EFI Boot appearing in Startup Manager

Question

EFI Boot appearing in Startup Manager

Hello,

I have recently noticed that when I hold down the Option key while starting up my MacBook Pro, two options appear; Macintosh HD, and something called "EFI Boot".

Selecting EFI Boot causes the screen to go black for a few seconds, then restart.

If I start up normally, without holding down the Option key, the MacBook boots into Macintosh HD, as expected.

Essentially, EFI Boot only appears when I hold down the option key.

Despite system functionality apparently not being adversely affected, I would like to find a means of removing this EFI Boot entry. I do have a Time Machine backup; as such, would it be best for me to erase my internal drive, and restore from my Time Machine backup?

Any help gratefully received.

Cheers.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Aug 21, 2020 11:40 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

HWTech

Level 9

55,652 points

Aug 21, 2020 8:12 PM in response to Samington1987

Have you ever installed another OS such as Windows or Linux onto your Mac either to the internal or external drive? Have you ever used any third party boot managers or bootloaders such as rEFInd?

You can try manually mounting the hidden EFI/ESP partition by using the following command in the Terminal app:

diskutil  mount  disk0s1

This should mount the hidden EFI partition at "/Volumes/EFI". Use the Finder to view the contents of this partition. The only folder on this partition that macOS uses is named "apple". You should be able to delete any other folders from the root of this partition. Feel free to post a screenshot of the Finder showing the folders on the drive before deleting anything if you want to be safe.

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Answer 2

Aug 22, 2020 5:43 AM in response to HWTech

Hi, thanks for the reply.

This worked perfectly; the EFI Boot item is no longer appearing in Startup Manager.

Should mention that I had to put SUDO" before the command in order for it to work.

In answer to your question ... Yes. I did previously install Windows 10 through BootCamp, then decided that I no longer needed it.

It wouldn't uninstall through BootCamp, so I ended up having to manually remove the partition, convert the Microsoft Recovery partition to HFS+ such that it could be deleted through Disk Utility ... All good fun.

So, given that I couldn't remove the partition using the approved method, I'm guessing something was just left behind?

Anyway, many thanks for your help ... I've learned something as well.

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EFI Boot appearing in Startup Manager

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