Arch Linux

Marein

Member

Registered: 2016-02-10

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Recover Linux boot after installing Windows 10 on 2nd HDD

Hello all,

I've had Arch installed on my machine for about a year now. Recently I've had a need to a Windows environment so I installed Windows 10 on a spare bit of my hard drive. That went well and I was able to set up grub such that I could access both Linux and Windows. However I soon ran out of space on the drive, so I acquired a second hard drive and installed Windows 10 on it. Contrary to before, I have been unable to regain access to my Linux installation since installing Windows 10 on the second drive.

In summary my actions were as follows:

• Install Arch Linux on sda (a year ago)

• Install Windows 10 on sda (recently)

• Succesfully fix grub using a live SD, as follows:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
# in chroot:
grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/EFI /dev/sda

• This got me 'Linux Boot Manager (P1: ...)' and 'Windows Boot Manager (P1: ...)' as an option in UEFI

• I could happily boot both Linux and Windows at this point.

• Install Windows 10 on sdb

• The above sequence of commands now only gets me 'arch (P1: ...)' as an option in UEFI, which upon selection bring me back to UEFI, except when the live SD is inserted: then it starts the live SD. The Windows Boot Manager does work for starting either Windows installation.

• I have since removed Windows 10 from sdb and ran the commands again, to no avail.

• I am still able to boot the original Windows 10 on sda through the 'Windows Boot Manager (P1: ...)' option. But I cannot recover the 'Linux Boot Manager' option, only the apparently broken 'arch (P1: ...)' option.

Current parted -l output below. Here sda is the first drive, sdb is the second drive, sdd is the Arch live SD, and sde I used to store the output of parted.

Model: ATA ST1000DM003-1ER1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size    File system     Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  513MB  512MB   fat32           esp                           boot, esp
 2      513MB   750GB  749GB   ext4            linux
 3      750GB   766GB  16.0GB  linux-swap(v1)  swap
 4      766GB   883GB  117GB   ntfs            win10                          msftdata
 5      883GB   883GB  134MB                   Microsoft reserved partition  msftres


Model: ATA Hitachi HDE72101 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End  Size  File system  Name  Flags


Model: Generic STORAGE DEVICE (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 4025MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 2      88.1kB  32.6MB  32.5MB  primary  fat16        esp


Model: WD Elements 10A8 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  500GB  500GB  primary  ntfs         boot

Maybe of relevance: Secure Boot is enabled in UEFI. I cannot disable it (the option is greyed out), even if I set an administrator password for UEFI. UEFI version: 2.10.1208

This recent post seems very similar to my problem, except that in their case Linux is on sdb. Also, they mention that they found a 500 MB bootsector written on sda by Windows 10. However in my case this space seems to still be occupied by the 512MB bootsector that I made for Linux (in accordance with the Beginner's Guide).

I hope someone has an idea of how to fix this. I'm not very experienced with things like bootloaders, so I hope I've given the right information. If not, I'll be happy to supply more information where needed.

Thanks very much in advance!

Last edited by Marein (2016-02-13 17:06:50)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,778

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Recover Linux boot after installing Windows 10 on 2nd HDD

grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/EFI /dev/sda

Is there a particular reason why you are instructing GRUB to use /boot/EFI rather than /boot (which would appear to be the actual ESP mountpoint)?

What was the output after running the `grub-install` command?

See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855

Please post the output of:

# efibootmgr -v

---

Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

Marein

Member

Registered: 2016-02-10

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Recover Linux boot after installing Windows 10 on 2nd HDD

Hey Head_on_a_Stick, thanks for your reply.

I used the --efi-directory option because without it the below happened and I read in this post to use the --efi-directory option.

# grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
grub-install: error: cannot find EFI directory.

The output after running the commands that I wrote in my post was always normal as seen below. That's why I didn't think to mention the output.

# grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/EFI /dev/sda
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
Installation finished. No errors reported.

The output of efibootmgr -v is:

BootCurrent: 0003
Timeout: 2 seconds
BootOrder: 0001,0002,0003,0000
Boot0000  Windows Boot Manager	HD(1,GPT,ae2a86bb-fff9-4577-8d0d-119f0af78c73,0x800,0xf4000)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)WINDOWS.........x...B.C.D.O.B.J.E.C.T.=.{.9.d.e.a.8.6.2.c.-.5.c.d.d.-.4.e.7.0.-.a.c.c.1.-.f.3.2.b.3.4.4.d.4.7.9.5.}...s................
Boot0001* arch	HD(1,GPT,ae2a86bb-fff9-4577-8d0d-119f0af78c73,0x800,0xf4000)/File(\EFI\arch\grubx64.efi)
Boot0002* UEFI: WD Elements 10A8	PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x12,0x2)/USB(5,0)/HD(1,MBR,0x4294967243,0x800,0x3a375800)AMBO
Boot0003* UEFI: Generic STORAGE DEVICE	PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x13,0x2)/USB(1,0)/HD(1,MBR,0x49,0xac,0xf800)AMBO

As I mentioned, those last two entries correspond to my external drive for saving ouptut and my Arch live SD.

After reading your post I tried some more options with grub-install. I was able to make some progress by using --efi-directory=/boot instead of /boot/EFI, with the rest of the commands the same as in my original post. This resulted in the same 'no errors' output as above. Now the option 'arch (P1: ...)' in UEFI works. It takes me to Grub, where I have a choice of:

- Arch Linux, with linux core repo kernel
- Arch Linux, with linux core repo kernel (Fallback initramfs)

Unfortunately, both of these options result in:

error: no such device ad4103fa-d940......467
Loading Linux core repo kernel ...
error: no such partition.
Loading initial ramdisk ...
alloc magic is broken at 0xcb720100: cb7b3600
Aborted. Press any key to exit.

I only copied part of the device ID on the first line, let me know if I should post the whole ID.

Any ideas? Thanks!

NB: I had to manually copy some of the output in this post so please excuse small errors.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,778

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Recover Linux boot after installing Windows 10 on 2nd HDD

error: no such device ad4103fa-d940......467

I think you need to generate a new grub.cfg

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_guide#BIOS.2FMBR

---

Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

Marein

Member

Registered: 2016-02-10

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Recover Linux boot after installing Windows 10 on 2nd HDD

error: no such device ad4103fa-d940......467

I think you need to generate a new grub.cfg

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_guide#BIOS.2FMBR

Great, that did it! I used the below command. The 'arch (P1: ...)' option in UEFI now presents a Grub menu. There is no option there for Windows, but I guess that's an issue for another time (I can still access Windows from the 'Windows Boot Manager' option in UEFI).

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

This yielded output that seemed to contain errors (maybe just about connected drives that it tried to scan for operating systems, finding none) but ending in 'done'.

Thanks!