Did you select the boot loader file, refind_x64.efi.
/boot/efi/EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi or /boot/EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi depending on where your ESP is mounted.

I said I selected the file. It's copied to /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi . That was necessary to complete rEFInd's installation. Clearly, after that, naming it, selecting ‘add,’ Guefi didn't add it... nor did it have any of the 16 other (duplicate) entries except Slackware ( /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.efi .) I also have /boot/efi/EFI/FreeBSD/boot1.efi

when adding a boot menu entry, you need to point to the boot loader found in the refind directory, not the Boot directory

here's what mine looks like

rich[Downloads]$ tree -L 2 /boot/efi
Each one of the directories under EFI/ has a boot loader. A boot entry for each needs to point to the boot loader in the director of the OS your ar trying to load.

The directory is there; I just don't use it, and don't have an .efi in it. When I installed it, it said it wasn't successful and you may need to copy or move it to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi (already said I did this) which worked. It's clear I have stuff in the EFI partition and got rEFInd to work for Slackware and FreeBSD; details of where rEFInd and those are (though I also already stated their .efis) or what my own tree is like, has nothing to do with why efibootmgr isn't doing more detailed output or why guefi doesn't list my other entries and can't add any. The problem isn't that I was trying to add bootx64.efi; Guefi also won't add the FreeBSD .efi--only Slackware's ELILO one.

If you want to know, here's my tree; just ignore ‘refind;’ it really is only in BOOT. I moved it instead of copying it, because after having it in two places, that looked like it was causing the duplicate boot entries to keep being added until I had 20+. It hadn't necessarily happened the first time I only kept one rEFInd .efi on there, though it did happen this time. I had to zero /dev/sda each time, not just the EFI partition, before I could get rid of the increasing list, start over, and try to prevent that.

Probably none of this will be fixed until programmers find out what is going on with Gigabyte's buggy recent BIOSs, like for this GA-Z170XP-SLI.

My apologies, I was in a rush yesterday and indeed did not completely read your posts. I had some time to go through all your post and did some googling on Gigabyte uefi firmware and now understand your problem with the buggy firmware. guefi, being a graphical front end to efibootmgr will not work if efibootmgr doesn't work itself. The only thing i can suggest now if there is a way to get refind to boot, then you should be able to multiboot from there assuming that all the os directories are setup on the ESP partition correctly. refind detects boot loaders on its own and does not depend on the boot entries in the EFi firmware NVRAM, so you don't really need to add boot entries to the uefi NVRAM.

I ended up reporting the bug to Gigabyte, sometime after which someone said I could upgrade my BIOS, but not whether this is actually fixed well or at all.

I could retry now, but will be retrying with NetBSD and Slackware, but have to wait until NetBSD supports skylake GPU.

You have to install rEFInd if you haven't. cd /usr/share/refind* ./refind-install

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