Adventures In Boot
Posted 11-16-2020 at 08:06 AM by zaivala
This is an excerpt of my presentation in mintCast 333.5. I thought I had done this already; we're up to Episode 346 now. It does not cover ALL the bases but it should give someone a head start.
This report is not meant to be a Deep Dive so much as an I Want It Fixed NOW, How Do I Do It? We may be hearing from my other team members as I go along for more tips.
Cleaning up EFI
After many installations of different distros on my computer, I discovered that my EFI boot sector held a folder for each and every one of those distros, making for a lot of non-booting artifacts.
If you want to see what’s in your EFI, you can run efibootmgr in a terminal. Or you can install rEFInd, which will replace your current GRUB menu with an EFI graphical menu, which may help or further confuse you. I note there are icons for boot menus, Ubuntu distros, Mint (has the old logo), and a penguin logo for other Linuxes.
I was greatly confused by all of this. I won’t go through the long process I went through trying to understand the differences between EFI and GRUB, and also being sidetracked by friends who threw them both out and are using systemd-boot.
The final solution, proposed by Andreas in the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram group and refined by conversations with Londoner and cryptodan in the DHD group, is as follows:
Delete everything on your EFI menu (using efibootmgr). Then reinstall with grub-install with a key to writing it in the EFI partition.
Specifics:
using efibootmgr, you view and identify your EFI boots.
Continue until all are deleted.
Run efibootmgr again, and you will see how effective you were.
If you get this warning…:
{NOTE: I have perused the man page for grub-install, and the –target switch is not shown. Thanks to Andreas on Ubuntu Podcast Telegram group for bringing it to my attention.)
Then you just run “sudo update-grub” to get all your boots back.
You know that issue I’ve had with each successive installation taking over GRUB? Running grub-install as shown above, in the distro you want to have controlling GRUB, will fix this. [Note that some distros require you to run grub2-install]
If you’re installing a distro and don’t want it to take control of GRUB, and *if* it uses the Ubiquity installer common to many Ubuntu-based distros, our listener Londoner points out you can install by booting to the live disk, open a Terminal, and type “ubiquity –no-bootloader“. This will open a graphical Ubiquity installer but will not install GRUB as part of the process.
This report is not meant to be a Deep Dive so much as an I Want It Fixed NOW, How Do I Do It? We may be hearing from my other team members as I go along for more tips.
Cleaning up EFI
After many installations of different distros on my computer, I discovered that my EFI boot sector held a folder for each and every one of those distros, making for a lot of non-booting artifacts.
If you want to see what’s in your EFI, you can run efibootmgr in a terminal. Or you can install rEFInd, which will replace your current GRUB menu with an EFI graphical menu, which may help or further confuse you. I note there are icons for boot menus, Ubuntu distros, Mint (has the old logo), and a penguin logo for other Linuxes.
I was greatly confused by all of this. I won’t go through the long process I went through trying to understand the differences between EFI and GRUB, and also being sidetracked by friends who threw them both out and are using systemd-boot.
The final solution, proposed by Andreas in the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram group and refined by conversations with Londoner and cryptodan in the DHD group, is as follows:
Delete everything on your EFI menu (using efibootmgr). Then reinstall with grub-install with a key to writing it in the EFI partition.
Specifics:
using efibootmgr, you view and identify your EFI boots.
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$ efibootmgrThen using sudo efibootmgr, delete each one:
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0005,000A,0008
Boot0000* ubuntu
Boot0005* rEFInd Boot Manager
Boot0008* UEFI OS
Boot000A* openmandriva
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$ efibootmgr -b 0005 -BNote that you must use sudo. My illustration showed what happens when you do not.
Could not delete variable: Permission denied
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$ sudo !!
sudo efibootmgr -b 0005 -B
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,000A,0008
Boot0000* ubuntu
Boot0008* UEFI OS
Boot000A* openmandriva
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$
Continue until all are deleted.
Run efibootmgr again, and you will see how effective you were.
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$ efibootmgrThen use:
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000* ubuntu
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$
sudo grub-install –target=x86_64-efi
If you get this warning…:
grub-install: warning: disk does not exist, so falling back to partition device /dev/sdb1…then you forgot to use sudo
{NOTE: I have perused the man page for grub-install, and the –target switch is not shown. Thanks to Andreas on Ubuntu Podcast Telegram group for bringing it to my attention.)
Then you just run “sudo update-grub” to get all your boots back.
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$ update-grubFIXING GRUB
grub-mkconfig: You must run this as root
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$ sudo !!
sudo update-grub
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/50_linuxmint.cfg'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/60_mint-theme.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /boot/grub/themes/linuxmint/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-45-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-45-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-42-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-42-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-40-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-40-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-28-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-28-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.0.0-32-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.0.0-32-generic
Found Feren OS (18.04) on /dev/sda1
Found Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (16.04) on /dev/sda2
Found Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (18.04) on /dev/sda3
Found Zorin OS 15.2 (15) on /dev/sda4
Found OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 (4.1) on /dev/sdb3
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-45-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-45-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-42-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-42-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-40-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-40-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-28-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-28-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.0.0-32-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.0.0-32-generic
Found Feren OS (18.04) on /dev/sda1
Found Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (16.04) on /dev/sda2
Found Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (18.04) on /dev/sda3
Found Zorin OS 15.2 (15) on /dev/sda4
Found OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 (4.1) on /dev/sdb3
Found Feren OS (18.04) on /dev/sda1
Found Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (16.04) on /dev/sda2
Found Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (18.04) on /dev/sda3
Found Zorin OS 15.2 (15) on /dev/sda4
Found OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 (4.1) on /dev/sdb3
Adding boot menu entry for EFI firmware configuration
done
zaivala@zaivala-Galago-Pro:~$
You know that issue I’ve had with each successive installation taking over GRUB? Running grub-install as shown above, in the distro you want to have controlling GRUB, will fix this. [Note that some distros require you to run grub2-install]
If you’re installing a distro and don’t want it to take control of GRUB, and *if* it uses the Ubiquity installer common to many Ubuntu-based distros, our listener Londoner points out you can install by booting to the live disk, open a Terminal, and type “ubiquity –no-bootloader“. This will open a graphical Ubiquity installer but will not install GRUB as part of the process.
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