I have completed the installation and the result is the same as the previous time : no error.
Is there an installation log somewhere that I could show ?
Result is also the same for booting. My mmc drive doesn't seem to be seen and I can't boot from it.
But in UEFI, it is said that the ESP must be the same for all OSes. So Could I install elive using the same ESP as my archlinux install. The ESP of my archlinux install is 512MB and is mounted on /boot directly. Would it be possible ???
(I'm going to try it and come back with results). But first I will have a good backup of my ESP just in case ...
OK I have tried to reinstall on same target. I specified the LUKS key to open the old installation and then give the root lv as /root target, I told it was ext4 and not to format it. Then it ask for a /boot I gave it the boot elive partition on the sd card. And when it asked if I want to add a another partition, I answered yes and pointed the ESP to my ESP on the first SSD disk. Everything when well for the installation.
But now the laptop is trying to boot from grub and I don't have grub on the SSD, i'm booting with systemd-boot. The install assume you want grub. So if I want to correct this, next step would be to install systemd boot on Elive and get rid of grub.
It is late and I have to go to sleep. Next step will be tomorrow (on Eastern america time GMT-4).
I have tried to boot with grub installed on the SD card but it doesn't work.
I get the grub console with a message that it doesn't find the UUID of my root.
The root partition is a LV on a LUKS crypted container but I never had been asked for the passphrase. From the grub console I only see (hd0) and the partition on it, this is my nvme ssd disk. It doesn't show the mmc sd disk.
It looks like either it doesn't see at all the partiton on the SD card and the initramfs is skipping the decryption of the LUKS followed by the opening of the volume group.
That's bad, decrypting should be done from the unencrypted /boot partition.
Maybe you could see what actually happens if you let Stable 3.0.6 partition the SD card, just like @e-Solutions did. If it works, it would corroborate his experience that there's something amiss with the partitioner and SD cards.
I'm sorry but I don't have the stable version here, only the 2 last beta versions 3.8.27 and 3.8.24.
The laptop is x86_64 with 16Gb memory, I want a 64 bits download!
Do you have a link to download the 64 bits version ???
It is 2022-06-14 21h15 (GMT-4) here and I should have a download link in one hour.
ciao!
Addendum: OK I had the link after 10 minutes and it's downloaded. I'm writing the image to a USB key now.
No cigar! The image doesn't boot for x64 UEFI machine. I doesn't boot from the USB key at all.
I cannot install it. My lappy MOBO doesn't offer the switch from UEFI to legacy.
Maybe you've got another machine that allows 'legacy mode' and also can read the SD-card.
Then have Stable preformat it for installation (come to think of it there are machines/OSes that require SD-cards formatted as FAT).
Another option I've thought of is installing Elive to the SD-card using 'Virtualbox' and copying the install to the SD-card. I wrote a post on that (albeit using a USB flash drive) a while back.
It's just that I want to find out if there really is something wrong the partitioner when it comes to SD-cards or not.
I can try to install virtual elive machine on KVM (no virtualbox here) and use the SD card as storage. Or may be use the actual install on sd card by telling KVM that it's a hardware install ??? I will see today if there is possibilities. I used to run a Windows install like that from virtualbox at work. It must be possible from KVM too. I will check.
And yes I have my previous laptop that can boot legacy and it can read SD cards (the larger one, not the minis but I have a large one adapter that can take minis inside. So it would not be exactly the same setup that on the other machine but I can try it too.
No, it wouldn't but it's about making the card recognizable and making sure if it's a partitioner bug or not.
It would turn out very silly if we were breaking our heads over systemd where the culprit was the sd-card formatting in the first place.
no error logs, have you tried to boot directly from that second disk? (I'm not fully following this thread so i don't know all the details)
note that for that to work you need to have a separated /boot partition (so, what boots is the /boot partition, loading the micro-linux system which is the initrd file, in order to be able to detect and decrypt your encrypted real root system and switch to it)
this is where the EFI partition is mounted, so it is where the grub of elive has been added (EFI works a a per-directory os-bootloaders, so there should be a directory called elive which is meant to boot this one)
if all these things are correctly configured, does installing "refind" helped to boot from its own elive grub boot system?
stable 3.0 ? this is too old for me to remember what the installer exactly (lots of changes has been made), the logs shows that is the last (bullseye-based) beta version, I wonder if he's affected by a bug on grub that was in these recent builds (basically, if the package grub-efi-amd64-signed is installed on that installed system, this is the cause of the issue). But back to the Stable-3.0 topic, I'm not sure that EFI was supported on these versions
No it wasn't and isn't.
But there was also an issue with the formatting of an SD-card with Beta ..... and not entirely clear what was going on there or that the perceived bug could be replicated.
This one: https://forum.elivelinux.org/t/installing-on-hp-stream-11-notebook
I have installed elive stable on the sd card on my old laptop. The card is seen as mmcblk0 device. I see the card from the install image and I could install on it. But I can't boot from it.
Same situation as my new laptop : the bios doesn't see the mmcblk0 card. And grub was installed on it. So it just doesn't boot. On this computer grub is installed on the hard disk and it boot a Solus linux. I don't see how I could chainload from the first grub to a second disk it doesn't see from the bios ???
I can read the mmcblk0 disk. It is formatted correctly on 2 partition boot, encrypted root with a volume group with root and swap (on an extended partition).
On the old laptop with Elive stable 3.0.6 I just tried to boot elive from KVM by creating a virtual machine from an existing disk and assigning the disk to the /dev/mmcblk0. I gave it 2048MB memory and 2 processors.
It does boot and I can get to the grub menu. But while booting the machine I get a message from E16 that "cryptsetup evms.activate not available". And follow the message that it is loading but it never load for eternity.
I will test this too on my actual laptop. And we'll see what happens.
Regards,
BT
edit:
I tried on my actual laptop and it does exactly the same thing. Grub start, I choose the default entry. Then it flashes some text very rapidly saying that there unknown hardware and then that amd-ucode/microcode doesn't load. It may be that I haven't installed correctly the virtual environment. Not that the elive install itself is in problem. I think that I would have to do a P2V conversion to convert the physical hardware to virtual hardware first to be able to run on a VM.
Anyway, we got an answer. The mmc is formatted correctly and it could boot if the bios could see the mmcblk0 disk.
So in your case we're down to the BIOS/Firmware not recognizing the SD-card. Which could be attributed to the BIOS (needing to activate USB emulation for the reader) but I personally think it's the SD-card itself.
Anyway, all machines that boot using BIOS/Firmware and that don't see the carrier, will never boot from that carrier ...which leaves only the options of maybe upgrading the Firmware or ultimately 'libreboot' if the hardware allows.
that's the first problem, but yeah you should be able to install on the first disk to boot from the second disk, now there's two possible scenarios here:
not having an EFI partition on the second this (to make sure is not installed on this one, but on the first disk)
having an EFI partition on the second disk (in order to make it from it, but using a bootloader like refind that should find this efi partition)
i would start with the first option
Note: Installing an OS in a SD card is not recommended at all because it can reduce its lifespan very fast, these devices are not ready for strong RW operations (I think the installer already warns about that?)
It's ok I have abandoned the idea to have a bootable OS on that SD card. Instead I would to install elive on a external ssd drive.
I would like to replace the POP OS on it by elive. Is it possible to install over the actual OS and keep the home directory intact ?
I have seen on the elive site it should be possible to replace one linux by elive and keeping personal data. But I have not found documentation on how to do it actually.
It's a piece of cake with Elive.
You just allow the installer to do the work for you.
We have a thread going on about that:
Concluding from there I'd wait out a few days for 8.3.28 to show up. There's quite a few enhancements in there that haven't been implemented in older versions yet.
And I did post a review, a while back of moving Ubuntu 18.04 to to Elive 3.8.24 which went quite smoothly.
