MacOS – rEFInd boot manager not showing EFI shell

bootefimacos

After succesfully installing the rEFInd tool from https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ on a macbook with macos 10.15, restarting the laptop does bring me into the rEFInd boot manager. But the only option available is to launch macOS. I downloaded this tool to use the EFI shell and there seems to be no option to launch the shell.

Is this some sort of package I need to install to the EFI mount?

Best Answer

You need a compatible EFI Shell program (called shell.efi) in your EFI partition.

As mentioned in the rEFInd config file documentation, in the showtools parameter section:

Note that the shell, memtest, gdisk, apple_recovery, mok_tool, and fwupdate options all require the presence of programs not included with rEFInd.

The rEFInd CD version does include an EFI shell (there is also a link for it on the Installing Additional Components section of the documentation) but this doesn't work on my macs (all 2015 or older) as the Apple EFI firmware is too old.

You can download an older EDK version 1 binary which should work on any version :

  • Download Shell_Full.efi from tianocore/edk2
  • Rename it to shell.efi
  • Mount your ESP with mkdir /Volumes/ESP followed by sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/ESP
  • Copy shell.efi to directory /Volumes/ESP/EFI/tools where rEFInd will look by default (make directory if it doesn't exist).
  • rEFInd will display shell as a small icon underneath the OS icons if it finds the executable.
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