Arch Linux

joeparrilla

Member

Registered: 2015-04-26

Posts: 3

Gummiboot wont find Mint

Hey guys, so my install of Arch alongside Mint went relatively smooth. I can boot into Arch with no problem and everything works. The issue is that I went the gummiboot route, and doing so seems to have lost me access to my Mint installation which is using GRUB. The only way I can get into the Mint installation is to boot using an Arch USB and choose the Ubuntu option from there. If I boot normally, gummiboot only discovers Arch.

I tried messing with the /boot/loaders/entries and adding a new entry for Mint pointing to Mints boot partition. Interestingly, this actually works when I choose Mint on the gummiboot screen, but eventually says "an error occured while mounting /boot/efi"

If I press 'S' to stop mounting, the Mint splash login screen appears but I cannot type or use the mouse. At that point I have to just hard reboot with the power button.

I feel as though I am very close, but I am not experienced enough with boot loaders to understand whats going on. I looked in Mints /boot directory, and there is no bootx64.efi like Arch has. My /boot directory on Mint contains a grub and an efi directory, but the only files remotely close are grubx64.efi and shimx64.efi.

I am assuming that the root of the problem here is that Mint is only setup to use GRUB, while ARCH is using gummiboot. Is the solution to get gummiboot set up on Mint? Or should I get GRUB working on ARCH?

I can provide any additional info that may help. Im so close, I just need to get past this final hurdle

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,778

Website

Re: Gummiboot wont find Mint

Unfortunately, gummiboot can only boot kernel images & initial ramdisks located on the EFI system partition.

You can simply copy over the Mint kernel image & initrd to your ESP and make gummiboot menu entries defining their location relative to the ESP root (it's probably best to use a /boot/mint subdirectory to hold them).

The only problem then is that when the kernel is updated in Mint you would have to manually copy over the new image & initrd again.

In my Debian system, I make use of the kernel post-install scripts to do this automatically -- I don't know if Mint also has these but I would think so.

In your Mint system, create a file at /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-gummiboot with this content:

#!/bin/sh
mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
cp /vmlinuz /initrd.img /mnt/mint/
umount -R /mnt

Replace "XY" with the drive letter & partition number of your EFI system partition (probably /dev/sda1).

Then make the script executable:

# chmod +x /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-gummiboot

If there are no kernel post-install scripts in Mint then you should probably just use GRUB instead.

EDIT: Added the putative /boot/mint directory to the update script.

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2015-04-26 15:14:20)

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

joeparrilla

Member

Registered: 2015-04-26

Posts: 3

Re: Gummiboot wont find Mint

Thanks! Ill try this now.

Quick question, do I need to have gummiboot entries for both Arch and Mint in the /boot/loaders/entries directory for both installations? As of now the .conf files are only in Arch

joeparrilla

Member

Registered: 2015-04-26

Posts: 3

Re: Gummiboot wont find Mint

Also, 2 questions about the script:

Should the target of the copy be /mnt/mint or /boot/mint? Your initial directions say to copy the Mint kernel image and initrd to the ESP root (/boot/mint).

Secondly, the script is copying /vmlinuz and /initrd.img... but those files are located in my /boot directory... not the directory where the script is. Do I need to use the actual location such as /boot/vmlinuz? also the files are called initrd.img-3.13.0-37-generic and vmlinuz-3.13.0-37-generic for me... so Im guessing I need to use that for the file name and also make sure to use that in my .conf files on the arch installation where gummiboot is?

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,778

Website

Re: Gummiboot wont find Mint

Should the target of the copy be /mnt/mint or /boot/mint? Your initial directions say to copy the Mint kernel image and initrd to the ESP root (/boot/mint).

The first command in the script mounts the ESP to /mnt so you should use "/mnt/mint", as indicated.

Secondly, the script is copying /vmlinuz and /initrd.img... but those files are located in my /boot directory... not the directory where the script is. Do I need to use the actual location such as /boot/vmlinuz? also the files are called initrd.img-3.13.0-37-generic and vmlinuz-3.13.0-37-generic for me... so Im guessing I need to use that for the file name and also make sure to use that in my .conf files on the arch installation where gummiboot is?

In Debian, the kernel image & initrd are symlinked to /vmlinuz & /initrd.img -- this makes the update script possible as otherwise the names of the images would have to be changed with every update and this would render the script pointless.

You should check that your Mint system also has these symlinks in the root partition (I would be very surprised if they were not present as a similar post-install script is used to update GRUB after kernel updates).

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî