What did grub-install do to my nvram?

Screenager · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2023 Posts: 37

I just ran through linux from scratch on my old ThinkPad T500 with a bios and MBR setup without any problems (aside from insane compile times).

I want to really understand what is happening here.
So I went on to my old X220t for a gentoo EFI and GPT install and did it according to the handbook. There is still a SSD with an old win7 inside which I didn't touch and installed on an USB-Stick. So far everything works great got KDE-Plasma running on Wayland - didn't expect this old laptop to feel this ... fast...

So now I want to do a more 'fancy' install with LUKS and LVM on a different SSD. But I want to understand one thing first:
My BIOS Bootmenu had an entry 'WIN7_OS' on top before listing physical devices. This got replaced by 'gentoo' after I was done with grub-install. I probably should have run --no-nvram. I suggest the handbook puts one of this red danger messages here.
While I can boot into the old Win7 just fine by selecting the physical drive instead of the old 'WIN7_OS' top entry I can't do the same for my gentoo USB stick. I can only boot into gentoo by using that 'gentoo' entry that probably comes from the NVRAM.

I am scared from continuing, if I mess up the initramfs with my fulldiskencryption while at the same time losing the ability to boot in my host I am doomed to start over from an ordinary livestick without persistence. And I still won't know why this behaves so strange.

Usually the UEFI boot manager should just look for a flagged partition and read the EFI folder there, right? That is why whe use fat32 and the standardized folder structure, or am I wrong?
Then why won't my stick boot if i just point it to the physical stick without that NVRAM entry?

EDIT: The entry 'gentoo' is even there after a cold boot without the gentoo stick plugged in so it has to be some weird manufactor-firmware thing, right?

soparla · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2018 Posts: 72 Location: Florida

You should not be afraid. You can always edit the grub config and bring back in Win or whatever and then run grub-install again.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2023 12:25 pm Post subject:

Screenager,

Welcome to Gentoo.

Are you using the same kernel command line in both USB stick boot cases?

Root on USB can be a problem because the kernel tries to mount root before USB gets started.
That's a bad thing for root on USB.

To test add rootdelay=30 to the kernel command line. That's far too long but at the end of 30 seconds the kernel will try to mount root and panic if root is not there.
When it works, swap that for rootwait. That will wait forever for root, so only use that once it works.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Screenager · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2023 Posts: 37

pietinger · Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2023 11:11 pm Post subject: Re: Why are you afraid?

pietinger · Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2023 11:21 pm Post subject:

pietinger · Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2023 11:42 pm Post subject: Re: Why are you afraid?

zah21 · n00b Joined: 15 Jan 2021 Posts: 27

If you don't mind may I ask why you felt the need to use Linux from scratch when there's such a nice distro such as Gentoo? Also why post in Gentoo forums, when there's a dedicated Linux from scratch forum out there.

I sense you're some kind of troll.

Anyway, what have you learned after starting on your journey? I was thinking of trying it myself until I started to realize that I'd have to manage packages compilation issues myself, as well as deal with bugs, updates and other stuff down the line, so that wasn't a good motivator unfortunately :/

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21644

Please do not call people "troll" without more evidence. The Gentoo forums tend to attract this type of person because we have many power users, so advanced questions are likely to get a good answer. If OP is trolling, he is putting a lot of effort into it, so that explanation seems unlikely.

Screenager · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2023 Posts: 37

Listen, I am a former Flash developer and now I am a former Unity developer too, some people need to be fooled twice but I am done with corporate shenanigans. I am currently a solo game dev and I consider myself more of an artist. I am a huge gearhead/technerd, the sort of who selects special potentiometers for his guitar and rewires/resolders the whole electronics himself. So it is only natural I came to gentoo. I have used Windows until now and I won't upgrade to Win 11...

So as I am back to my own engine development right now, might as well switch everything to gentoo while I am in the process. I did LFS for educational purposes. There was a nice amount of history inside so I can see why some stuff grew the way it is. I already run infrastructure in form of a debian server with NGINX, node.js, postfix, dovecot, gitea, nextcloud and other stuff which I plan to move to a hardened gentoo install. So I know my way around C/C++, Blender, GLTF and Vulkan but have no basic understanding of how GNU/Linux works. Typicallly, I just copied tutorial commands to get stuff setup and running, admining the bad way, well at least I got fail2ban setup for every public facing login :lol:

I also started the gentoo install on this laptop for educational purposes. I actually wanted to move my workstation first and it is gonna be a long and stressfull process so I wanted to be prepared. Until I have a new DAW (Ardour or Reaper) with all my VSTs running I am a little edgy. Sorry for appearing trollish, you can imgine live is a little stressfull right now. I was about to rework my website and was 75% done with it and was thinking about first trailers and composing a soundtrack and now I am back to thinking about scene graphs, implementing A* again and filling polys while looking at librarys...

Which probably made me copy some command from somewhere else and now I am stuck with this strange install. I definitely ran some grub-install variance that I found somewhere on google. Just FYI I have around 900 tabs open right now, it's been a few chaotic months :oops:

Thank you all for your help.

I will take a look at it with efibootmanager, maybe check the Bios settings again but I guess I just abandon this weird install and move on. No way to debug this if I myself don't know what exact command I ran. I was thinking I could save time by fixing it and moving it with dd from stick to SSD so I won't have to compile anew. Could it be other os probing saw the Win7 SSD that was still inside at that time, grub refused to do anything because the EFI would not allow to add entries and I --forced the install with a strange folder structure and overwrote my NVRAM completly?

BTW I really like gentoo so far, that's why I am going all in. Gotta use these honymoon feelings and dive in as deep as I can, enjoy it while it lasts.

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21644

As a quick tip, do not use dd to copy to an SSD. Ideally, never use dd unless you need (usually for forensic or compliance reasons) a bit-for-bit exact copy. In almost all cases, making a filesystem on the target and copying the source data as files will be better for you.

Screenager · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2023 Posts: 37

The plot thickens:

pietinger · Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2023 3:13 pm Post subject:

First of all: I am sorry that you, as a new user, had an unpleasant contact with another user. This happens very rarely in our forum!

Screenager · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2023 Posts: 37

No worries. My writing was a little all over the place after I've been doing Linux/Gentoo full-time(and 'overtime') the past few weeks :lol:

Yeah, I read a little bit more around and saw how the wiki is organized and the idea is just excellent. There is a lot of stuff I need to do, might as well write it down step by step. This will slow me down and stop me from breaking stuff out of inpatience and might create a guide or two. Besides, I need to setup my own wiki at some point so I see many synergies in doing this.