How to Install the rEFInd Boot Manager | Boot in Style!

hey everyone Thanks for clicking on one of my videos today we're going to go through installing a bootloader called refined on your dual boot system to allow you to easily switch between operating systems when your computer boots up for those of you who don't know I'm just going to quickly go through what a bootloader is when you turn on your system the BIOS will automatically launch you into what's called a bootloader now most of the time this happens in the background with the Windows boot manager and you don't even see it happening but sometimes if you install a Linux distribution you'll see a thing called grub and then you'll know what I'm talking about the bootloader provides you with a list of options that you can boot the system into so for example if you've got more than one operating system it'll give you a list of different systems that are on the hard drive that you can load into from the boot manager sometimes it's also got other options such as recovery partitions and things like that to help you recover your drive if it gets damaged the bootloader that we're going to go through today is called refined refined is a graphical bootloader that looks a lot better to Grub although it essentially does the same thing refine presents you with an array of colorful icons on boot and you can select the operating system that you want to launch into by navigating with the keyboard and hitting enter although this is functionally the same as the grubbed bootloader it just looks a lot nicer and it's a much better way to boot into your system refund can be installed through either Windows Linux or some other operating systems although Windows is quite tricky to do and it involves using the command prompts to mount the EFI partition on the hard drive temporarily and then accessing it and this makes it a lot harder to configure and theme refined once you've installed it instead we're going to look at using Linux to install and configure refined as it makes it much easier to access the files and configure the bootloader if you're dual booting your computer then you're most likely running some sort of Linux distro on it already so this should be easy for you the process is quite simple with Linux and if you follow all the steps correctly nothing really should go wrong it's important to note that this should only be done if your computer has a UEFI startup function all the systems using the BIOS startup function won't work the easiest way to check this is just by searching either your motherboard model or your laptop model online and check the results if you can't find your results online you can check it using Windows here on my Windows desktop I'm just going to hit the Windows key and R at the same time to launch the run application we're just going to type Ms info we're just going to type Ms info 32 in there and hit enter and just on the list here you'll see it says UEFI here one more thing I want to mention is that I will be doing my demonstration of this inside virtualbox just because it makes it easier for me to record and put on YouTube but the process should be relatively the same on any other computer just running it on bare metal if there's any significant differences I'll be sure to let you guys know okay so I'm just here on Windows on my drill boot system and the first thing that we're going to do is launch into our Linux distro which for me that's Linux Mint if you watched my last video then you'll learn how you can install Linux Mint alongside Windows really easily and dual boot them both off the same hard drive I'll put the link up the Top If you haven't seen that one so this is that grub bootloader that I talked about earlier and as you can see it does work it's fine but to me it's not the prettiest looking bootloader and I think we can definitely do a lot better so you can see the options that we have here are Linux Mint recovery mode that I spoke about earlier and we've got windows and then this is sort of like a shortcut to the UEFI just to make it easier than spamming a random key when your computer is booting up so we're going to go ahead into Linux and it's just going to boot up all right foreign so here we are in our Linux mints running on the same hard drive as a Windows machine I showed you guys earlier so what I'm going to do is just open up the terminal down the bottom here I'll just make this a bit bigger there we go so in here we're just going to type sudo which will give us root privileges which is basically just admin rights for Linux apt which is our package manager install and refined let's hit enter on that depending on your connection it might take a while to install so we've got this message here that just says do you want to add refines to the EFI system partition you just want to hit yes to this otherwise it's not going to work properly and there we go so it should be all installed now so once you've installed the package it should be all good to go so what we're going to do now is just hit our little start button down here we're just going to reboot the system and hopefully we should launch straight into the refined boot manager when it comes up and here we are so we've just restarted the system and this is the refined boot manager so right now you're done you can just use this as normal um there are a lot of configuration options that you can add to this I might do another video on that it's really great you can add lots of themes and colors and really customize it you can change the icons all that sort of stuff so that's windows that name on there that's selected say you wanted to launch into Windows you just select that one hit so say we wanted to remove these two EFI ones here because they're not really used too much we can just select it just hit delete on the keyboard and then we'll just go up here yes here we go we'll do the same with this one uh and now as you can see we've only got Linux mints there and windows that's super nice super easy super clean and if we wanted to get back to those other ones we can just go down the bottom here this menu here says manage hidden tags just enter into that and these are those two that we've hidden from earlier so you can still access them they're just not on the front page there um some other options here this is the EFI shell that runs within grub most people probably won't really have a use for that uh same with that one there this is just some information about the refund program that's that hidden tags this is shutting the computer down you can also reboot and it's also got a shortcut to your UEFI program as well so as you can see this is refined it's super simple super easy to use say we wanted to launch into windows so just hit enter on that and it'll launch straight into the Windows operating system say you were to split your hard drive up even more create more partitions and install other operating systems uh they'll just appear in refine it super simple you don't even have to add them to the program or anything they'll just add themselves in there and as you can see here we are in Windows so we're just going to restart here we go so we say we wanted Linux Mint we'll just go into Linux there so I'm not going to go too in depth with the customization and configuration in this video I can do a separate one as well if you guys like that but I'll just show you how you can access the config settings so what we're going to do we're just going to hit the file manager down here on Linux uh we're going to go to our file system on the side here and then we want boot and then EFI so it's going to prompt us for our password this is the same one that you made when you created the Linux account it's the one that you use when you log into the profile then we've got EFI here so we double click that one and then we've got all of our options here so basically this is booting to Windows this is the grub bootloader that we spoke about earlier and then here we have a refine so we can double click that one so in the file here we've got our configuration options and it's just as simple as either changing the value or commenting out a lines so the way that this works is each of these hashtags here is a comments symbol so when the code runs anything that's got a comment in front of it it's just going to ignore that line so as you can see there's a little description here to help you understand what everything is and that anything that's an actual value that will affect the um the program like for example timeout here that doesn't have a comment so the code will run on that line and it'll call another file in here and put that value into there and then that'll change the boot manager so that's how you can configure this system I just have a read through here there's lots of options you can change this is the timeout so the way that it works is if say you don't hit enter or you don't do anything when memory find launches it'll launch the last news operating system after a certain period so say 20 seconds was too short we want to do 30 seconds simple as that just hit Ctrl s to save the file and then that's changed in refined so you can just scroll down here there's a bunch of options um you can set your own icons directory you can hide some of the other options that come up under the refined operating system some of the different menus and information that sort of stuff there's lots of information about this on the refined website I'll leave a link to that in the description but that's a great site there's lots of useful stuff on there there's also lots of resources on YouTube and uh GitHub and all that sort of stuff so I would just have a poke around online maybe look at some different themes and that sort of thing if you guys want me to do a configuration tutorial we can definitely look at different themes and things that you can do with refine to make it look even better um so here you have your icons file so if you go into this one uh it's actually not going to display them so we need to do is just right click and then open as root so we're going to need our root password for this and we're gonna have to go back through here again and then icons so now they're coming up they just didn't come up Focus we didn't have root access these are all the icons that basically run refines so say you wanted to change the icon for your operating system you can go in here and delete the old one and add in your new one so you can see they're all just here so say you're running Windows and you don't like this one you can download a new one off the internet um just go in and make sure that it's the same size you just head to the image tab at the top here this one's 128 by 128 I think that's what they all are they're all sort of the same um you just delete this one put your new one in here give it the exact same name and it'll replace that in the bootloader and you'll have your brand new image there we're good to go so there you go guys that's basically how you can install the refined boot manager on your dual boot system it makes it super easy and simple to launch your operating system as you can see we have our options nicely displayed here just hit enter on the one that you wanted it'll start up straight away so I think I'm going to leave it there for today if anybody has any questions please don't hesitate to leave them in the comments down below and I'll answer all of them please also consider subscribing and liking the video I'm only just getting started on YouTube so it would mean a lot if you could give me a little bit of support just to help me get going if there's any other tutorials or videos that you want to see just leave them in the comments as well and I'll have a look at making some of those or putting some information out about that other than that thank you for watching and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: ByteSized

Views: 19,719

Keywords: refind, boot manager, linux, windows, linuxmint, grub

Id: xRZab8yrSOQ

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023