On Tuesday, 24 September 2019 09:50:44 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:
> Right. After spending most of the last 10 days and some nights wrestling
> with the beast, I've got it fixed at last.
Except that I was wrong: I hadn't fixed it. I've just spent another two days
with an unbootable system finding a real fix.
When this all started, a couple of weeks ago or so, bootctl remove & install
threw a wobbler. It created two empty directories:
/boot/4eec63dc92f83de25e1e2e485d7f6536
/boot/EFI/Linux
then wailed about not finding some data file and stopped.
Ever since then I've been trying to force the system back into the directory
structure that used to work, and getting stung over and again.
This morning I decided to bend with the wind. I let bootctl create those
directories again, then copied the latest kernel image into /boot/EFI/Linux/.
On running bootctl install again, everything worked as expected. All I had to
do was to adjust the boot order with efibootmgr.
I suspect I have a hardware problem, because the UEFI BIOS boot menu doesn't
always show an entry I've just added, and it sometimes inserts a blank entry
among the real ones.
For the record, here's the layout of /boot now:
# tree /boot
/boot
├── 4eec63dc92f83de25e1e2e485d7f6536
├── config-4.19.72-gentoo
├── config-4.19.72-gentoo-rescue
├── config-4.19.72-gentoo-testsys
├── early_ucode.cpio
├── EFI
│ ├── BOOT
│ │ └── BOOTX64.EFI
│ ├── Linux
│ │ └── bzImage-4.19.72.efi
│ ├── systemd
│ │ └── systemd-bootx64.efi
│ └── TestSys
│ └── BOOT
│ └── bootX64.efi
├── intel-uc.img
├── loader
│ ├── entries
│ │ ├── 08-gentoo-4.19.66-rescue.conf
│ │ ├── 09-gentoo-4.19.66-rescue.nonet.conf
│ │ ├── 30-gentoo-4.19.72.conf
│ │ ├── 32-gentoo-4.19.72.nox.conf
│ │ ├── 34-gentoo-4.19.72.nonet.conf
│ │ ├── 40-gentoo-4.19.66.conf
│ │ ├── 42-gentoo-4.19.66.nox.conf
│ │ ├── 44-gentoo-4.19.66.nonet.conf
│ │ ├── 90-testsys-4.19.72.conf
│ │ └── 92-testsys-4.19.72.nonet.conf
│ ├── loader.conf
│ └── random-seed
├── System.map-4.19.72-gentoo
├── System.map-4.19.72-gentoo-rescue
├── System.map-4.19.72-gentoo-testsys
├── vmlinuz-4.19.72-gentoo
├── vmlinuz-4.19.72-gentoo-rescue
└── vmlinuz-4.19.72-gentoo-testsys
9 directories, 27 files
Here's hoping I won't have to go through that pain again for a while...
--
Regards,
Peter.
