Arch Linux

SofieSasao

Member

Registered: 2024-03-03

Posts: 20

[SOLVED] Unable to launch Arch linux with Secure boot

I need to enable Secure boot for certain soft to work properly on another system.
Grub does not load with enabled Secure boot, so I followed these instructions to fix the issue.
Grub loads now and can successfully boot another system. However, it fails to boot Arch:

Loading Linux linux ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...
error: cannot load image.

  Failed to boot both default and fallback entries.

Press any key to continue...

And shows Grub menu again after this. Disabling Secure boot fixes it, but I need this to work with enabled Secure boot.
This happens on the VirtualBox machine, Arch is freshly installed, and the another system is Windows 11 Home.

This post is related to this unanswered post. I will post the final solution there when I find out how to fix the issue.

Last edited by SofieSasao (2024-03-10 09:17:19)

SofieSasao

Member

Registered: 2024-03-03

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Unable to launch Arch linux with Secure boot

I managed to solve the issue.
My mistake was that while signing files with sbctl I relied only on the list of files displayed by sbctl verify command, as instructions suggest.
The fix was to sign vmlinuz kernel image. In my case, I had two kernels installed: linux and linux-lts. These commands resolved the issue:

sudo sbctl sign -s /boot/vmlinuz-linux
sudo sbctl sign -s /boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts

I'm still not sure if sbctl's pacman hook will handle these two files automatically on system update though.

UPD:
Looks like it does handle them automatically at this point.

Last edited by SofieSasao (2024-03-10 09:32:00)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,016

Re: [SOLVED] Unable to launch Arch linux with Secure boot

Where does that reddit post sign the kernel?
What do sbctl status and verify say?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unifie … ecure_Boot

Edit: F5ck

Last edited by seth (2024-03-10 09:44:36)

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SofieSasao

Member

Registered: 2024-03-03

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Unable to launch Arch linux with Secure boot

Where does that reddit post sign the kernel?

You are right, this part was missing. It is exactly what led to the problem in my case, until I studied boot process and secure boot a bit deeper.

Edit: F5ck

Appreciate your effort anyways :)