dual boot issue

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Danbor

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I have two ssd's and I was dual booting, Mint 21.2 on drive 1 and Ubuntu on drive 2.
I want to get wine, lutris, steam and whatever else up and running without hosing my daily use OS on drive 1 so I decided to install mint on drive 2 and do my experimenting there. Installation went fine, until I tried to boot back into drive 1 and get some actual work done. Uh oh! Big problem! I can boot into the new install on drive 2, but I can no longer boot drive 1. When I select "drive 1" in grub, the best I get is a grub terminal with a login prompt. Logging in there just gives me a CLI prompt. When I try to select an earlier kernel all I get is a black screen with an unresponsive blinking cursor.
I think, not sure but I think, if I remove this install, ( running on drive 2 ), and put Ubuntu or something else on here, I should be able to boot normally again. Not being sure of this I thought it would be prudent to seek some help before I do something foolishly and lose everything on drive one.
Searching all over the place, I can find lots of help troubleshooting dual booting but most of it pertains to dual booting with windows or Mac, which doesn't seem to apply here. I know there are no hardware or BIOS issues as everything worked flawlessly dual booting Mint and Ubuntu. My assumption is that it's a grub problem that I have no clue how to troubleshoot or fix. From here, ( drive 2 ), I can access folders and files on "drive 1, so if anyone would care to help, I should be able to supply more info if needed, just tell me what you need and I'll attempt to provide it.
Thanks in advance!
 


Installing mint may have overwritten your original grub, giving it priority.
try re-starting and opening the short boot menu [depending on the make of your machine, it will probably be a F key]. Scroll down and select the drive you wish to use and hit enter If it boot OK then try changing the boot order in the UEFI/BIOS
 
Thank you Brickwizard and KGill for responding. F11 gets me to the short boot menu. But no help there.
I can already boot with the live usb stick. The problem is, I don't know what to do to fix the problem when I do boot to it. Is there something on the live stick that will let "drive 1" actually boot the OS instead of just sitting at a cli interface.
At powerup, both OS's appear on the grub selection menu. Selecting the "drive 2" OS loads fine, but selecting the "drive 1" option does not load the OS, just the cli screen with a login. Logging in seems to do nothing but leave me at a $dan prompt. Issuing an ls command there gives me home directory listing so I know it's able to access the drive, It just doesn't boot into the OS environment. Issuing a poweroff command returns an error stating no access to the buss.
 
Sounds like what I expected,

if your machine is UEFI then from the cli try
grub-install

if its a BIOS machine you may need to use a boot recovery disc
 
My machine is UEFI so I think that helps. Running grub-install output "error:disk does not exist 'hostdisk//dev/nvme1n1p1' not found.
If I recall correctly, / is installed on partition 3. Could that be the issue with this?
 
Running lsblk returned this

dan@jeep:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
nvme1n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─nvme1n1p1 259:1 0 94M 0 part
├─nvme1n1p2 259:2 0 93.1G 0 part /mnt/6e6c4507-7bc0-4e22-95bb-2a6799bda688
├─nvme1n1p3 259:3 0 15M 0 part [SWAP]
└─nvme1n1p4 259:4 0 838.3G 0 part /mnt/81c74b42-8b66-40e9-9996-89982dbdb6cf
nvme0n1 259:5 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:6 0 94M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:7 0 14M 0 part [SWAP]
├─nvme0n1p3 259:8 0 93.1G 0 part /
└─nvme0n1p4 259:9 0 838.3G 0 part /home

nvme0 is working, nvme1 does not. And I see why now. So, how can I get /boot/efi put back on nvme1n1p1?
I really hate bothering folks with my problems but I am stumped here. I do have a timeshift snapshot for this on a usb stick as well as a backup .tar file on a stick but I think reinstalling and trying a snapshot restore is not going to work.
 
Last edited:
You might find something with boot-repair, but I've never tried it on UEFI systems. Still, it may be worth a look:

linux-tips.us

Make Passwords In The Linux Terminal • Linux Tips

Today's article should be fairly simple and is about something we all use because it's about how to make passwords in the Linux terminal.
linux-tips.us linux-tips.us


BUT... I'd probably try os-prober first. That tells grub, regardless of where it is located, to look for other OSes on the system. It's pretty good at finding them, but not 100% effective.

 
KGIII said:
You might find something with boot-repair, but I've never tried it on UEFI systems. Still, it may be worth a look:

linux-tips.us

Make Passwords In The Linux Terminal • Linux Tips

Today's article should be fairly simple and is about something we all use because it's about how to make passwords in the Linux terminal.
linux-tips.us linux-tips.us


BUT... I'd probably try os-prober first. That tells grub, regardless of where it is located, to look for other OSes on the system. It's pretty good at finding them, but not 100% effective.

Click to expand...
That was interesting. Didn't fix my problem but I learned a little and no harm done.
I ran it from the bootable drive though. Maybe I should haul out my laptop and open the referenced web page so I can follow the instructions while I boot from the install USB drive.
Thank you for the assist though. I'll keep plugging away at it. Eventually, if I keep at it and accept all the help so selflessly offered, I'll either get it fixed or know why. Either way, I'm learning. Hopefully I'll get to the point where I also can help others as well as get help.
 
You have a good setup for dual boot. one drive for each os. The problem you have is grub and that will continue to be an issue. I have told many how to set up a reliable dual boot without messing with grub at all. Keep the setup as it is but use one of these...


basically you choose which drive gets power so only the OS you want will boot. This is rock solid and you will never have to mess with grub. As you may notice grub is sensitive and updates can change things but using this method I have one PC with fedora and windows 10, and another with fedora, win 7 and win 10 I just select which one I want using the buttons on the back. Once you have these in place you can fix your grub issues for single boot and be fine.
 
APTI said:
You have a good setup for dual boot. one drive for each os. The problem you have is grub and that will continue to be an issue. I have told many how to set up a reliable dual boot without messing with grub at all. Keep the setup as it is but use one of these...


basically you choose which drive gets power so only the OS you want will boot. This is rock solid and you will never have to mess with grub. As you may notice grub is sensitive and updates can change things but using this method I have one PC with fedora and windows 10, and another with fedora, win 7 and win 10 I just select which one I want using the buttons on the back. Once you have these in place you can fix your grub issues for single boot and be fine.
Click to expand...
I like that idea. My drives are both SSD's mounted directly on the motherboard though. I don't see a way to make it work. No cables involved, they just plug into the board and a cover gets mounted over them and cover attached with screws. Unless you've already crossed that hurdle ???
 
Danbor said:
I like that idea. My drives are both SSD's mounted directly on the motherboard though. I don't see a way to make it work. No cables involved, they just plug into the board and a cover gets mounted over them and cover attached with screws. Unless you've already crossed that hurdle ???
Click to expand...
I have not run into a MB that the drives directly connect to. always been a wire. In general the power is what this board controls and that usually comes from the power supply which would allow the solution to work. If you can show me a pic of the area that the drives plug in I may be able to help still. Might just need an extension.
 
APTI said:
I have not run into a MB that the drives directly connect to. always been a wire. In general the power is what this board controls and that usually comes from the power supply which would allow the solution to work. If you can show me a pic of the area that the drives plug in I may be able to help still. Might just need an extension.
Click to expand...
I don't have a way to get a picture on here. But it's a B550 Tomahawk max wifi motherboard. The SSD's go into the M2 slots soldered directly to the board.
 
Yeah, M.2 SSDs are pretty common these days.

Did you try os-prober and boot-repair?

I have one other idea, which involves your UEFI settings. There may be an option for AHCI in there. Whatever it is on, toggle it and try os-prober a second time (or even booting to the boot repair disk and trying that way).
 
ah, I didn't think about m2, you can look for a similar solution somebody may have made one. When you said ssd I was thinking SATA not PCIE
 
APTI said:
ah, I didn't think about m2, you can look for a similar solution somebody may have made one. When you said ssd I was thinking SATA not PCIE
Click to expand...
Not a problem. Thanks for the suggestion, it was a good one, just not in this case.
 
Try booting into the distro that you can boot into and run:

Code: 
sudo update-grub

Reboot and try. If that fails you may need boot repair.
 
Thanks, I tried update-grub and boot-repair both.
I've been digging into this and, as I understand it, here's what's happened. When I installed Mint on the second drive, it took control of grub. When that happened, it deleted whatever makes the first drive boot. So boot-repair doesn't "see" an OS on drive one.
At this point, as I have work piling up that I can't get done until drive 1 is up and running, I'm ready to just reformat drive 2 and wait until later and try again. The only thing stopping me is I need to find out how to make sure that drive 1 will boot after I erase everything on drive 2. A big concern as that is where grub is currently residing.
 
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