cant install bootloader

[plush pumice]

i cant seem to make a bootloader config for system-md boot, since whenever i try to i get the error that /esp/loader doesnt exist on vm

[coral meadow]

did you bootctl install?

[plush pumice]

yes

and il do it again

[coral meadow]

yeah

[plush pumice]

im pretty sure this is fine

[coral meadow]

no

its not fine

[plush pumice]

that explains it

[coral meadow]

it didnt install

[plush pumice]

someone told me it was

wee fanny

[coral meadow]

bootctl install --esp-path=/esp

please read logs

and also

please mount your boot partition to /boot or /efi, other mountpoints may? mess something up but im unsure

[plush pumice]

no such file or directory

[coral meadow]

show me ls /mnt

okay so

forget that

[junior falcon]

sent the output of the mount command

[coral meadow]

if you want to install the bootloader you need to be chrooted

to your system

[plush pumice]

cant find efi system partition

[coral meadow]

show me lsblk

[plush pumice]

should i make another one?

for efi

[coral meadow]

ummmm

is sda1 supposed to be the efi?

[plush pumice]

yeah youd think

it is

[junior falcon]

1G it must be, but then also, their OS isn't mounted

[coral meadow]

no it is, they are chrooted

[junior falcon]

oh they chrooted, okay lol

[coral meadow]

yeah so what step of the install are you on

[junior falcon]

didn't notice that sorry XD

[coral meadow]

WRONG PERSON

[plush pumice]

the last one

3.8

this is the one part i cannae figure out

[coral meadow]

show me /etc/fstab

[plush pumice]

permission denied

lovely

[coral meadow]

cat /etc/fstab

[plush pumice]

i hate bootloaders

this sucks so ass

[coral meadow]

yeah this isnt going to boot

exit chroot

and show lsblk again after exiting chroot

[coral meadow]

thats a mess

umount -R /mnt

[plush pumice]

i thought it reset

[coral meadow]

umount /boot

and after that show lsblk again

[plush pumice]

im assuiming me spamming it fucked it

bootloaders are my worse enemy

[coral meadow]

okay i assume that the 4G is SWAP correct?

[plush pumice]

yeppers

[coral meadow]

its not a bootloader problem you messed up other thing too

[plush pumice]

huh

[coral meadow]

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

[plush pumice]

fuckk

[coral meadow]

rm /mnt/esp

mkdir -p /mnt/boot

[plush pumice]

no such file or directory

[coral meadow]

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

[plush pumice]

esp doesnt fucking exist

thats the whole problem

ahhhh

this is torture

[coral meadow]

fstab isnt setup too

you skipped a step

its not going to boot

[plush pumice]

did i???

[coral meadow]

yeah the file is empty

[coral meadow]

swapon /dev/sda2

after these commands

[plush pumice]

no i defos did i set it up

i remember it vividly

[coral meadow]

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

[coral meadow]

this is empty

[plush pumice]

oml i thought i didnt need the arrows

[coral meadow]

show lsblk

[plush pumice]

holy shit im mentally ill

[coral meadow]

after mounting

[coral meadow]

yeah no, these pass the output to the /mnt/etc/fstab file

[plush pumice]

ok done

[coral meadow]

show lsblk and fstab

[coral meadow]

cat /etc/fstab

[coral meadow]

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

sda1 must be mounted

[plush pumice]

fact check true

now will bootctl

[coral meadow]

ok did you mount it?

NO

ABSOLUTELY NOT

[plush pumice]

ok ok

so basiclly sloopy mounting

ahhhhh

[coral meadow]

show me lsblk now

[plush pumice]

btw im not even doing this is on a actually pc this is a vm

because i felt bad abt using archinstall script

[coral meadow]

great now do this in order

1. rm /mnt/etc/fstab
2. genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

3. cat /mnt/etc/fstab

[coral meadow]

i noticed

well you are learning

[coral meadow]

show me output of this

[plush pumice]

yummers

now shits no longer sloppy

so basically i rushed my mounting and fstab

[coral meadow]

then, what kernel did you use? did you install the ucode for your cpu?

[coral meadow]

now we need to fix more things

[plush pumice]

which caused me not being mounted properlly which caused efi and system-md to not be installed

i obv got the ucode

im not dumb

[coral meadow]

its systemd

[plush pumice]

i installed the linux kernel

the pacstrap stuff is sound

[coral meadow]

chroot in and do pacman -S linux amd/intel-ucode

[plush pumice]

they where alr installed

[coral meadow]

this should put the linux kernel, the ucode to the /boot dir and regenerate initramfs

[coral meadow]

dont care

run it

[plush pumice]

i mean i did

thats what it said

it installed the ucode well though

[coral meadow]

yeah but did you let it reinstall?

[plush pumice]

obv

[coral meadow]

show ls /boot

[plush pumice]

how much dmg did i do

i see efi

[coral meadow]

great now bootctl install

[plush pumice]

holy moly

do i exit chroot

[coral meadow]

no

nano /boot/loader/loader.conf

[plush pumice]

oh yeah that shit

since it now exists

[coral meadow]

put this in

timeout  4
console-mode max
editor   no```

[plush pumice]

forgot abt it

lemme sort it

yeah yeah ik

[coral meadow]

ok use the wiki and show me both configs after you are done

[plush pumice]

alr thats done and dusted

[coral meadow]

show these files

[coral meadow]

cat /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf
cat /boot/loader/loader.conf

[plush pumice]

about the xxxxxxx part

do i just put in xx or am i ment to replace it with smth

[plush pumice]

other one is the exact same

as what you gave me

[plush pumice]

@coral meadow im gonna bootctl install

that ok?

ehh honestly

i might redo the install another day

i fucked it up alot, this is just a vm so il do redo it again learnign from this whole fuck fest

thanks though

[coral meadow]

yeah its wrong

i knew you would do that

im not trying to make tou feel dumb btw

ik its your first time

@plush pumice

are you here?

please dont delete it

you just need to correct the mistake

its a simple fix

[plush pumice]

uhhh

its alr gone

[coral meadow]

you dont do bootctl install after editing the conf

[plush pumice]

😢

[coral meadow]

jesus

do the same thing you did then but correctly

[plush pumice]

yeah tbf i coulda just continued it tomorow

yeah that was my point

since redoing the download woulda been faster

[coral meadow]

you are supposed to swap the xxxxxxxxx for the uuid of the root partition

[coral meadow]

no?

you just switch the xxxxx to the real partition uuid

and it would boot

[plush pumice]

.....

yeah fucking kill me

i knew it

ahh it'll be fine

[coral meadow]

that root=UUID=xxxx is telling the kernel where to find the root

[plush pumice]

il tryhard my ass off tmrw

i know what im doing now

[coral meadow]

you get the uuid by lsblk -f, its a long stream of characters

[coral meadow]

yeah you couldve just waited for my answer

[plush pumice]

guessed that

[plush pumice]

true true

but that would destroy the point

i did this because i felt too reliant on others for help on these kinda things

plus now i have shitloads to read to understand what this stuff even means

so its a win in my book

thanks though

[plush pumice]

GUESS WHATTT

[plush pumice]

speedrun

[coral meadow]

yeah did u get it to boot?

[plush pumice]

no because i need to mount sda3 to fucking boot

i think

its saying not booted in container

[junior falcon]

why is sda3 mounted to both /mnt and / ? It should just be /

[plush pumice]

yeah I need unmount it

forgot how to though

[junior falcon]

umount /dev/sda3 /mnt

and remove / on the seperate line and change /mnt to /

[plush pumice]

target is busy for some reason

thats not good

[junior falcon]

are you in the iso?

[plush pumice]

though im pretty sure reboot would fix it

yeah

[junior falcon]

cat /mnt/etc/fstab please

[plush pumice]

i didnt mess it up im pretty sure

[junior falcon]

okay that's good

[plush pumice]

im not a complete dummy

just bad with bootloader

[junior falcon]

what bootloader are you using?

[plush pumice]

m tryanna get sdm

systemd

sorry

dont remember the full name of it

[junior falcon]

I'm confused, haven't you installed the OS?

[plush pumice]

no

this is the install

on a vm

[junior falcon]

okay, but on the vm, what isn't working?

[plush pumice]

bootloader install

[junior falcon]

what's the boot order for the vm?

[plush pumice]

the iso is first im pretty sure

lemme go check

this what you mean right?

[junior falcon]

okay if the iso is the first then that's what's going to load up each time, right?

so set the bootloader partition to be the first?

[plush pumice]

well im pretty sure the bootloader isnt even installed

[junior falcon]

what bootloader did you use?

[plush pumice]

im trying to get systemd-boot

since i despise grub

[junior falcon]

chroot and then do the commands

[plush pumice]

im in chroot lad

[junior falcon]

this was done from the iso, not from the chroot

[plush pumice]

😭

[junior falcon]

you weren't when you did those commands

[plush pumice]

not to be cheeky but

running in a chroot, enabling --graceful

im hoping that means in chroot right

right?

[junior falcon]

ahh fair, it looks like you're not from the red text prefix at the top

or is that you chrooting in?

[plush pumice]

it wont let me umount /mnt from the root partiton

[plush pumice]

me chrooting in

apperntly /mnt is busy

[junior falcon]

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

what does that output?

[plush pumice]

doesnt exist

[junior falcon]

okay...think I know the issue, your vm is doing oldschool bios I think, not uefi

so you need to set up a vm that simulates uefi

[plush pumice]

great the vm isnt recieving keyboard

lovely

[junior falcon]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot#Installing_the_UEFI_boot_manager

as per that section

[plush pumice]

yeah iv been trying to do that part

[junior falcon]

Installing the UEFI boot manager

To install systemd-boot, first make sure that the system is booted into UEFI mode and UEFI variables are accessible. This can be verified by running efivar --list or, if efivar is not installed, by running ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars (if the directory exists, the system is booted into UEFI mode.)

what vm software are you using?

[plush pumice]

oh so basically iv been doing it right

but i used wrong bios

virtualbox

[junior falcon]

I usually use kvm, lets have a google

https://www.techbloat.com/how-to-turn-on-virtualbox-efi.html

try from step 3 onwards

for reference I searched "virtualbox force uefi"

because, when we're stuck, it's superior to search instead of first ask questions 😛

[plush pumice]

I did 😭

i jsut thought i was ment to install eufi somehow

[junior falcon]

I'm going for a walk, will try to check in afterwards if I can

[plush pumice]

started using arch-chroot -S /mnt

but when i put in bootctl --path-/boot install (because it couldnt find the boot partition)

it said it wasent on gpt partition table even though i made sure it was beforehand

i exited chroot and used gdisk

and got this

[junior falcon]

my goodness you suck at taking screenshots lol

had you mounted the efi partition to /boot?

(or from the iso, /mnt/boot)

[junior falcon]

it might be switching from bios to uefi has message things up somehow, you could always start again entirely, shold take no more than 10-15 mins now you know what you're doing

so, very quickly:
bios (basic input output system) was how to access a motherboards settings but got replaced several decades ago with UEFI( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), these are not packages to be installed using your package manager, they lay below the operating system.
So, it's not a matter of installing bios or uefi, it's a question of what your board uses. Laptop less than 15 years old? It almost certainly uses UEFI. I would be shocked if it didn't.

[coral meadow]

ok so what software are you using for virtualization

if virtualbox then you have to tweak settings for it to boot

[junior falcon]

yeah they were on bios on virtual box, switches to uefi, but that seems to have somehow broken their partition table, so, my suggestion is they start again using uefi the entire way through, which shouldn't take long

[coral meadow]

bruh

well at least they got some practice lmao

[junior falcon]

I don't know the ins and outs of virtual box, but, yeah, okay, if that's kicking up a stink I can sort of understand why

[plush pumice]

third times a charm

lovely

just lovely