Earlier this year, I had decided to go exclusively for Debian (or Debian-based, but not Ubuntu-based) distributions. But this happened:
After 2 days of installing (and re-installing), I finally settled. Hopefully this will stick for a long time.
Merry Christmas!
I have Debian installed on /dev/sda4 and it’s using EFI. I installed Arch Linux to another partition, /dev/sda5 the other day and it created a new GRUB2 menu during boot. Unfortunately, I somehow messed up the installation and when I chose to boot Arch from GRUB2, I get an error:
error: no such device: d4103fa-d940-47ca-... Loading Linux core repo kernel... error: no such partition. Loading initial ramdisk... unaligned pointer 0x22 Aborted. Press any key to exit.
Once I pressed any key, the Debian GRUB2 menu was displayed (giving me the idea that 2 GRUB2 menus have been installed to the EFI boot partition) and I was able to boot into Debian.
Since Arch didn’t want to start, I reformatted /dev/sda5 to remove it and went to remove it from the EFI boot parition. I searched the web on how to do this and came across this post which basically says that GRUB2 isn’t needed to boot Linux in EFI; EFI stub can be used. Thinking it would work, I reformatted /dev/sda1, where my EFI boot partition is, and followed the instructions.
Reboot…computer is stuck with a black screen with a blinking cursor on the top-left corner. Not a good sign. Waited a full 5 minutes to see if it would boot up. Nothing. Rebooted 10 times more. Nothing.
I knew I messed up my EFI boot.
After doing a lot of reading, I felt that it would take too much time (4chan was waiting…LOLs) to get my boot loader back up without GRUB2. So I decided to reinstall GRUB2 via a chroot environment using Mint 16 live USB (booted in UEFI).
Inside Mint, opened a Terminal and
(mint)$ sudo mount /dev/sda4 /mnt (mint)$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi (mint)$ for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys; do sudo mount $i /mnt$i; done (mint)$ sudo chroot /mnt (chroot)# apt-get --reinstall install grub-efi-amd64 (chroot)# exit (mint)$ for i in /sys /proc /dev/pts /dev; do sudo umount /mnt$i; done (mint)$ sudo umount /mnt/boot/efi (mint)$ sudo umount /mnt (mint)$ sudo reboot
After POST, the Debian’s GRUB2 menu showed and I’m once again able to boot into the computer.
In my search for a viable distro to use as my main OS that's either vanilla Debian or Debian-based (and not Ubuntu-based), I stumbled on Knoppix. I know that I've heard of this distro before but never really checked it out for reasons unknown. But this distro usually gets mentioned in online forums where the question is about PC troubleshooting. Most suggest the use of Knoppix for times when the main OS doesn't boot or is infested with viruses, etc.
I decided to give it a go. Besides, it's always useful to have a bootable Linux distro in case my main OS does decide to falter.