will using the --removable flag on grub make my drive bootable on other motherboards? [solved]

[mental jolt]

I have found that after moving to a new motherboard, both my bootable flash drive and my encrypted drive no longer show as bootable. redoing grub-install and stuff made both of them bootable. Encrypted drive sadly no longer decrypts to boot even though I can decrypt it and read the data from other installations. If I do a fresh install but with the --removable flag on grub, will it make it so that my drive will still boot even when plugged into a new system?

[placid mural]

.s tias

[gaunt ridge]

https://tryitands.ee/

[placid mural]

remember you don't need to do a fresh install of the OS, just the bootloader

[mental jolt]

I unfortunately do not possess a second device to try it and see

[cerulean pagoda]

with a normal installation of the bootloader, it is added as a boot entry in the motherboard NVRAM, so when you move the device to another motherboard, that motherboard doesn't have the boot entry for that bootloader

the --removable flag puts the bootloader executable at a certain standard location/name on the EFI partition, which motherboards scan every boot (so it doesn't require a boot entry)

[mental jolt]

oh okay thanks

they said something like it puts it in the efi folder instead of nvram but it wasn't clear why that was important when i read it in the wiki. this really cleared it up for me tysm

[cerulean pagoda]

yw 👍

btw you can view and modify the boot entries with the efibootmgr command

if you wanted to, you could just add the entry on each motherboard

but you'd need to use archiso or something to set that up for the first time on each board