Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-20 14:26:00

Hello! :·)

I would like to install Arch on my laptop*, but as soon as the install is finished (I do a regular USB live boot to install), I restart my laptop. But instead of having Grub, I have the HDD patent numbers displayed on my screen, after which the laptop tries to boot on an other device (usb stick, ...) or prints me the BIOS boot menu.

I first thought that it is a GRUB installation problem. Maybe I did something wrong? But I installed:
- Arch
- Arch with Architect
- Chakra OS
- Apricity
- Antergos

They all install properly but have the same exact boot problem, except antegros, stopping the install and prompting nothing more than something like: "Error: installation failed".

I tried to install Arch on an other computer, it worked without any problem. And on this laptop, I tested a while back Ubuntu, Ubuntu derivatives, Open SUSE, Fedora, and now went from Kubuntu to Debian, since I don't manage to install Arch. And they all worked.

Any idea on what went wrong?

*specifications of my laptop:
- Toshiba A660, 64bit
- uname -a =>Linux home 3.16.0-4-amd64 [...] x86_64 GNU/Linux
- BIOS (UEFI)

Last edited by Tuxtoriel (2016-04-24 08:45:37)

Scimmia · 2016-04-20 14:29:41

Is this a UEFI or BIOS system?

How did you set up your bootloader?

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-20 14:34:49

It's a BIOS, and my bootloader is generic. It first boots my HDD, and then USB, CD/DVD and finally LAN if I'm not mistaken.
Do you want some precise info? I can quickly reboot my laptop ( I'm currently on it ;·) ).

Last edited by Tuxtoriel (2016-04-20 14:35:13)

Lone_Wolf · 2016-04-21 12:05:48

Tuxtoriel, i think Scimmia wants details about how you setup the HDD and the bootloader program that you use to choose between diferent OSes and kernels, probably grub in your case.

ShaneRoach · 2016-04-21 15:34:25

Tuxtoriel wrote:

It's a BIOS, and my bootloader is generic. It first boots my HDD, and then USB, CD/DVD and finally LAN if I'm not mistaken.
Do you want some precise info? I can quickly reboot my laptop ( I'm currently on it ;·) ).

It looks like you are listing your boot ORDER, not loader.

GRUB is the bootloader the instructions in the Wiki have you installing for BIOS. For UEFI firmware, systemd-boot is installed to the appropriate disk partition. Did you install GRUB during the installation? Or, did you create a UEFI partition during the disk formatting portion of installation and later install systemd-boot?

To make a long story short, it seems as if your firmware is not detecting a compatible set of boot instructions on the disk where you installed Arch. It therefore falls back to the boot screen.

A helpful admin showed me this link just yesterday. Perhaps it will be helpful to you as well.

https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/2 … work-then/

First, you need to figure out which sort of firmware you actually have. Then you need to go back through the installation and ensure you have all the proper software in the proper places on the disk for the firmware to find and boot it with.

Last edited by ShaneRoach (2016-04-21 15:42:52)

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-21 19:37:58

Firstly, thank you all for your help! :·)

Scimmia: Sorry for the misunderstanding and thank you Lone_Wolf for pointing it out!
Since I couldn't boot & use my laptop anymore, I installed Debian to get some urgent work done. And since the last time I installed Arch, I installed the Arch derivatives mentionned above and thus I don't quite remember how I configured it. However I will now retry an installation with special care to the GRUB part! ;·) I'll post back my configuration.

ShaneRoach: I did install GRUB during the installation, after the base install and the system configuration, as mentionned in the installation guide.

ShaneRoach wrote:

To make a long story short, it seems as if your firmware is not detecting a compatible set of boot instructions on the disk where you installed Arch. It therefore falls back to the boot screen.
A helpful admin showed me this link just yesterday. Perhaps it will be helpful to you as well.
https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/2 … work-then/

Thank you for the link.
And about firmware detection, it may (or rather must) be the problem. As said, I will now reinstall Arch. But what surprised me was that neither of the GUI installations (Antergos, Apricity and Chakra) managed to get the booting right. But why? Because with those distros, I don't have to manage GRUB myself. Furthermore, it worked with any other distribution.
Isn't that strange, or am I missing something?

Thanks for your help! I'll keep you informed!

ShaneRoach · 2016-04-21 22:51:54

If you are unable to fix the issue yourself, I would like to ask for more details as to exactly what you did. If you installed Grub but your system is set in firmware to only deal with UEFI, it might act this way. It's hard to tell from what you've share so far. It might be as simple as setting the firmware to "legacy" or "legacy and UEFI". If it is UEFI only and you're operating on the Grub install given in the Wiki, it will definitely fail.

Sorry, I don't know a thing about all of the derivatives. But it would appear the sleek install packages for the Debian derivatives all are detecting your firmware correctly and dealing with the boot issue accordingly. That or I'm full of crap.

tho068 · 2016-04-22 09:32:08

I would like to recommend systemd-boot bootloader if using UEFI.

I personally find it easier to setup compared to grub. And the wiki has information about it.

If using legacy grub is fine.

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-24 11:03:20

I'm back!

ShaneRoach and tho068 : I use a BIOS and not UEFI, so I use Grub :·) . Concerning the derivatives, I think you are right ShaneRoach, and I might have found something.

So I managed to set up Arch. But as expected it did not boot. :·(
There is only one thing: As i ran grub-mkconfig I got this:

... # grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-linux
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img
Found fallback initramfs image: /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
    /run/lvm/lvmetad.socket: connect failed: No such file or directory
    WARNING: Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to internal scanning.
[80910.946796] squashfs: SQUASHFS error: Can't find a SQUASHFS superblock on sda2
[80910.950212] EXT4-fs (sda2): unable to read superblock
[80910.954024] EXT4-fs (sda2): unable to read superblock
[80910.957395] EXT4-fs (sda2): unable to read superblock
done

Well I did once try with Ubuntu LVM to see what it is. But since I installed other OSes. How can I clear it completely? (if not already done)
This post (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 7#p1390157) seemes to say that it should still be ok.

I followed the Arch guide and the Beginners guide:

pacman -S grub os-prober
grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I did not leave 1MB of space before the first partition, not knowing what to use to do it. (I did not manage to do it with cfdisk. Can we resize partitions with parted?)

Do you want more information?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-04-24 15:45:43

Tuxtoriel wrote:

I did not leave 1MB of space before the first partition, not knowing what to use to do it. (I did not manage to do it with cfdisk. Can we resize partitions with parted?)

One command output is better than a thousand words:

# parted -l

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-24 16:29:38

Ok, this lets me list my partition and their number. But I only found a way to move the end of the partition, and not the start. And actually, (booting from the arch usb key) I see that there is 1MB left at the beginning! :·) So thank you for the command!
So that should not be a problem.
But GRUB still does not boot!

Any idea?

Last edited by Tuxtoriel (2016-04-24 16:30:00)

DenBrahe · 2016-04-25 07:29:42

To me it seems your filesystems are corrupt. Did/can you try recreating the filesystems and partition table (msdos)?
Or run fsck from a live cd

JohnBobSmith · 2016-04-25 13:14:27

Tuxtoriel, what Head_on_a_Stick was getting at is that it is better to post the entire output to the board (preferably in code tags) than to use words to describe the output. Can you copy/paste the output of parted -l here so we can take a look? Remember to run as root (sudo). Thanks!

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-25 22:07:33

Oh! ok! :·)
There it is:

 # parted -l
Model: ATA TOSHIBA MK7559GS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 750GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  8591MB  8590MB  primary   linux-swap(v1)
 2      8591MB  750GB   742GB   extended
 5      8592MB  9666MB  1074MB  logical   ext4                                       (/boot)
 6      9667MB  63.4GB  53.7GB  logical   ext4                                       (/var)
 7      63.4GB  117GB   53.7GB  logical   ext4                                       (/data)
 8      117GB   213GB   96.2GB  logical   ext4                                       (/)
 9      213GB   750GB   537GB   logical   ext4                                       (/home)


... other peripherals

Between parentheses are the mounting points of those partitions. I used the Arch live usb key to get this data. (mkdir and then mount)
Something I was wondering: shouldn't there be any boot flag? (... even if GUI type installations would manage it automatically. And since they did not manage to make something bootable, I wouldn't think that it is the cause of the problem)

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-25 22:17:13

Well, I just found out: "Beginners guide"

The following command will be used to flag the partition that contains the /boot directory as bootable:

(parted) set partition boot on

    partition is the number of the partition to be flagged (see the output of the print command).

That was silly. Because for partitionning, I did follow something else, since no steps where described in the install guide (not the beginners guide!).
Nevertheless, I don't think that it is the only cause. (the whole Antergos, ... thing, as well as the fact that it worked on an other computer. Or maybe I still did this step!)
Well I guess I will reinstall it tomorrow!

Tuxtoriel · 2016-04-29 20:56:02

Good news!

I followed only the beginners guide... and it works! I managed to boot my computer. And I found something strange:
Except for one part, I could follow the guide and everything worked. That one part is the partitioning section. Everything works except for the "BIOS/MBR examples" part, that I followed, to make shure that I am not making a mistake.

By doing what is written on the wiki:

BIOS/MBR examples

(parted) mkpart primary ext4 1MiB 100MiB
(parted) set 1 boot on
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 100MiB 20GiB
(parted) mkpart primary linux-swap 20GiB 24GiB
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 24GiB 100%

And except for the partition sizes that I increased. But what I get is:

Model: ATA TOSHIBA MK7559GS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 750GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  2123MB  1074MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)  boot
 2      1074MB  97,8GB  97,7GB  primary  ext4
 3      97,8GB  106,3GB 8589MB  primary  ext4
 4      106,3GB 750GB   643GB   primary  ext4



(this is a reconstruction. What is real is the Number, Size, Type, File system and the Flags part. The Start (except for the first line) and the End (except for the last line) where recalculated for the purpose of the explanation. I took the data from the original code below)

The linux-swap "moved"! Why?
First I thought it was a typo or something else. But I tried several times, the same problem reapeared.

Thus, I did it again but with a swap partition as the fisrt partition. Here is the result:

Model: ATA TOSHIBA MK7559GS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 750GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  8590MB  8589MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)
 2      8590MB  9664MB  1074MB  primary  ext4            boot
 3      9664MB  107GB   97,7GB  primary  ext4
 4      107GB   750GB   643GB   primary  ext4

It works.

But if this happens each time something creates partitions, this could be a reason why the alternatives did fail.

(I may try to reinstall an alternative to examine the partitions.)

Does this make any sense?

Thank you for your help! :·)

ShaneRoach · 2016-05-01 16:28:30

That certainly did not happen to me.

Poking around Google I did not find a mention of the swap partition being accidentally marked boot either. That is very strange.

What it LOOKS like you did was to create your swap partition first and then set it boot on. But without being there to look over your shoulder, I could not say. All I know is I followed those exact same instructions and got an entirely different result from what you are showing there.

Arch Linux

#1 2016-04-20 14:26:00

Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#2 2016-04-20 14:29:41

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#3 2016-04-20 14:34:49

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#4 2016-04-21 12:05:48

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#5 2016-04-21 15:34:25

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#6 2016-04-21 19:37:58

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#7 2016-04-21 22:51:54

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#8 2016-04-22 09:32:08

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#9 2016-04-24 11:03:20

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#10 2016-04-24 15:45:43

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#11 2016-04-24 16:29:38

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#12 2016-04-25 07:29:42

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#13 2016-04-25 13:14:27

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#14 2016-04-25 22:07:33

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#15 2016-04-25 22:17:13

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#16 2016-04-29 20:56:02

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

#17 2016-05-01 16:28:30

Re: Arch and arch derivatives impossible to boot after install

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