Ubuntu – find the refind.conf configuration file

14.04dual-bootmacbook prorefind

I'm in the process of installing ubuntu 14.04 LTS on macbook pro 13inch retina display with the end goal of having a dual boot setup with OS X. I'm using reFind as my boot manager, and since I have disk encryption enabled on my OS X partition, I can't install reFind on my mac os x partition. To work around this I created a separate 1GB partition just for the reFind boot manager and installed refind on it using install.sh with the –ownhfs and –alldrivers options. Currently my diskutil list output looks like this : 

My-MacBook-Pro:~ yatin$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1 -- ESP
   2:                  Apple_HFS REFIND_BOOTMGR          864.0 MB   disk0s2 -- custom HFS refind partition
   3:                  Apple_HFS OS X                    82.9 GB    disk0s3 -- OS X
   4:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s4 
   5: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4               83.5 GB    disk0s5 -- ubuntu
   6:                 Linux Swap                         14.5 GB    disk0s6 
   7: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4               68.4 GB    disk0s7 -- shared volume

Now when I boot up my mac, I see refind's boot selector which displays three entries, one for ubuntu, one for my mac and a third for grub. I would like to remove the grub refind entry since it serves no purpose given that refind is booting my ubuntu image directly, but I'm unable to find the refind.conf file. I don't see the refind.conf under the usual location on the REFIND_BOOTMGR volume ie /EFI/refind/refind.conf. Where should it be located ?

Best Answer

Although refind is good, there seems to be an awful lot missing from the instructions page, it could do with being proofread by someone other than the author so that all the dozens of "what does that mean?" or "where's that located?" questions can be answered right at the start. What's obvious to someone writing the program may not be so obvious to those trying to use it.

Anyway, to find its proper location I managed to find some clues in the uninstall portion of the instructions. These point back to the manual installation guide for instructions on mounting the unmounted EFI partition, et voila!

diskutil list to get a list of partitions, in my case EFI is disk0s1.

mkdir /Volumes/esp to create somewhere to mount the volume to.

sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/esp to mount the volume.

Now look in /Volumes/esp/EFI/refind to find your refind.conf file. Alternatively Finder will now have mounted a disk called EFI in your Devices list on the left-hand-side, so you can click on that and browse to EFI/refind.

Googling for the answer found this page so hopefully this little snippet of info will be useful for others trying to track it down.

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