Fedora Rawhide without any rollback extensions (kinoite or silverblue) was a stupid idea, so I’m back! Problem is, now I’m the proud owner of a lovely T14. It would be lovelier if it paid attention to the USBs I plug in, in the GRUB menu. So anyways, I’m now trying to boot the image from the GRUB shell, by doing
set root=(cd0, msdos2)
chainloader /efi/boot/BOOTx64.EFI
boot
And then I get:
unable to open root directory (Unsupported).
I tried installing Lubuntu instead to see if it was a problem with the usb, but nope! Lubuntu has a file in the /EFI/boot/ directory called grubx64.efi (IIRC) that I chainloadered and that worked. Anyone have ideas on what to try next, or obvious solutions that I overlooked due to lack of familiarity with EndeavourOS?
The way I’ve done that in the past is burning an iso onto a usb (rufus, dd, balena, etc), rebooting, and then selecting the option for the new OS on the GRUB screen. The option isn’t showing up, despite some UEFI menu finagling, so unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean, that option is either out the window or needs to be troubleshooted on its own. Since I at least have proof that the GRUB shells works in some cases, I’m pursuing that route for now. If you have suggestions for either case though, I’d love to hear them! Correct me if I am misunderstanding what you meant by live USB, please.
Forgive my ignorance, but is there a specific reason you’re trying to boot it from an existing grub installation? Do you have other OS’s installed on the device that you intend to multiboot with?
If not, and if EOS is going to be the only OS on the device for now, why not boot directly from the USB device using the normal boot menu (F12 during post for a Lenovo device)?
It will even reinstall a fresh grub for you if you choose it as your bootloader during setup.
That is what the goal is. The problem is that the boot menu, like grub, doesn’t realize that the usb is an option as far as I can tell. I don’t have access to my laptop rn, but give me 10 minutes and I’ll try the f12 menu again to confirm. Thanks for the friendly, non RTFM response so far yall, this is the real reason why EOS is great.
I have Lenovo machines myself and the only real pitfalls to watch out for are the ubiquitous “make sure secure boot is turned off” and (I believe, it’s been a while since I went digging) a setting in the UEFI that switches the default function key behaviours and may necessitate hitting FN+F12 instead depending on how it’s toggled, I can’t remember specifically.
More generally, depending on how you’ve created the USB you may only be able to boot in legacy mode rather than UEFI, so the system may not detect the drive as bootable if it’s been written in a manner that your current setup isn’t happy with - most commonly, a drive written with the partitions set up as MBR rather than GPT may not be recognised by a UEFI system.
If you’re genuinely not seeing the USB as an option in the F12 boot menu then my money is on this exact thing being the problem - either you’re trying to boot off a GPT drive using legacy mode, or an MBR drive using UEFI mode on a system that doesn’t support MBR.
Personally provided you’re definitely not in legacy mode I find it easiest to use Ventoy, setup with GPT and then just drop the raw ISO images for whatever you may want to boot into the drive. I keep a library of distros and my bootable utilities all on the one stick, it’s very handy - if you do go down the Ventoy root, you may get a slightly confusing option after booting where it will ask if you want to boot Ventoy in normal/grub2/other mode: just default to normal, try again with grub2 if you then get further issues after selecting the iso you wish to boot.
Guys, guys, slow down…. I’m actually just too silly to remember to change the boot order! 2 wasted days later…. I did it! No CSM or GPT/UEFI pains, just good old forgetting-the-obvious™! Sorry! Thanks for the great advice though.
I can only say it is somewhat difficult to understand what the problem was you were having due to the topic and explanation. I’m glad @z580c was able to point you in the right direction.
Basically what happened, was I burned EOS to a usb flash drive, and then tried to start the installer from the Fedora GRUB menu. The Fedora GRUB menu does not look for external bootloader conf files, but I forgot that fact and assumed something was wrong.
I went looking for an alternate, manual solution, which I got some leads into but never really worked out. Obviously, when you install a new operating system, you do so from the boot order menu, not the GRUB menu, but again, I forgot this fact until yesterday. Does that answer your confusion, Rick?
Never tried this or attempted to do this or would have thought to do this.
When you install a new system you boot from the menu item of the live USB when it boots up. Then when it loads you install from what ever install process the live USB has. I don’t think I’m confused.
