EFI partition of my 2015 MacBook Air. Every time I update macOS, it ends up taking over the bootloader and resetting it to using the macOS operating system. Afterwards, if I hold the option key while booting up my mac, there is no boot option for rEFInd that I can select. The only way I can bring rEFInd back is to boot up into recovery mode, manually mount my system partition with Disk Utility (as it is encrypted using FileVault), then open Terminal and reinstall rEFInd. It's quite a hassle.

Is there any better way to handle macOS updates?

I have read the section of the rEFInd manual named "Recovering from a Coup Using MacOS" but I didn't find any information in there that was pertinent to my situation. Note that I cannot disable System Integrity Protection (which one of the solutions there requires) as I need to keep it enabled for the software development I do on this system.

Below is the output from the command diskutil list disk0.

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         121.1 GB   disk0s2

I have Windows, Linux, and macOS 10.15 beta installed to an external drive, so my MacBook's internal drive just has macOS.

David Anderson
  • 40,244
Bri Bri
  • 2,436
  • You can install rEFInd in ways other than the default, where rEFInd will appear in the Startup Manager. Before posting an answer, could you add the following to your question: 1) What other operating systems do you have installed? 2) The output from diskutil list. – David Anderson Jul 07 '19 at 21:15
  • I have Windows, Linux, and macOS 10.15 beta installed to an external drive, so my MacBook's internal drive just has macOS. 2) Given my answer to 1, my partition layout is typical for macOS 10.14. Here's the output: https://pastebin.com/LbeADFER
    • – Bri Bri Jul 07 '19 at 22:44
  • @DavidAnderson I've found an alternative option by installing rEFInd to a separate HFS+ partition on my MacBook's internal drive. It took some work to make it happen though since resizing an APFS container is difficult. (I needed to use tmutil both to remove my Time Machine backup as a backup destination and then delete every single local snapshot first!) I think that may have been the direction you were going in. If so, feel free to post that method as an answer and I'll mark it correct. – Bri Bri Jul 08 '19 at 14:46
  • Yes, ether install rEFInd on a new HFS+, FAT or EFI partition. FAT has the advantage of being able to select the default operating system to boot from any installed operating system. – David Anderson Jul 08 '19 at 15:00
  • @DavidAnderson I'm not sure what you mean when talking about the advantage of using FAT over HFS+. Can you clarify? – Bri Bri Jul 08 '19 at 15:04
  • Some users prefer to select the default operating system while booted to the current operating system. The rEFInd boot manager by default requires you to select an operating system when the computer starts up (or restarts). The selected operating system then become the default. Some users have reported this is hard to do with wireless keyboards and mice. To select the default from the current operating system, the partition containing rEFInd has to be accessible by all operating systems. Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems can read and write to FAT formatted partitions. – David Anderson Jul 08 '19 at 15:13
  • @DavidAnderson I don't think my question is a duplicate of the question you linked to. That question is asking how to fix a different problem than mine, and the solution you posted is different than the solution I just used to fix my problem. The one similarity is resizing the APFS container on my internal drive to make room for an extra partition, but a) that was hard due to Time Machine and required a lot of extra steps not mentioned in your answer, and b) no changes to refind.conf were necessary for me as I always want rEFInd to be my default bootloader, hence my original question. – Bri Bri Jul 08 '19 at 15:26
  • Just so you know: Duplicates have to do with the answers being the same. The questions can be different. But, in this case the answers were different enough, that I changed my mind and posted a new answer. If you still feel my answer is still inaccurate, you can edit the answer and make additions and/or corrections. – David Anderson Jul 08 '19 at 16:11