Arch Linux

Jamarley

Member

Registered: 2024-04-02

Posts: 2

Weird issue with grub config not booting by UUID

I have a weird issue with my system and just now found out what caused it, maybe some of you can help me figure out the reason why.
I run a bit of a weird configuration with Endeavour and Arch in dual boot (one is for developing, the other is for casual gaming etc.).
Now both have different root drives and different home partitions.

But for a few days now I had trouble getting my Endeavour to boot at all. It always got stuck on boot saying

A start job is running for /dev/sdc6

where it would just get stuck.
Chrooting into it from my still functional Arch system and doing updates didn't do much. I checked etc/fstab multiple times to ensure that the UUIDs were the same. Only when regenerating my grub config was I able to boot into the system ONCE.
Then on the next boot we had the old problem back.
So I was sure it had something to do with the grub config. I checked /etc/default/grub on both systems, nothing out of the ordinary or vastly different.

Then it hit me: I checked /boot/grub/grub.cfg and there was the culprit:
Arch was booting like this:

linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts root=UUID=357a8ef3-c162-4d77-a559-b3496bfda79d rw

while Endeavour, for some inexplicable reason, was doing this:

linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts root=/dev/sdc6

Replacing that with the correct UUID made it boot up just fine.
Which got me EVEN MORE confused. Why the hell is grub automatically generating a config that is a mix of both UUIDs and /dev/ identifiers?
I explicitly checked to see that

 GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID 

was set to false or uncommented on any grub config I could find.
I have no idea why it generated it that way.
Has anybody, by any chance, got any idea why the hell it did that?

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: Weird issue with grub config not booting by UUID

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=614143

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

Jamarley

Member

Registered: 2024-04-02

Posts: 2

Re: Weird issue with grub config not booting by UUID

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=614143

More than 12 year old issue that fix never made it upstream. Why though if it still occurs to this day? Thanks for sharing though. It might be good to have this issue searchable, maybe someone can save themselves some headaches.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: Weird issue with grub config not booting by UUID

More than 12 year old issue that fix never made it upstream

Debian _is_ upstream for the os-prober project and the developers clearly don't agree with UUIDs as a root partition identifier ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A custom menuentry would work well for EndeavorOS if their kernel & initramfs images aren't versioned — see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#GNU/Linux for an example.

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî