Arch Linux

murasakino

Member

Registered: 2023-02-08

Posts: 19

[solved] strange efi partition behaviour after removing old system

A few days ago i manually removed some old kernels from my /boot and made sure to remove the entries from grub.cfg, after rebooting the system became unbootable after i left only the 6.7 kernel with the error

Arch failed to mount /sys/fs/fuse/connecetions

(i dont have access to direct error messages anymore as i will explain later).

I decided to completely remove grub and reconfigure it again, but the same error persisted. after opening the grub console and searching the contents of my esp partition i found that the old kernel images still exist, the following are some things i tested using windows as i dont have access to a working linux machine:
(for reference, the system is a dual boot for windows and arch, /dev/nvme0n1p1 with drive letter E being the boot partition, /dev/nvme0n1p2 being the recovery partition, nvme p3 being windows, and nvme4 being linux. device sda1 being the harddisk i also have)

output of dir inside of the esp partition:

E:\>dir
 Volume in drive E has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 0E87-179F

 Directory of E:\

02/07/2024  06:04 PM    <DIR>          EFI
    |->01/28/2024  01:03 PM    <DIR>          Boot
    |     |->    01/28/2024  03:54 PM           139,264 bootx64.efi
    |->01/28/2024  01:03 PM    <DIR>          UpdateCapsule
01/28/2024  01:03 PM    <DIR>          System Volume Information
01/28/2024  01:06 PM    <DIR>          .Trash-0
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               3 Dir(s)     714,129,408 bytes free

output of bcdedit /enum firmware:
https://pastebin.com/wPTTW9YY

the anomaly i encounter is that the esp partition seems to have its own boot entry, upon using it i would boot into the grub menu which makes no sense as i completely removed grub. the contents in the advanced menu are the old kernels which no longer exist.

i tried updating, regenerating, and completely removing grub with multiple methods and this entry with the description: "HDD0: KINGSTON RBUSNS8154P3256GJ1" keeps appearing on my boot screen.

I also tried a fresh installation of arch using the iso and after making sure its properly configured and mounted the new grub does not show up. rather opening the grub entry generated shows the entries of my old kernels.

i genuinely tried every solution and thread i can find here but i cant find exactly what this problem is but as usual i probably overlooked something simple.

Solution:
I apparently had a backup fat32 partition on my harddisk, apparently it had its own boot entry so It was the one I was booting into while changes were applying to the nvme0n1p1 partition. I just changed it's fs type to ext4.

Last edited by murasakino (2024-02-17 09:08:54)