I use rEFInd as my boot manager and sometimes I like to dual boot a new linux distro (just to try out) which I install with a live USB. Unfortunately, after installing, GRUB has always taken the reigns and it becomes a slight inconvenience to get back to rEFInd every time.
Is there some trick that can request grub not to install?
[What prompted me to ask was I tried KaOS yesterday, and during installation it asked what bootloader i wanted and included the option for ‘none’.]
I tried to use rEFInd years ago on my first UEFI machine, gave up and ended with GRUB… maybe it was just a crap setup and I need to try again…
But, how about backing up just the boot sectors / EFI partition with a
ddcommand and then just restoring it again? Not a slick solution, I agreeTBH, if a distro doesn’t give me options during install then I’d probably stop there as every update to GRUB could be automatically installed and blat your machine again.
Unfortunately that does nothing on a UEFI system. There’s no boot record any more (just a partition table) and even if there were (ie it’s an MBR drive instead of GPT) it would be ignored under UEFI.
But in the case of rEFInd and GRUB, both would actually happily live side by side, what’s changing is just the default bootloader selection in the UEFI. So all you need to go into your UEFI settings and point it back to your choice of bootloader. No need to worry about reinstalling the bootloader, messing with config files, etc.