Arch Linux

xFlammy

Member

Registered: 2022-05-24

Posts: 8

GRUB fails to install to Raid 10 Array

Hi, I'm practicing installing Arch on a virtualbox VM with virtual disks that have been set up using a raid array, following both the Arch install guide and the raid page guide, both the setup and installation section. Whenever I attempt to execute grub-install command while chrooted on the relevent step when installing the bootloader, I always get the message "efibootmgr failed to register the boot entry: operation not permitted". I've looked for other cases of this error, but none of them seem to be relevant to this particular case. I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong here, can anyone help?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,740

Re: GRUB fails to install to Raid 10 Array

Your raid array has/should have nothing to do with this. If you are going for an EFI setup, did you do https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Virtua … (optional) ? If you are not going for an EFI setup, what's your exact grub-install command.

xFlammy

Member

Registered: 2022-05-24

Posts: 8

Re: GRUB fails to install to Raid 10 Array

Your raid array has/should have nothing to do with this. If you are going for an EFI setup, did you do https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Virtua … (optional) ? If you are not going for an EFI setup, what's your exact grub-install command.

EFI is verified with ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

all the relevent steps and commands i took to get to the point are as follows:

disks sda through sdd were partitioned (one partition for each disk) using fdisk, with one partition per disk, GPT label, and set filesystem to "Linux RAID."

following this, switched to the raid installation procedure on the raid arch wiki:

# mdadm --create --verbose --level=10 --raid=devices=4 --layout=n2 /dev/md/myraid10array /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

# mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf

# mdadm --assemble --scan

# mkfs.ext4 -v -L myraid10array -b 4096 -E stride=128,stripe-width=512 /dev/md127

Following this, /dev/md127 (the array) was partitioned using fdisk with GPT label, partition 1 500MB (boot), partition 2 2gb(swap), and partition 3 17.5gb. The partitions were then formatted and mounted follows:

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/md127p3

# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/md127p1

# mkswap /dev/md127p2

# mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi

# mount /dev/md127p3 /mnt

# mount /dev/md127p1 /mnt/boot/efi

# swapon /dev/md127p2

Afterwards, completed the pacstrap step and installed packages base, linux, linux-firmware, base-devel, nano, grub, efibootmgr, networkmanager, mdadm, sud, and fstab was generated with

# genfstab /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Asll steps in the localization section of the install wiki page were completed and hostname added. Per the raid installation guide, mdadm_udev was added to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf hooks and the initramfs was regenerated using # mkinitcpio -P .

The specific command used to install grub was

# grub-install /dev/md127

Which fails, and returns with the error: "grub-install: error: efigootmgr failed to register the boot entry: Operation not permitted."

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,740

Re: GRUB fails to install to Raid 10 Array

Please use code tags for pasting command lines/outputs.

I don't think you can or should make your ESP part of the RAID, the ESP needs to be a plain FAT32 partition that your  UEFI implementation can read (... though maybe this will just work for the outside, you might have to test). The actual command you would want to use in that case is specified under https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#UEFI_systems (note the listing of the mount point rather than the device) . If you indeed can't edit your NVRAM entries (though afaik this should generally work, but again I think you can't make your ESP simply part of the RAID for that, though admittedly not entirely sure here) you might be able to opt for the --removable flag instead.