Arch Linux

rxl_980

Member

Registered: 2016-12-09

Posts: 16

[SOLVED] dualboot win10 arch, legacy boot with grub, cannot mount boot

I am trying to setup a dual boot with arch linux and windows 10 on the same hard disk. The windows installation was already in place and installed in legacy (MBR) boot mode. I have installed arch following the wiki installation guide using a live cd image booted from a usb thumb drive. It all completed fine. After reading the wiki entry on bootloaders I decided to use grub as the bootloader.

Currently I have 7 partitions on my hard disk (which is /dev/sdb). Partition one is flagged as bootable and is the ntfs formatted windows 10 partition. There is a second small recovery win 10 parition and then the remaining ones are my arch partitions (an extended volume with three logicals inside, one of which is root, one is swap and one is just currently a blank ext4 formatted partition intended for data/files in the future).

When I shut the system down and restarted it without the live cd i did have an entry in the grub bootloader for arch. When I try to boot it I get a failure message and it starts in 'emergency' mode advising me:

[FAILED] Failed to mount /boot.
see 'systemctl status boot.mount'

After putting in my root user password and running that systemctl status command I get the following

boot.mount - /boot
Loaded: loaded (/etc/fstab; generated)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2018-08-27 18:56:52 UTC; 11min ago
Where: /boot
What /dev/sdb1
Docs: man:fstab(5)
         man:systemd-fstab-generator(8)

Aug 27 18:56:21 arch1 systemd[1]: mounting /boot...
Aug 27 18:56:21 arch1 mount[319]: mount: /boot: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
Aug 27 18:56:21 arch1 systemd[1]: boot.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited status=32
Aug 27 18:56:21 arch1 systemd[1]: boot.mount: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Aug 27 18:56:21 arch1 systemd[1]: Failed to mount /boot.

Sorry this is manually typed out, I can't actually figure out how to copy text into files from the arch system yet. I tried to manuall mount/ boot from the console prompt but that fails in the same way.

When I installed I set /mnt/boot to sdb1 which is the windows drive and after logging into windows I can see grub has installed on that drive. I can read the config file for grub from windows (which has an arch linux entry). At this point I'm unsure what to do. I'm not sure if my issue is with grub or something else. Any help would be appreciated.

Last edited by rxl_980 (2018-08-28 19:52:00)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,113

Re: [SOLVED] dualboot win10 arch, legacy boot with grub, cannot mount boot

When you are dropped to the emergency shell What is the output of

pacman -Q linux
uname -a

Please boot the install media chroot in as you did during the installation and post the output of the following (Pastebin_clients tip box covers how to post from the console)

parted -l
cat /etc/fstab

Edit:
Oh and welcome to the arch linux forums rxl_980.

Last edited by loqs (2018-08-27 21:51:58)

rxl_980

Member

Registered: 2016-12-09

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] dualboot win10 arch, legacy boot with grub, cannot mount boot

Oh and welcome to the arch linux forums rxl_980.

Thank you and thanks for your suggestions.

This is embarassing, but I think I have resolved my problem. I just checked over the install guide steps again and realised I generated my grub config file at the wrong stage of the process. I generated it right after installing the bootloander and before I installed the microcode package (intel). I just tried reconfiguring grub and now arch boots me to the login screen which suggests to me it is working. I should have read the wiki more carefully!