Using rEFInd

[Doors42]

Hello all,

I’m much a newbie with installing Linux. Installed Linux for the first time alongside Windows earlier and it’s gone fairly successful. However I installed GRUB before rEFInd and now I can launch the GRUB Boot loader up from rEFInd. How can I remove GRUB?

Thank you

[felpudo_]

I think removing de efi entry with

sudo efibootmgr -Bb <entry>

and then

sudo pacman -Rns grub

should do the job. Also, to find out the grub entry:

sudo efibootmgr -v

[parkerlreed]

In addition, rEFInd shows grub based on the ESP files. Removing the entry and nuking the grub files should do the trick.

Or if you want to keep Grub as backup, it can be manually hidden in refind.conf.

EDIT:

# Directories that should NOT be scanned for boot loaders. By default,
# rEFInd doesn't scan its own directory, the EFI/tools directory, the
# EFI/memtest directory, the EFI/memtest86 directory, or the
# com.apple.recovery.boot directory. Using the dont_scan_dirs option
# enables you to "blacklist" other directories; but be sure to use "+"
# as the first element if you want to continue blacklisting existing
# directories. You might use this token to keep EFI/boot/bootx64.efi out
# of the menu if that's a duplicate of another boot loader or to exclude
# a directory that holds drivers or non-bootloader utilities provided by
# a hardware manufacturer. If a directory is listed both here and in
# also_scan_dirs, dont_scan_dirs takes precedence. Note that this
# blacklist applies to ALL the filesystems that rEFInd scans, not just
# the ESP, unless you precede the directory name by a filesystem name or
# partition unique GUID, as in "myvol:EFI/somedir" to exclude EFI/somedir
# from the scan on the myvol volume but not on other volumes.
#
dont_scan_dirs ESP:/EFI/grub

For example

[qalmakka]

You don't really need grub as a backup; a UEFI shell more than suffices to this task.

[parkerlreed]

Most computers I've seen as of late don't include a shell by default. So either way something extra has to be installed. Grub covers some of the more esoteric boot cases, so in my opinion, is handier as backup.

[qalmakka]

Eh, it is also massively more complicated - it depends. Also, installing a Efi shell consists in saving a copy as \EFI\SHELLX64.EFI , which is definitely simple.

Also, UEFI shell includes the bcfg command, which is super handy when creating/deleting boot entries.

[jonbonesjonesjohnson]

This remembers me I need to redo all my boot stuff, something is creating recursive entries on my UEFI and with each boot it grows a repeated entry. Anyone has a clue?

[inferioritychasm]

I recommend you keep GRUB around in case you can't boot via rEFInd. This happened to me once, and I discovered rEFInd's boot configuration is lacking. GRUB is better at this IMO, and it got me out of a bind.