I use refind as my boot manager on my 2015 MacBook Air. Originally I had it installed on to my internal drive's EFI partition (and installed it in the recovery environment) but every time I update macOS on my main drive or an external drive, which is frequently due to the nature of my work, macOS sets itself back as the main startup disk and I have to boot back into the recovery environment to rebless refind. This is a pain in the ass.
I noticed that refind has the option of installing itself on to a separate HFS+ partition using the --ownhfs
option, which is supposed to allow selecting that partition in the Startup Disk system preferences. I thought that'd be a good solution since every time I update macOS, all I'd need to do is use that pref pane to set the startup disk back to refind. So I made the partition and installed refind to it in the recovery environment. Everything worked okay so far.
However, as soon as I tried to use the Startup Disk pref pane to change my startup disk back to refind, it would give me an error that reads "Running bless to place boot files failed". Here is a screenshot of the error:
Is there anything I can do to get this working? Or is it perhaps the case that this particular feature of refind (installing with --ownhfs
) no longer works with macOS 10.14?
Please note that I cannot disable system integrity protection on my system because I routinely need to test software that requires it to be fully enabled. I'm hoping there's a solution that allows me to more easily set refind as the startup disk without disabling SIP.