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I can't figure out how to rename boot entries on a MacBook Air 2012, i.e. those that appear when holding alt during boot.

The problem was initially that my EFI Ubuntu installation could only be booted with the boot entry called "EFI Boot", which wasn't very descriptive, but I could live with it. The current problem is that since I installed OpenCore (a third party boot loader that enables Big Sur on this Macbook model) it replaced the Ubuntu boot entry with its own entry, which uses the same name ("EFI Boot"). I'm assuming this replacement happened because of the name collision (?).

As I see it, the first step of the solution would then be to change the name of the current "EFI Boot" entry (that starts OpenCore) so that when I try to recreate the Ubuntu boot entry later the OpenCore entry won't get overwritten. I can't figure out how to do this.

What I've tried

I've tried customizing a suggestion from Apple Community that advised how to do it for an Ubuntu .efi (after mounting the ESP):

sudo  bless  --folder  /Volumes/EFI/EFI   --file  /Volumes/EFI/EFI/OC/OpenCore.efi  --label  "OpenCore"  --shortform  --verbose

The above command succeeded (in Big Sur), but had no discernible effect on the boot menu upon reboot.

Related

I have also read several suggestions that I'm struggling to make sense/use of:

  1. One answer only pertains to macOS (Monterey), and explains that its boot.efi resides on an APFS volume. To me it appears that — on my machine — there's a boot.efi on my ESP (FAT32) in /System/Library/CoreServices, so I don't think I can make use of that even if my goal were to rename an entry for macOS (which it isn't).
  2. Another answer suggests that you'd just have to rename the volume an OS resides on, but I'm not trying to rename a boot entry corresponding to an OS on a particular volume. Even if I were, the answer implies mounting (?) a Linux filesystem as a volume in macOS, which isn't something that's readily available.
  3. The third answer says that .VolumeIcons.icns should be on a Mac OS Extended formatted volume, and the name of such a volume will appear in the boot menu. I have no such volumes — only FAT32 (ESP), APFS (Mojave, Big Sur), NTFS (Windows 10) and EXT4 (Ubuntu). I have a .VolumeIcon.icns on the ESP though. But I still can't make sense of it since the question asks about renaming a boot entry for Windows, which I doubt is installed on Mac OS Extended. Even if it were, the entry I want to rename doesn't have its own volume to the best of my knowledge.
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I'm having a similar issue with the less-specific volume setup - Boot Camp volume label won't get changed despite %disk_label% files are being successfully created (where they are supposed to be created). You can have a look in a similar question of mine. It appears to me that there's a firmware bug that causes this behavior. Quite similar issue was introduced in firmware updates in about macOS Big Sur 11.3 release: .VolumeIcon.icns file in placed to root of /Volumes/EFI were not respected by Startup Manager (so no custom volume icons in Startup Manager were displayed). Only firmware update fixed this.

Meanwhile please keep this question posted if you'll stumble upon a fix.

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  • This does not really answer the question. If you have a different question, you can ask it by clicking Ask Question. To get notified when this question gets new answers, you can follow this question. Once you have enough reputation, you can also add a bounty to draw more attention to this question. - From Review
    – Alper
    Commented Sep 5, 2022 at 20:33

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