Installing on LVM inside LUKS is unbootable
I have a disk with two partitions: boot, and a LUKS-encrypted partition for the rest. The LUKS device when unlocked contains a few LVM logical volumes: root, home and swap.
I ran the BlendOS installer, then mounted root at
/mnt and boot at /mnt/boot. Then in the manual partition menu I set each respective partition to System and Boot, then ran the installer. Afterward, I updated /mnt/etc/fstab and /mnt/etc/crypttab according to my disk layout. I updated mkinitcpio, modprobe and GRUB configs to ensure the disk would be unlocked at boot, then ran arch-chroot to ensure those settings were applied to the boot partition.
After completion, I unmounted, unplugged my live USB and rebooted, and the boot process would not recognize the boot partition as bootable.
I booted into a rescue USB and used arch-chroot to poke around. I verified that fstab and crypttab were correct. I tried mounting the boot partition to /boot/efi and rerunning mkinitcpio and grub-install, but it still didn't boot.
The only hint I am getting via Discord search is that someone installed Blend to a vanilla ext4 partition and then copied it to their LVM logical volume afterward. I haven't tried that, but in this case it seems to be the unencrypted fat32 boot partition that isn't playing nice.
Any thoughts or ideas welcome.32 Replies
don't have anything to say, just letting you know that i'm not that familiar with the installer, and definitely not with LVM or setting up LUKS manually, so it'll probably be a while until this is fixed
either until i get around to figuring all that out, or until rudra fixes it
Somebody else got it working on their LVM I think but they left
Are the boot and esp flags applied
yes,
parted -l shows that partition 1 is a fat32 EFI system partition with boot and esp flags
I appreciate the response either way. I figured, even if there's no official fix for this right now, documenting the symptoms would at least give someone else a searchable breadcrumb trail if they run into the same thing.Check the contents of it
it's got amd and intel ucode images, as well as initramfs images for
linux-zen and linux-zen-fallback. also an EFI dir, a grub dir, and a vmlinuz-linux-zen fileAnd if you open your one time boot menu does the partition appear
(Or your UEFI settings)
If you have the option in your UEFI try adding the partition to your boot options manually
with nothing else plugged in, the NVMe disk was the only boot option and it wouldn't let me add others.
after arch-chrooting and rerunning grub-mkconfig and grub-install with different args, I got a GRUB boot option to show up in the boot menu, but it also does not work and just loops back to the boot menu.
Even the fallback option?
You might need to press e to edit it
it doesn't even show the grub menu. the BIOS boot menu just comes back up.
Oh :P
I haven’t worked with an LVM like ever
yeah, I get you. it's a nice solution for creating logical partitions inside a LUKS encrypted partition.
but it's not as straightforward as e.g. ext4 directly on the drive
Might be why this piece of junk is shitting itself
Custom Python backend in the installer
We’re moving to calamares in v5
love Calamares
EndeavourOS uses it to great effect
is there a public roadmap for watching v5 progress?
Nope
Rudra’s keeping things under wraps
You can keep track of CommonArch’s development though
On GitHub and gitlab
is that the distro template blend switched to for v4?
No
It’s something to supercede the current FS build system
Uses OCI containers instead of a tarball and a set of commands
@joshmock , stupid question: when you booted into the rescue USB, you only have run grub-install or also reinstall the OS?
I have done several combinations of things at this point with no luck, including wiping and reinstalling on the same LVM setup. modified all the correct kernel, grub, disk configs, and no luck.
for context, after giving up I wiped the root partition and installed vanilla Arch on it manually (no archinstall) in about 15 minutes and got it to boot all the way to login with very few hiccups
is there a way to install Blend without using a GUI installer?
you can try bootstrapping a vanilla arch install
add the breakfast repo and akshara package & mkinitcpio hook (and a working system.yaml) and technically you're golden
not supported in any way but might work
@joshmock forgot I wrote a guide for this while it was still in beta: https://asterisk.lol/blog/blend_v4
Asterisk's Den
blendOS v4 Install Guide
The blendOS v4 alpha is now out! Here's how you can install and try it out.
jampack broke my website, fixed
don't use any of the alternate track repos
wait is the hook not part of the package?
GAAAAAAAH THE SUN (gitlab light mode)
yeah the hook is part of the package
also i'm pretty sure you don't need to add the breakfast repo as long as akshara is installed - though it's the easiest way to get akshara
It is
this has been super helpful. I'm getting all the way to the initial
akshara update steps. now that update fails on error every time, but it's never clear what the error actually is.
I piped stdout and stderr to files so I could skim through them and, from what I can see, random errors may be happening (temporary network issues, or a file it can't modify for some reason) but akshara keeps running anyway, as far as it can go, rather than breaking on the first error.
it actually gets all the way to checksumming .new_rootfs, and succeeds at that, but it still exits in a failing state and never switches over to the new root.
the final two errors it spits out are
umount: /.new_rootfs/: not mounted.and
rmdir: failed to remove '/.new_rootfs': Directory not emptythose actions seem to be in the akshara code that cleans up after a failure has already happened, so i don't think that's the actual error it's failing on.
The rmdir thing is an unrelated bug
It’s been fixed in the latest dev build but it’s not in the repo
But either way things have changed so it might not work anymore
i'll take a look tomorrow probably and see what i can figure out
I paused on it for now and went back to my vanilla Arch setup
but also, now I'm curious if that CommonArch project could be extended to bootstrap and manage an immutable Arch install rather than just building ISOs
@joshmock, you've gained the level
1https://old.rxddit.com/r/BlendOS/comments/1khnc4i/i_realize_this_has_been_asked_a_million_times_but/
I realize this has been asked a million times, but still for whatever reason, there's no exact answer that I've found.
rxddit.com
u/Burkely31 on r/BlendOS
So, I'm attempting to multiboot blendOS on a system with a couple of version of ubuntu and a fedora install. All have utulized the same /boot/efi partition. But reading over the docs, and reading over them again and again and again, it's worded as if a new /boot partition must be created strictly for blendOS. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I'...
somebody else was having issues with blendOS not showing as a boot option in their GRUB
might be related
they're trying to fix it themselves