No boot from usb stick, just a grub shell

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1

Hi everyone,

As I am very satisfied of its look and feel on my desktop, I am trying to install Manjaro 21.2.4 on a tablet. It is an Acer One 10 also called switch, with a tablet ‘attached’ to a removable keyboard.

Boot fails from the usb stick, the same that I used for installing Manjaro with a dual boot on my desktop. It just opens a grub shell and I am stuck with it.

Maybe the usb stick has kept a record of the dual boot on my other machine? No, when I use this stick again on my desktop, it starts a live session and no option to Windows.

The only thing that I had to modify on the usb stick is an efi file in /boot/efi. This is a trick that helps in the case of a 64 bit processor but a 32 bit uefi, as explained here: https://gist.github.com/franga2000/2154d09f864894b8fe84
But this should not interfere with grub and no selection of the OS to start with.

2

If you mean that file, i’d rather think it does interfere, as Manjaro needs its own (64bit) GRUB to boot…

1 Like
3

That’s it I mean the bootia32.efi file. Without it, my UEFI does not find the usb stick on boot.

This solution works well for other distributions. For instance LinuxMint that I have tested this way on my tablet.

4

I have followed this tutorial in order to use the grub shell to boot: https://szymonkrajewski.pl/how-to-boot-system-from-usb-using-grub/

I have indicated the path to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi
File path is returned correctly but I end up with an ‘unknown error’ after I enter the command root.

??

5

It looks like the command is set root.

6

Thank you for the suggestion but this does not work either.

As I understand from https://www.unix-ninja.com/p/Manually_booting_the_Linux_kernel_from_GRUB one should load the kernel. But I can’t find it, I have access only to /efi and /System Volume Information

At this stage, it would be interesting to analyse the boot process with maxi https://github.com/andreaskielkopf/maxi
What do you think @andreas85 ?

7

You can look at /boot
ls -lA /boot
to see the kernel, or you can use
mhwd-kernel li

Or you can try maxi.

But maxi has some dependencies !
It is written in java (needs java>=8), It needs a shell and some things mentioned on github. It does nothing without these programs.

If the dependencies are ok, it may work :wink:

But i never tried this on ARM

The worst thing that can happen is

  • that it does not run at all or
  • that it does find nothing (while everything is in place)

+ It does change nothing in the system

+ It does not need to be installed

8

The ‘system’ finds nothing there. As I said, I have access only to /efi and /System Volume Information. And I am afraid I can’t run java or anything else, except grub.

I think I will stop searching. The problem comes from efi files that do not match 1/ 64 bit instead of 32 bit for my very special UEFI or 2/ Manjaro which has special requirements compared to other linux. Too complicated for me.

EDIT: Just to say, it must be an Arch linux thing. Because I’ve just tried with Garuda linux which is also based on Arch and I get the same result. Whereas I can install Mint and even CloudReady / Google OS on my tablet thanks to the bootia32.efi trick.

1 Like
9

They seem to successfully booted and installed arch using refind (which also worked on apple’s 2006 32bit efi imacs):
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198968

1 Like
10

This sounds interesting. I’ll give it a try… But I must dig into the documentation first as I don’t know refind.
Thanks.