Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

Derphy · 2015-10-01 09:47:19

Hello.

After installing another OS onto a different partition, I can no longer boot into Arch Linux.

Here's the details of what's been happening:
I was keeping Linux Mint as a back up OS. I hadn't updated Mint in quite a while, and when I did, it kind of broke. Rather than repairing it, I figured I would just try out Debian as my back up OS.
So, I formatted my Mint partition and installed Debian onto it.
I use grub2 and at first, that wasn't working properly. I found some instructions online for booting from the grub shell, but I noticed that I could only boot into Debian—Arch appeared to have nothing in the boot folder, no kernel and no initrd. Once in Debian, I tried updating grub, but I was getting an error about having a partitionless drive and BIOS. I can't access that error anymore. Debian had some tinkering I'd need to do to get it up and running smoothly (like being able to use sudo). so it seemed easier to just use a liveusb of Mint (since I had one ready to go) to work on getting grub working again. But some issues that I ran into with that had to do with the fact that I was using a liveusb, (again, not errors that I have access to anymore, something about /cow) and eventually I just decided to replace Debian with Mint. If I remember correctly, that's how I had installed grub initially—I partitioned my drive from a live USB, installed Arch, rebooted and installed Mint, and I don't think I ever did any boot loader things on my Arch install other than making an EFI boot partition (a decision which I'm actually not sure was what I needed). So I was hoping that would work again.
It didn't—Mint installed and I still had to boot from the grub shell and once in Mint I had the same error when trying to update grub. Some of the things I had read from people with similar issues seemed to indicate that chrooting into the Arch partition would allow me to fix some things, but I soon found that I needed to arch-chroot for everything to work, and it looked like I could only do that from the Arch usb. So I did that, and double checked that /boot was still empty. Then I realized that maybe just remaking my EFI boot partition would do the trick, rebooted, and grub was working again, but still only for Mint.
Back on the Arch USB, I couldn't get grub to update while arch-chroot'ed because grub wasn't installed. I installed it, the mkconfig found my Mint partition. Checked out fstab and saw that swap wasn't entered and I needed to change the UUID for my boot partition. Just to be safe, I updated the system as well. Still wasn't showing up in grub, tried mkconfig and updating grub in Mint, Arch was found on the right partition, but it still isn't in the boot menu. I'm not sure what else to do at this point.

The past few days I've been using Mint and it's just kind of bothering me. Definitely don't want to stop using Arch. My music and things are on a separate partition and backed up on my external hard drive, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if I have to reinstall Arch, but I'd rather not. But I certainly want to replace my Mint partition with something else—just after a few days of use and it's all to present to me why I stopped using it was a main OS in the first place.

The following is the outputs after mounting the Arch partition (/mnt) and boot partition (/mnt/boot) and doing chroot

blkid:

/dev/sda1: LABEL="Arch" UUID="25b7e39a-0c60-405c-9523-9da78f7d765c" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="7d649206-0f33-46b4-9fa6-81105f6e8fb4" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda3: UUID="b1ee627b-4b1d-421d-9009-54b1f3a7c9c0" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sda4: LABEL="things" UUID="cf5ee108-1243-4b88-aa02-3287bdf42620" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda5: UUID="B9D6-9575" TYPE="vfat"

fstab:

# /dev/sda1
UUID=25b7e39a-0c60-405c-9523-9da78f7d765c	/         	ext4      	defaults	0 1

# /dev/sda5 LABEL=EFI\134x20BOOT
UUID=B9D6-9575      	/boot     	vfat      	defaults	0 0

# /dev/sda4 LABEL=things
UUID=cf5ee108-1243-4b88-aa02-3287bdf42620	/run/media/greze	ext4	defaults,noatime,users 0 0

# /dev/sdb1 LABEL=usb
UUID=CA05-F99D   /mnt/usbstick  vfat user,noauto,noatime,flush 0 0

# /dev/sda3 swap
UUID=b1ee627b-4b1d-421d-9009-54b1f3a7c9c0  none  swap sw  0 0

perhaps this is relevant, last 10 lines of dmesg:

[   18.694406] cfg80211:   (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[   18.694408] cfg80211:   (4910000 KHz - 4990000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2300 mBm)
[   18.694410] cfg80211:   (5030000 KHz - 5090000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2300 mBm)
[   18.694411] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[   18.694413] cfg80211:   (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[   18.694414] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2300 mBm)
[   19.739644] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process ended, respawning
[   19.744354] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process (1403) terminated with status 1
[   19.744369] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process ended, respawning
[   19.920914] init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (1464) terminated with status 1

I'd appreciate any advice you can give and I apologize if this is the wrong area to post this issue.

Last edited by Derphy (2015-10-04 08:29:57)

c3kay · 2015-10-01 10:40:55

I'm not sure what you're asking. And it's confusing, because your fstab indicates that it's from Arch based on that blkid output, but the dmesg output you posted is clearly from Mint. You clearly have two OS partitions, but I'm unsure as to how you'd get anything from dmesg about upstart when you're chrooted into Arch.

It sounds like your Debian install has overwritten grub. Remove grub from inside Arch chroot and try another boot manager, and read up on UEFI: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … _Interface

Derphy · 2015-10-01 11:37:52

What I'm asking is how can I get Arch to appear in grub again. Sorry that wasn't clear. Honestly, I only included the dmesg because I had seen it in a sticky about posting problems and I wasn't sure if it was related to the kernel or not. I don't know much about dmesg.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting I completely remove grub while using the Arch live usb?

Thanks for the advice.

fanisg · 2015-10-01 12:11:35

I have not read at all the thread, I have no idea but maybe I have the solution!!!

Maybe this: http://forums.netrunner.com/showthread. … light=grub

Superposition · 2015-10-01 12:28:12

You need to restore grub. There are instructions on the wiki.

c3kay · 2015-10-01 12:59:06

Derphy wrote:

What I'm asking is how can I get Arch to appear in grub again. Sorry that wasn't clear. Honestly, I only included the dmesg because I had seen it in a sticky about posting problems and I wasn't sure if it was related to the kernel or not. I don't know much about dmesg.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting I completely remove grub while using the Arch live usb?
Thanks for the advice.

The dmesg is cleared at every boot, so it can only tell you about kernel events that have just happened. It can't, for example, tell you about what happened in previous boots the way the journal can.

I think you need to know about UEFI booting before you go any further, and understand the difference between that and BIOS and why you need that /boot partition and EFI folder. If grub is giving you issues, you might want to either have a look at the troubleshooting page (the linked entry in particular), or try some alternatives - syslinux, refind or systemd-boot (gummiboot). Some of these, like systemd-boot, will only work with EFI systems, so you need to know what system you have to make an appropriate choice.

If you chroot into your Arch install then you can add and remove packages as if you were booting into it. So you can remove grub, or reinstall it, or install another bootloader/manager, or run os-prober from inside Arch.

Derphy · 2015-10-01 13:13:30

I didn't find a wiki page about restoring grub, but I found thishttps://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147200
However,

grub-install /dev/sda

results in

installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, block lists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged...
grub-install: error: will not process with blocklists.

I'm going to try syslinux but I don't have time to tonight.

I did some reading on EFI and as it happens, I don't have it. I think I got confused because I do I have GPT. I don't really remember, it was a few months ago that I first installed and I don't know what lead me to believe that I had EFI.

Thanks for the help thus far.

shulamy · 2015-10-01 16:38:25

i think you have to run os-prober from the other system.

ezik

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-10-01 20:37:17

Derphy wrote:

However,

grub-install /dev/sda

results in

installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, block lists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged...
grub-install: error: will not process with blocklists.

That is not the correct command for a UEFI system (if you have that, your OP was tl;dr).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GR … allation_2

Derphy · 2015-10-04 08:27:08

Ok, I fixed it! Full disclosure, I'm still really confused. But some info from you guys helped me out and I feel like I understand how things work a bit better now and I'm suspicious that this happened due to some mistakes during installation. Because I did have it set up for EFI, but I don't actually have that is what I have found out. Anyway, here's what I did.

First I tried removing grub, which seemed to be a success, but I was still using grub to boot into Mint somehow.
This thead made me think I should I clear out my boot partition and set the flag to bios_grub
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=168580
Then I reinstalled grub, did the mkconfig, rebooted, and got Error 15, which lead me to this http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=138121
That worked and I was able to get into Arch and Mint from the boot menu, but was giving me and error, similar to the one in this post https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=196083 and fixing my fstab then fixed everything. Marking this as solved, thanks for the advice!

Arch Linux

#1 2015-10-01 09:47:19

Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#2 2015-10-01 10:40:55

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#3 2015-10-01 11:37:52

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#4 2015-10-01 12:11:35

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#5 2015-10-01 12:28:12

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#6 2015-10-01 12:59:06

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#7 2015-10-01 13:13:30

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#8 2015-10-01 16:38:25

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#9 2015-10-01 20:37:17

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

#10 2015-10-04 08:27:08

Re: Arch not in GRUB after installing Debian on other partition[SOLVED]

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