Arch Linux

sterlinga

Member

Registered: 2015-09-07

Posts: 1

rEFInd boot entry loading windows boot loader

Hello archers, I formatted my windows OS and lost the refind boot manager setup.
Here's how my setup looks, I have a hybrid hdd + sdd laptop, arch resides on the ssd that windows never touched.
The hdd is spread between local disk C partition where windows is installed and a D partition that contains all media and other data.
Long story short, after the format the ESP was deleted, I used a live usb to chroot into arch remounted the ESP at /boot/efi in the /etc/fstab file, I only had to edit the PARTUUID of the partition. (while in chroot I was mounting /dev/sda2/ at /boot/efi manually, it was not mounting automatically even after doing the changes to reflect the new partuuid in fstab)
then reinstalled refind with

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sdX -p Y -l /EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi -L "rEFInd"

   where X and Y to match the device and partition of the ESP, in my case x is a and Y is 2
the entry for refind is showing as a new boot option but when selected the windows boot manager is starting up instead.
vmlinuz-linux, intramfs-linux.img and initramfs-linux-fallback.img are all located in /boot/
here are the manual stanza from my previous refind.conf

# Arch
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
      icon /EFI/refind/icons/os_arch.png
      volume root
      loader /boot/vmlinuz-linux
      initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img
      options "root=PARTUUID=5b772462-68e1-463c-b22f-8ff22625ec21 rw rootfstype=ext4 pcie_aspm=force acpi_osi= "
  
      submenuentry "Fallback Mode" {
      loader /boot/vmlinuz-linux
      initrd /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
      options "root=PARTUUID=5b772462-68e1-463c-b22f-8ff22625ec21 rw quiet rootfstype=ext4 pcie_aspm=force acpi_osi= "
}

which should still be relevant since they have nothing to do with the ESP uuids.

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: rEFInd boot entry loading windows boot loader

Sometimes the firmware of the laptop looks for only the "Windows" version of boot/EFI files -- like bootx84.efi (or whatever it's called). Do you recall the last time you set up the ESP whether you had to rename rEFInd's boot file as the "default" one or not?

(Hopefully what I've wrote makes sense.)

---

Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."