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PlutoParty@programming.dev

[help] Triple boot system lost one of the drives in Grub. (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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I added more hard drives to my windows PC to dual boot as a test, then added another drive to actually play since I was enjoying Linux. My third OS isn't bootable any more. What have I done wrong?

Started off with Windows 10 on a SATA drive with an M.2 drive for more data.

Added a 2Gb NVME with Debian - this has become my daily driver. I haven't been to windows more than a few minutes a week.

Added another 250Gb SATA drive to test and play with another Debian install so I don't break my daily driver.

Tried today to boot into the test OS and It's just missing from GRUB? It doesn't show up as a bootable drive in my UEFI BIOS either, though the drive itself is seen.

From KDE Partition Manager in my daily driver Debian, the drives are:

/dev/nvme01 - the daily driver Debian

/dev/sda - the Windows OS drive

/dev/sdb - the windows M.2 drive

/dev/sdc - the test Debian drive (not booting)

I would appreciate help. While there's not much on that drive, I would like to continue my playing around.

Thanks in advance.

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[–] autokludge@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm thinking you may have updated grub at some stage from Deb, and didn't have the test OS mounted at the time, or os-prober not enabled :- therefore not detected when grub.cfg was regenerated.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Detecting_other_operating_systems
https://wiki.debian.org/Grub#Dual_Boot

I ended up using rEFInd myself, as it does automatic OS detection/scans for bootable partitions.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I didn't update GRUB intentionally, but who knows. Installing and reading docs, thanks for the tip.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

I can get into initramfs on that drive now, but the first thing it says is "no root device specified. Boot arguments must include a root= parameter". I assume I'd add that to GRUB, if I could see the OS in GRUB!

Then from the BusyBox initramfs prompt, i try vgchange -ay to try and activate the LVM partitions....? , and it activates three logical volumes from each of the two Debians. I figured out that I can pass it my correct LVM group, and it only activated those three. I exit from the initramfs Prompt and it says it can't find some files in /root/proc, then it hangs forever.

Man, all the stack overflow stuff I see says things like "mount the root to a new folder, then fix the problem, then reboot." But doesn't ever explain how to actually do some of it. I'm just too new to follow the "yada yada"!