Hey guys and welcome to a new episode of Nomadic Dmitry channel. In this video
we're going to discuss the boot options for the Mac OS and to be specific when
it comes to loading alternative operating systems on your Mac
there is not much options because initially by default you are limited by
whatever Apple provides and it means: the default boot loader in order to load any
approaching system other than Mac you need to have specific boot manager for
that reason. Well there is a of course default BooCamp kind of boot loader
that allows you to boot Windows let's say, but again it's not very customizable
it doesn't have much options and I personally don't like it because
it doesn't look good it's very very limited and I prefer a different
option. For that option my default choice number one is usually they're
rEFIing. Again I feel like this is one the is the best one. This is the
modern version I use personally to boot Linux for example and not only
you notice you can actually boot Windows with this as well. Instead of default
interface to load a Mac OS when you press the Option key during
the boot you can be presented with this dialog like this one. The first thing that you
need to do actually to install this boot loader since we discussed why you need
let's go ahead and actually install it. So this is the URL you need
to go to actually download it, but when you browse around
this website it's actually not that obvious where the installer is located because
there's are so much links and you are
actually get confused what exactly you need to install it. Let me help you
with that because I was puzzled myself. Here I am on this website and here all the
information you actually need to install it so this is a URL where you go
But to get the binary you need to go to this
URL so let me copy this one and paste it here so let's do that. This is the URL of
the binary. To install on your Mac you need to download this binary and
press here and you are redirected to SourceForge URL
The idea is that you have a script
that you execute on your machine and in this way you get the bootloader
appearing by default on your Mac. I've already done that
Let me open the Finder to locate it
The best way to install it is not in your current session
The best way to install is by booting into Recovery Mode
and installing it from there (from the Terminal)
I've already copied files to my USB flash drive that I'm going to use
You need to have a spare USB drive to do that
You just unzip the binary and place the extracted folder on your USB drive
so you're gonna have it when your flash drive so this is the first opinion to
So this is the first step you need to do to be able to install the bootloader
and then we will execute this script from the recovery mode
I've just plugged my USB drive into the Mac
and I'm just gonna launch the computer. You need to press
those buttons Cmd-R and those actually boot computer in the recovery mode
I have a password here since I set up Secure Boot there
I have a FileVault installed, so let's boot into that mode
My drive is encrypted, that's why I need to type a password
There might be some problems in some cases when you have your Drive encrypted
like mine, so if you are considering encrypting the
drive maybe reconsider it sometimes it doesn't work well with this multi-boot
system. Let me type the password. Alright and now we're loading
into the recovery mode. Why we actually need to load into recovery mode
to install the boot loader? Well, because Mac OS in the recent
version introduced the system file protection (System integrity protection) I
think it is SIP that basically disallows modifying stuff like that. It's much more a
pain to actually install the boot loader this way so that's why I'm booting into
recovery mode in recovery mode I'm going to install it. Once it's launched I
need to press the Utilities over here at the top Utilities -> Terminal and we have
there a bunch of options like restoring from the specific volume, but we
don't need all that right now in a bash command line we need to type "CD" into this one
And we're going to go "LS" to take a look at what do we have so we need to go
to the "Volumes", type "cd Volumes/" press tab to do it quicker. Type "ls" to see
what we have. We need to go to REFLASH (my USB stick name)
We need to go to this directory right here (refind-bin-0.12.0). "cd refind-bin-0.12."
Now type "./refind-install" to executre the script
Press "Yes" in the window to install the bootloader (make sure you backup your data!)
Let me press "Y" here
It says it was installed. We are done here.
Now it should work, let's remove the thumb drive
And let's restart the computer
I'm presented here with the options
I'm going to attach my Linux drive here
It's an SSD with a Linux installed
And now I need to reboot (or press Esc key to refresh the boot menu)
There is a linux there now and I can boot it if I press the Enter button
It's a good way to educate yourself on loading different operating systems on your Mac
This is a great option to load different OS on your Mac
You can also use it just from a flash drive
If that's all you wanted, then you can finish with this vide
But if you actually wanted to know how to configure the rEFInd boot menu
and how to change stuff (e.g boot order configuration, menu delay, bootloader removal, etc)
then let's proceed and let me show you that
We are back in Mac OS and let's discuss our options to
have in terms of in terms of customization of the boot loader. As I
said you in most cases you don't actually need to do that because it's
done automatically in this boot loader automatically detects whatever you need
But in case you want to customize it and play with it or remove it let's go ahead
and do this so what you actually need to do first. You need to launch Terminal and once
you done that - you are in your Home directory
directory you need to create a folder "mnt"
or any other name. This is the folder where we will mount our bootloader
to actually do operations with it so let's do it actually. I already have
created this folder MNT so I don't need to create it. But I'm gonna execute this
command right here and you can find all those commands in the description
to actually mount the drive with the bootloader. Ok, let's type this command
type it and I type my password here all right so I've mounted my boot order
right here and next thing I'm gonna do I'm gonna actually to go to this
I'm going to go to this directory "cd ~/mnt/EFI/refind"
In EFI you can have multiple bootloader placed in EFI folder on your boot partition
Here I have Apple and refind
If you want to remove refind, then just type "rm -r refind" and hit Enter to uninstall it
from your Mac. But we actually want to go further
and investigate what's there. We need to go to refind. Then
LS command. And what do we have the main file and there are interesting for us is refind.conf
conf and EFI file - the bootloader itself.
refind.conf is the configuration file that you can open with your
favorite text editor
I will use "gedit", but you can use any other tool
So I'm typing here "refind.conf"
Let's see what's there
For example, I have modified the timeout option here
Because I don't want to wait more that 10 seconds here in OS selection windows
during the boot
By default it's 25 as far as I remember. And then we are going to look for
"scanfor" line here
Basically it's what types of boot loaders to search on your machine
You can specify where rEFInd will look on your Mac
Uncomment this file (it's commented by default)
You can modify it any way you want according to the description above
There are also a bunch of other options that you can research and modify as you wish
This is what I wanted to tell you about the rEFInd bootloader
I hope this tutorial was useful to you and your needs
Thank you for watching. If you liked this video please press the like button, subscribe
and see you again soon!