You’re looking for a partition on your main hard drive called EFI. In the Terminal, type this command: diskutil list
This is the most accurate and I have succeeded!įirst, you’ll need to locate the EFI partition, which is where your Mac stores information about what operating systems can be booted from your Mac. Then umount and delete the directory you created earlier. These can be safely removed, but for extra safety I would recommend renaming them to something different instead. On a machine where I had Windows installed, it also contained a Microsoft and Boot directory. This directory is supposed to only contain an APPLE directory. Sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/efi Now mount the EFI partition (replace the numbers 0 and 1 if they are different in your output): sudo mkdir /Volumes/efi The numbers 0 and 1 have significance later. You should see something like this: /dev/disk0Ģ: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 250.1 GB disk0s2ģ: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3 List the partitions on your Mac: diskutil list You need to mount the EFI partition in OS X (normally, it only gets mounted for system updates). The procedure to solve this is not for the faint of heart. This is what you see when you hold down ⌥ during boot. When you don't use the Boot Camp utility to remove Windows, the Windows boot image on your EFI partition is not removed. In the end, I'd like to just have both of these gone (and I guess any other hidden remnants of Windows that they might be indicating). I can't see where these icons would be coming from. When I start up my Mac holding down option, I get the following.
So but it turns out that when I "uninstalled" the Windows partition, something didn't quite update in the boot loader (I'm kind of fuzzy on my knowledge of the difference between a boot loader and a boot manager, so I might be using these terms incorrectly).
So now I've got a nearly out-of-box Macintosh HD partition everything on the Mac side works fine.īut lately, I find myself getting increasingly annoyed at the BSD coreutils among other things, and so I'd like to be able to dual boot into some version of Linux (probably Ubuntu or Xubuntu, but this is kind of arbitrary).
Once back in OS X (Mavericks, but it was Mountain Lion when I installed Windows), I expended the default HFS+ partition to fill the full space of the SSD. I tried to do this through Bootcamp again, but for whatever reason this didn't work, so I booted up on a live Ubuntu USB and manually erased the NTFS partition for Windows. It never really worked, (it would freeze all the time, the WiFi would cut in and out, etc.) so I got rid of it. A while back, I installed Windows 8 on my MacBook Air (mid 2013 model) using Bootcamp.