rEFIt For Mac

rEFIt is a collection of Mac OS X tools designed to manage the boot menu for your EFI based Macintosh computer. Installing these utilities will help you boot different operating systems easily (you can use Boot Camp to install other operating systems, such as Windows or Linux).

The rEFIt toolkit can be installed on your OS X volume, which means that next time you restart your Mac, you will be able to see the rEFIt boot menu. However, you can install the toolkit to a separate volume, to an external disk, or to the EFI System Partition.

You may also burn rEFIt to a CD and boot from that without affecting the operating system. The developers also provide detailed removal instructions, depending on the rEFIt location and type of installation.

The rEFIt menu will be visible when you start your Mac, and you will be able to navigate the available options using your arrow keys. rEFIt automatically detects the bootable operating system loaders, together with information about the storage volume.

By using the F2 key you can access the supported boot options. REFIt can restart the EFI shell or the computer, and comes with a partitioning tool.

Most importantly, rEFIt comes with a hand full of maintenance tools that can be accessed via the EFI shell: you can synchronize the MBR and the GPT partition tables, you can see a list with all supported protocols, you can switch between the graphic to the text console, you can test the TCP/IP connectivity, and so on.

If you are looking for an easy to install collection of efficient tools that can help you easily boot different OS installation, while also including useful tools for managing EFI based computers, rEFIt certainly deserves a try.