Arch Linux

SirMyztiq

Member

Registered: 2015-03-24

Posts: 118

[SOLVED]Recovering boot partition

Hello!

My boot partition got full. Every time I tried to do any update I always had to delete the fallback.img in order for it to update my system. Today I tried to expand the partition. This is on a dualboot windows setup.

I loaded a gparted live usb because I wanted to keep it simple. I ran into some issues making the partition a bit bigger. My plan?

I copied everything in the /boot partition(EFI), deleted it, reformatted it to fat-32 and the copied all the files back onto it. It was extremely naive but for some reason I thought it would work.

Now, Windows boots up. And not only that, but I'm not able to select the "Arch linux" boot option that I usually saw when I started my machine.

I feel like I'm heading in the right direction to fix this issue.

I started reading this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … boot_order

But I'm not so sure if that is heading down the right path. Because it looks like my Arch Linux boot option is not even there anymore. I checked my BIOS setup and it doesn't show up. So Windows is the only bootloader it recognizes at the moment.

I would appreciate any guidance in how to fix my system. I have an old Arch Linux USB drive. I see all the files in the /boot that I saved from my working file system. However, my fear is that there were some hidden files I didn't copy over.

SOLUTION:
AS V1del suggested, reinstalling the bootloader onto my UEFI partition was the right and obvious approach(which wasn't obvious to me at the beginning) I simply chroot'ed using an old ArchLinux live USB I have around for emergencies. This means mounting all my file systems then chrooting, then running ```bootctl install``` which installed the bootloader and added itself to the bootloader list.

However, I also had to update my ```/etc/fstab``` boot UUID to the new one that was generated.

After this, it all worked!

Last edited by SirMyztiq (2018-05-30 14:55:36)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED]Recovering boot partition

Just reinstall your bootloader into the UEFI partition, it's likely that the identifier changed and thus the old entry pointing to the old partition was removed by the UEFI.

SirMyztiq

Member

Registered: 2015-03-24

Posts: 118

Re: [SOLVED]Recovering boot partition

Just reinstall your bootloader into the UEFI partition, it's likely that the identifier changed and thus the old entry pointing to the old partition was removed by the UEFI.

Thanks for your help! My gut told me that is what I needed to do, but it had been so long that I've done any type of recovery that I was scared to act on it. Once I went through the process, it all came back to me.