have a ivyra1n booted thinkpad t430 (should be irrelevant). installed windows first on clean GPT drive, then made separate 2G linux ESP so windows couldn't overwrite any boot entries. have 6-7 alternative root partitions, one of which is meant to be a stable linux mint installation, and a large segregated data partition. no separate home partitions. Attempted installing rEFInd, didn't like it, switched to systemd-boot on arch install after having installed windows, mint, and debian installations. Arch switched without hiccups, but mint began telling me my ESP was full- looking at lsblk, it seems that mint (and potentially all my distros?) treated the 100M windows ESP as the default rather than the 2G linux ESP. My goals are to set the linux ESP as the default for my mint, debian, and arch installs, and any future installs, and to copy over the preexisting boot entries from the windows ESP to the linux ESP. i'm not particularly well acquainted with mounting/file transfer between partitions, or how to change default partitions, or which boot entries i need to copy (and what to copy with it, and what to delete). definite guidance needed. system is still functional, can boot into all presently installed distros, and i know how to boot live environments for recovery.
#Mild headache with multiboot/windows setup and systemd-boot (CLOSED?)
hearty badger
orchid venture
First things first, can you please share what your lsblk -f looks like?
My first impression is that your windows bootloader partition shouldn't be mounted in linux, so your kernel install stuff shouldn't recognise it
hearty badger
First things first, can you please share what your `lsblk -f` looks like?
sure thing, i'll do one from mint and one from arch- if there's any distro that has the correct esp, it's probably arch
orchid venture
The reason windows has a tendency to squish linux bootloader is because when it installs and probably if/when it updates its bootloader, it looks at the drive and picks the first partition it finds that's FAT32 and labeled as an EFI partition and uses that
I wonder if mint does something similar with its fancy auto install magic. I've not installed mint myself in forever, and not on top of windows
hearty badger
i think mint likely does the same thing. i installed windows first, then partitioned extra drives- there are two entirely distinct bootloaders, with the windows one having come first and therefore not needing to interfere with the second linux ESP.
wgetpaste isn't available on mint 12, i'll see what i can do for arch
if it helps though, mint's lsblk displays sda1 (the 100MB windows ESP), as being mounted to /boot/efi. sda7 is listed as being mounted to root.
this isn't a shock to me, i'm mostly wondering how i can effectively move all of the boot entries in the windows ESP to the linux ESP
and how i can set the linux ESP to the default for mint
orchid venture
That should™ be as simple as changing the fstab and rebooting
hearty badger
it'll even dynamically move the boot entries?
orchid venture
Ah no you'll have to shuffle those around yourself
hearty badger
gotcha
would i be doing anything with the Boot directory in those, or would i simply need to move the entries labeled "Linux Mint" or "Debian" into the linux ESP
orchid venture
I would probably just nuke all the non windows stuff in the windows esp and reinstall all your kernels via apt in the proper esp
hearty badger
never done anything like that before, how would i reinstall the kernels? would i simply delete the entries, change the esp using fstab, reinstall, and then they'll automatically relocate themselves?
orchid venture
I'd do more looking into this yourself before trusing the word of a discord rando for sure, but that's how I understand it to work
I would also use genfstab because it's easy
what I would do (double check this)
- umount /boot/efi
- mount your actual esp to /boot/efi
- mv /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak -- (important to back things up!)
- genfstab -U / > /etc/fstab
- vim/nano /etc/fstab and sanity check it, remove lines like "loop" - you only want stuff in here you want auto-mounted at boot
- apt install linux-image-$(uname -r) - this should also run all the initramfs generation stuff and install the kernel to the new partition on /boot/efi with your other distros
hearty badger
super helpful, seems right with my (admittedly limited) knowledge of boot stuff
orchid venture
if mint doesn't have genfstab, a cheeky trick is to mount the arch drive and use the one there :D
It's only a bash script anyhow
hearty badger
nice
much appreciated, might have further questions but you've helped plenty already
hearty badger
seems to have worked for mint! little bit of funny stuff i'll have to figure out later, but it's successfully switched to systemd boot. Arch install seems to have been bricked after my attempts to get this to work last night, but if this method works everything else should be fairly smooth. much appreciated.
Mild headache with multiboot/windows setup and systemd-boot (CLOSED?)
orchid venture
should be a similar process with arch