Les thought he had it bad

[D-Dan]

Today, I decided to convert my boot drive (with /home also on it) to gpt ready to create an EFI setup for when the new rig arrives. I have a separate /boot partition, and figured it would be easy. Conversion worked without a hitch.

Reboot, and I have a non-booting system. No sign of GRUB. Downloaded the latest ArchISO, boot from it, chroot, reinstall GRUB, reboot, and still nothing.

After a while of trying and experiments, I got a step further, a reboot before GRUB, every time. More experiments, and GRUB Loading. with nothing happening.

By now, I’m thinking it’s time to create a current backup of /home. Shouldn’t take long. All the real data is offloaded and linked into /home on other drives. Took an age.

Then I had an idea. I’d re-partitioned to make room for the EFI partition, so I deleted the EFI partition. Reboot, and nada.

Off to the laptop for hints, and I could find nothing other than the BIOS Boot partition should have no FS on it. Delete partition, recreate, and reinstall GRUB. Reboot, and Nada. Starting to get happy about that backup now. I’m thinking, well, yeah, it needs grub.cfg, and the linux and initramsfs images. Fortunately, I’ve backed these up (more on this later), but how can I copy them with no mountable boot drive.

despite nothing anywhere around the interweb, I thought, perhaps the BIOS Boot partition should be small, and create a standard ext4 partition for the actual /boot. Tried once, and the BIOS Boot partition was too small. Deleted both, and started again. Success. Both partitions created. Went to restore linux.img etc., to find the backup directory empty. Did I just create the directory and forget the actual backup.

So then I have to figure out how to restore it.

Back to chroot, and reinstalled GRUB (again) and, with the new /boot partition mounted, grub-mkconfig again. Still no sign of the images, of course, so reinstall the kernel and hope for the best. Reboot, and yay.

6 hours fixing this, and Les is worried about mounting a disk.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[JayCeeDee]

@bdthree – Lee, I’ve just read this Topic and on returning to the Topic page and refreshing, it still shows as unread with the black vertical bar on the left hand side.

 

Edit – it cleared when the topic moved to the top of the list.

 

Cheers

John

[Ed P]

So what fixed it Dan?

It reads as though you just went to a conventional non-EFI set-up, true?

[D-Dan]

For the moment, yes – BIOS setup since I still need to boot on this rig. Just preparing for UEFI conversion at the moment.

I think the fix was repartioning for the GPT boot partition and a /boot partition to mount, reinstalling GRUB and configuring it in /boot (mounted by then), reinstalling the Linux kernel, then fixing up fstab for the new UUIDs.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Les.]

Sometimes it is better not to know too much. I may have mentioned previously that I build well in excess of one thousand computers, but somehow I never got my head around computer software.

By the middle of last week I decided to walk away from my little difficulty for a few days, whilst my brain recovered.

Saturday morning, I switched on the PC, only to be greeted by a linux prompt of some sort with the word INITRAMFS, or something similar. I quickly decided it was beyond me, so shut it down, got out the Cagiva, and went for my usual Saturday ride (in the rain for a change, first time for a couple of months I needed my leggings).

When I got home early afternoon, I sat and ate midday meal, listened to Radio 3, then faced it. I booted it up with the Linux install disc,  copied across from home (on the SSD) to my main backup drive the important hidden files (.thunderbird, .mozilla and .kodi).

I shut down, disconnected the backup drive and the main spinner. Boot up again with linux disc, click “Install” and let it do its stuff.

Once complete, shut down, plug spinner back in and was pretty well back to before the morning’s tantrums.

Apart from putting back the current Thunderbird and Mozilla, it was all OK.

Think how much I saved my poor head as compared with trying to find out what was wrong and why.

Les.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

As far as I know, if you convert a disc to GPT then you end up with the standard GPT protective MBR all ready for configuring a UEFI system. You can BIOS boot from a GPT disc with Linux (unlike Windows) but the MBR will have to be setup for it.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

You most likely did that when you reinstalled GRUB.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

It looks like you now have a kernel that understands GPT discs too so thats one step towards UEFI ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

To UEFI boot with windows (the only thing you can do with a GPT disc) you not only have to have the EFI version of Bootmanager in the EFI partition you also have to have the EFI version of Winload in the Windows partition because the standard version just cant read GPT discs

[Author]

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