Error: unknown filesystem. grub rescue

[iamwaffel360]

@TriMoon

• Want to manually copy over stuff from one partition on your SSD to another one on same SSD.
  Plus remove the Micro$@$ partitions.
  This will be a LONG and HARD job…

I need to learn at some point so no better time and I am happy to learn as much as I can.

So I have been reading through the
The UEFI-Bios
and have learned things from it but there was nothing about rebuilding or merging partition.
So far I have the following remaining

nvme0n1p1         34   4196351   4196318     2G ext4 Partuuid-d905d8a8-3e17-cb41-8f7f-d8a4702518ba uuid-8397e3da-d5a1-4c76-a9ff-4ce63244bc94
nvme0n1p3   12584960 548937727 536352768 255.8G ext4 Partuuid-42f4a4ea-eb5e-ad4a-8e8b-232bec3715fb uuid-c40ed434-f467-4386-ae24-85f6d8ca6b4b
nvme0n1p11 730861567 976773134 245911568 117.3G ext4 Partuuid-0f4eb051-433b-2044-a363-1096a03d94d1 uuid-b2683235-d9b1-4a6f-b0fb-141a1ced512c

I have backed up the contents of

nvme0n1p1
nvme0n1p2
nvme0n1p10

From what I learnt in the past and now your guide

@TriMoon

and must be formatted as a FAT file system

and

@TriMoon

(UEFI-Specs §12.3 File System Format)

the first EFI boot should be FAT, however the first EFI boot should be FAT, however nvme0n1p1 is ext4 so based on that I should not be able to boot however, it now tries to boot into my old manjaro system (I can tell as its manjaro loading screen would always not render in the correct resolution) but never manages to, so I am more lost as there are no FAT partitions on any drive in the system.

I have been trying to do the list of thing to do but have been getting stuck

@TriMoon

Things to do:

1. Temporarily mount /dev/nvme0n1p11 somewhere so we can modify it as needed.
2. Temporarily mount all the ESP’s on the SSD in turn, to copy their contents into a sub-dir of (1).
3. Delete all partitions on the SSD EXCEPT /dev/nvme0n1p11 which will hold our current system and EFI backups.
4. Create a new /dev/nvme0n1p1 as ESP partition, with enough space to hold the contents of the EFI backups in (2)
   5.This needs to be a FAT32 partition.*
5. Create a new /dev/nvme0n1p2 as root filesystem partition to hold everything from /dev/nvme0n1p11 minus the EFI backups.
   7.I would suggest formatting this partition as a BTRFS filesystem as it will be easier to expand.*
   8.But that is your own choice…*
6. Change the fstab of the new system in /dev/nvme0n1p2 to use:

• /dev/nvme0n1p1 as /boot/efi
• /dev/nvme0n1p2 as root filesystem /.

10. Configure and use sd-boot as bootloader in /dev/nvme0n1p1 to help initial booting into the new system because it is way easier to configure as Grub until we are able to regenerate the Grub config.
11. Change the UEFI-BIOS boot entry, to use /dev/nvme0n1p1 as boot partition, using efibootmgr and the bootloader to use.
12. Chroot into /dev/nvme0n1p1 and regenerate the initrd so the above changes will be used while booting.
13. Try to boot from (8) and fix eventual problems that went wrong.
14. If all went “Okay” we can delete /dev/nvme0n1p11 and enlarge /dev/nvme0n1p2 to use all available space left on the SSD.

So far I have wiped nvme0n1p1 and replaced it with a FAT32 partition and have updated the fstab (I believe correctly)

I was intending to keep both nvme0n1p3 and nvme0n1p11 for the moment(I am only working on fixing nvme0n1p11 for the moment to not complicate things).

I am unsure of what sd-boot is

@TriMoon

• Configure and use sd-boot as bootloader in /dev/nvme0n1p1 to help initial booting into the new system

I am unsure of what sd-boot is but I am booting into a majaro live system so cant I use that to boot and then manjaro-chroot in to it?

@TriMoon

Change the UEFI-BIOS boot entry, to use /dev/nvme0n1p1 as boot partition, using efibootmgr and the bootloader to use.

on both live and chroot when putting efibootmgr I get the following.

EFI variables are not supported on this system.

@TriMoon

regenerate the initrd

when looking this up almost every result is redhat related (and account locked) and the ones that dont say to use something called dracut?

@TriMoon

Try to boot from (8) and fix eventual problems that went wrong.

I havent been able to do some of the prevous steps so got grub rescue
but when entering

@iamwaffel360

set root=(hd2,gpt11)
set prefix=(hd2,gpt11)/boot/grub
insmod normal

I now get

error: file '/boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod' not found.

fdisk -l
now gives the following

Disk /dev/sda: 223.57 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors
Disk model: KINGSTON SV300S3
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: gpt
Disk identifier: 6417DBB6-7CE4-3548-B55D-6D731B19974E

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1  321538048 468856991 147318944  70.2G Linux swap
/dev/sda2       2048 321538047 321536000 153.3G Linux filesystem

Partition table entries are not in disk order.


Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: WDS500G2X0C-00L350
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: gpt
Disk identifier: BEE49EBE-AC08-4F84-926F-D695E5160D07

Device              Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1       2048   8390655   8388608     4G EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p3   12584960 548937727 536352768 255.8G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p11 730861567 976773134 245911568 117.3G Linux filesystem


Disk /dev/sdc: 115.5 GiB, 124017180672 bytes, 242221056 sectors
Disk model: DataTraveler 3.0
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: 0x3e951a66

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1  *         2048 242155519 242153472 115.5G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdc2       242155520 242221055     65536    32M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)


Disk /dev/mapper/ventoy: 3.57 GiB, 3837536256 bytes, 7495188 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
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device                   Boot   Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mapper/ventoy-part1 *         64 7486995 7486932  3.6G  0 Empty
/dev/mapper/ventoy-part2      7486996 7495187    8192    4M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)


Disk /dev/loop0: 29.7 MiB, 31137792 bytes, 60816 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


Disk /dev/loop1: 896.48 MiB, 940027904 bytes, 1835992 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


Disk /dev/loop2: 1.87 GiB, 2007453696 bytes, 3920808 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


Disk /dev/loop3: 739.35 MiB, 775262208 bytes, 1514184 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

and /etc/fstab
contains the following

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system>             <mount point>  <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
UUID=F7CE-D10A                              /boot/efi                   vfat    umask=0077                                                                                                                                        0 2
UUID=b2683235-d9b1-4a6f-b0fb-141a1ced512c   /                           ext4    noatime                                                                                                                                           0 1
UUID=480d2b75-9789-4800-b8ad-764019c85d26   /home                       ext4    noatime                                                                                                                                           0 2
UUID=8a065abc-8719-4231-9f15-03d795b01065   swap                        swap    noatime                                                                                                                                           0 0
tmpfs                                       /tmp                        tmpfs   noatime,mode=1777                                                                                                                                 0 0
//192.168.10.90/Media                       /home/waffel360/nas/Media   cifs    rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,user=waffel360,vers=3.0,noauto,noserverino,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.mount-timeout=30,_netdev,credentials=/home/waffel360/nas/smbcred   0 0 

Thank you for your time.