Remove entries from EFI Loader
Hi, I have been looking all over to see if i can find out how to remove some enteries from the EFI partition, so in order for you to understand why I'll give you a bit of a story about what I did
I wanted to multiboot Windows 8, Windows 7, OSX and ubuntu 13.04. Getting windows 7, OSX and linux working together was no big issue particulary with the refit loader helping me out to make the linux loader show up. but when I tried to install windows 8 in bios mode (non efi, i dont want to have windows 8 booting EFI... thats another story) anyways windows 8 would always find something or other to winge about. either there were 2 many partitions on the drive (so i removed the 2 linux partitions and it still winged, so i removed the recovery partion as well, then shifted the windows 7 partition down) then it winged that the drive was guid/gpd partitioned and i was not impressed so i removed the whole lot and decided if i could make the drive go half GUID and half MBR... which i managed to do but that comes in later... so anyways I then backed up windows 7 using the imige creation software that was built into the system (I also had macdrive installed at the time, this may have helped cause some of my issues) so I ran this backup and then DBANed (deriks boot and Nuke, wipes 0's to the entire drive) then ran the windows recovery and it for some reason put back all the partitions including the majority of the mac one (not all of it for some strange reason), so i was like ill get smart here and I removed the mac partitions and made another image (the drive at this point in time is fully MBR i did a manual check to find out after i did the recovery) once there was only 1 partition on the drive (at the end of the drive where bootcamp usualy sits) i shortened it down and stuck in windows 8 behind it and this worked quite well so I made and image of this and then dbaned again, and re installed OSx, I then went to recover the partitions using windows recovery but windows recovery insisted that it wanted to wipe the entire drive and not just recover the partitions i wanted to recover, so once again I got smart with it and used Acronis Disk recovery which was able to read and recover indervidual partions from a windows recovery and not wipe out the entire drive. so i recovered windows 8 and windows 7 onto the end of the drive behind the OSx section. I then re-booted and installed refit so I could then install ubuntu, and what do I find? I have 2 extra loaders in Refit one called Boot EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi from EFI and Boot Microsoft boot menu from EFI soi i decided to boot one of them, and windows apeared not to boot, but by sheer chance i decided i would listen to see if the hard drive was doing anything, and i hear it loading so i thought hmmmm, and just waited a while then opened teamviewer on another pc and lo and behold windows 7 had started and was showing up in my teamviewer avalible computers so i decided to connect and got a horrably corrupt display back, it was barely legible but i was able to make out the password section and made it load, then i was able to recognise when i hit the start menu but it was very touch and go. so i just put it down to windows trying to use the INTEL 4000 graphics card but not being able to alocate any ram to the card so it just jumped off the deap en on the graphical sides of things. so i restarted the machine (touched the power button and the computer shut down, (thats how i had the power button set, so it turned off properly not forcefully) so i then turned it back on and decided that within the refit loader i would try out the Partitioning tool and have a look at that. And it did something wonderful it said all my windows partitions were GPD partitioned and would like to change them to MBR so i did that and restarted and lo and behold another loader apears: Boot windows from partition 4 which worked to boot windows 7, it somehow killed windows 8. I then found out i could install windows 8 on a VHD and boot that as a live distro so i set that up and then used EasyBCD to resore the windows 7 loader and boot 8 out of the 7 loader instead of 7 out of the 8 loader cause the 8 loader takes ages to load then when u select windows 7 it reboots the machine making it go through the efi loader again before windows boots. (i have had alot of experiance with Esay BCD as i have been using if for many years now) anyways so here we are I have 3 Operating systems working then i go and stick Ubuntu 13.04 at the end of the Drive booting in efi mode (it doesnt work in bios mode for some reason only efi mode) so it got installed and now refit is showing 5 loaders 2 of which just load up a tiny section of windows loader then reboot back into refit, so I also discovered a few other bugs and glitches so i backed up the windows 8 vhd file and wiped off all partitions bar mac, (i dont want to remove mac, and i cant back it up as i have no drives that time machine wants to accept without me formating them which as a no go, plus it will take forever to backup and restore so i dont want to do that) So reformatted windows 7 using the Bootcamp helper, so there are now only the OSX and its 2 little partitions (the efi and recovery partition) and a Bootcamp partition but refit is showing up 5 loaders (i completely removed and re installed refit to clear any memory and settings it may have stored) and if you hold in the option button on mac 4 loaders show up: refit, Windows, EFI, Recovery 10.8.3 I decided to find out what would happen when i selected efi boot and it strangely enough went ahead and booted windows 7 in bios mode.
So my issue is, I want to get rid of:
mac loader entries: "EFI boot" from the mac loader and leave "refit" "Windows" Recovery-10.8.3" and
refit loader entries:"boot microsoft boot menu from efi" "Boot EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi from EFI" and "Boot EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi from efi and leave "Boot Mac OS X from Mac OSx" and "boot Windows from Partition 4"
I belive all of these enteries come back to the EFI partition having stored there, so I would either like to go in and manualy remove the enteries or run an auto reconfigure on the partition which scans the loaders to fin what is still relevent and get rid of the rubish
Last but not least ill give u my system details:
- Macbook Pro 2012 Mid, non retna
- 4GB ram, 500GB hdd
Model No: A1286
MacBook Pro, Other OS, Remove entries from the EFI partion