my 2 distros' installers (and boot repair programs) delete each other's bootloader entries

newbiesforever · 11-23-2023, 12:57 PM

I had a vexing little problem with the installer on one of my distros, MX. Then I just discovered that another distro I am exploring, Peppermint, causes the same problem when installed.

Each distro's installer is of course theoretically supposed to detect the other distro, and write it into the grub menu; but in practice, they often fail to. I find that MX's installer is unpredictable about this: sometimes it successfully detects the other distro (Peppermint or whatever else I am installing at the time), and sometimes it doesn't. I supposed that was an MX issue, really because normally MX is all I run. (I think I've tried repeatedly re-writing the grub menu, and have observed different results.)

Today, I restarted after installing Peppermint from a liveUSB. To my surprise, the Peppermint installer did the same thing: wrote a grub menu with no entry for my MX installation. I sighed, and ran the MX liveUSB to reinstall MX's bootloader. What else could I do? Unfortunately, it just did the opposite: wrote a new grub menu that left Peppermint out.

So, I guess I can't have both distros. Their installers (or grub re-writing programs) cancel each other out. Any ideas? Um, well, I guess I could manually write the menu, if I want to invest the time, right?

mrmazda · 11-23-2023, 01:26 PM

Please provide the value for GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= from each installation.

Please provide from each, input/output from tree /boot/efi/, and from lsblk -f, using code tags.

colorpurple21859 · 11-23-2023, 07:35 PM

As root add this line to /etc/default/grub:

Code:

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

then run

Code:

sudo update-grub

newbiesforever · 11-24-2023, 11:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

Please provide the value for GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= from each installation.

Please provide from each, input/output from tree /boot/efi/, and from lsblk -f, using code tags.

I don't know where to find GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=. Oh, wait, never mind. I was following Color's instructions, and I see that GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= is in /etc/default/grub. The line says:

Code:

GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(unset PRETTY_NAME; (. /etc/lsb-release; echo ${PRETTY_NAME:?}) 2>/dev/null || echo Debian)"

For some reason, entering tree /boot/efi/ produced:

Code:

/boot/efi/  [error opening dir]

.

The lsblk -f output is:

Code:

NAME    FSTYPE  FSVER     LABEL     UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                                     
├─sda1                                                                                  
├─sda5  ext4    1.0       DATA      545f0634-76e5-4950-aafd-924e271abbf6  626.6M    93% /media/DATA
├─sda6  ext4    1.0       HOME      1974066a-bfa7-42c3-90ab-33c938726242    4.8G    78% /home
├─sda7  ext4    1.0       MUSIC     28a9cc27-dc15-47f6-899d-5e46540e7876   18.5G    63% /media/MUSIC
├─sda8  ext4    1.0       rootMX23  9532c4b6-fd72-4531-90d9-dd6d4592cd42    4.7G    76% /
├─sda9  swap    1                   e6aede79-9d7c-47b0-83cd-b6deb3c0b5ce                [SWAP]
├─sda10 ext4    1.0                 d6490e14-be35-4630-a99b-4a3cc9b862f9                
└─sda11 ext4    1.0                 2e973b1e-7a45-4fb2-a03c-00753f23dbe4                
sdc                                                                                     
├─sdc1  ext4    1.0       Live-usb  a54248a8-c72d-4c1d-b1ad-83e584279409                
└─sdc2  vfat    FAT32     LIVE-UEFI 81AB-6894                                           
sr0     iso9660 Joliet Ex MX-Live   2023-07-30-20-16-07-00

mrmazda · 11-24-2023, 02:12 PM

I meant for you to boot either of your installed installations to collect data, not a USB stick, and asked for GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= from each installation.

/boot/efi/ doesn't exist on an MBR partitioned disk, as yours apparently is. That tells us you didn't install either OS in UEFI mode. That affects how to repair. colorpurple21859's instruction is probably all you need to follow, booted from each installed system, or via chroot.