So I have a secondary EOS system that I’ve had for years but I don’t use as much as I used to. Anyway about 2 weeks ago I ssh’d to it, and did a standard ‘sudo pacman -Syu’ and while I didn’t watch it fully during completion, from my memory I don’t recall seeing any big errors at the end. So I just did a reboot. When it didn’t boot, I switched over the KVM to it, and could see that no matter what kernel is selected in grub it gives an error that vmlinuz-linux could not be found.
So tonight I finally got around to creating a boot usb to access it, boot via that and arch-chroot and I can see that in the /boot directory all vmlinux-linux files were deleted, along with initramfs-linux files and the entire efi directory.
So I did a ‘sudo pacman -Syu linux linux-headers’ and it pulled down 419 new packages, and I can see that I now have the vmlinux-linux files back, and the initramfs-linux files too, but the efi directory was not there.
So I’ve tried using grub-install
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=endeavouros
but I get the error
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
grub-install: error: /boot/efi doesn't look like an EFI partition.
I’ve tried manually creating the folder via mkdir, but I still get the same error. I didn’t have a separate boot partition previously so I’m not sure how to progress past this
[root@EndeavourOS boot]# efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 000A
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0001,0007,0006,0009,0008,000A
Boot0001* Diskette Drive BBS(Floppy,Diskette Drive,0x0)0000424f
Boot0006* USB Storage Device BBS(USB,SanDisk Cruzer Blade 1.26,0x0)0000424f
Boot0007* CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive BBS(CDROM,P1: HL-DT-ST DVD+/-RW GU90N,0x0)0000424f
Boot0008* Onboard NIC BBS(Network,IBA CL Slot 00FE v0106,0x0)0000424f
Boot0009* P0: SanDisk SSD PLUS 1000GB BBS(HD,P0: SanDisk SSD PLUS 1000GB,0x0)0000424f
Boot000A* UEFI: SanDisk Cruzer Blade 1.26 PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(0,0)/HD(1,MBR,0xea64eddc,0x5853c0,0x56000)0000424f
[root@EndeavourOS boot]# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 7:0 0 2.6G 1 loop
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 897.3G 0 part /
└─sda2 8:2 0 34.2G 0 part
sdb 8:16 1 3.7G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 1 2.8G 0 part
└─sdb2 8:18 1 172M 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
[root@EndeavourOS boot]# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 931.52 GiB, 1000207286272 bytes, 1953529856 sectors
Disk model: SanDisk SSD PLUS
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x7797dddd
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1881759179 1881757132 897.3G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1881759180 1953520064 71760885 34.2G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Disk /dev/sdb: 3.73 GiB, 4004511744 bytes, 7821312 sectors
Disk model: Cruzer Blade
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xea64eddc
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 64 5788607 5788544 2.8G 0 Empty
/dev/sdb2 5788608 6140863 352256 172M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
Disk /dev/loop0: 2.6 GiB, 2788671488 bytes, 5446624 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
[root@EndeavourOS boot]# ls -al /boot/
total 195952
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Apr 11 22:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Jan 26 20:30 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 11 22:56 efi
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Jul 31 2023 grub
-rw------- 1 root root 61914979 Apr 11 22:49 initramfs-linux-fallback.img
-rw------- 1 root root 17124612 Apr 11 22:49 initramfs-linux.img
-rw------- 1 root root 62861061 Apr 11 22:50 initramfs-linux-zen-fallback.img
-rw------- 1 root root 17236310 Apr 11 22:50 initramfs-linux-zen.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9683968 Feb 11 11:09 intel-ucode.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15368704 Apr 11 22:49 vmlinuz-linux
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16433664 Apr 11 22:49 vmlinuz-linux-zen
[root@EndeavourOS boot]# ^C
So how do I get grub-install to work here?
