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[SOLVED (kind of)] Problems Installing Parabola OpenRC with BTRFS and rEFInd

not_a_robot - about 3 years ago -

Hello, since I'm a new member, there are constraints on 'non-dictionary' words or whatever, so I'll upload my question in a text file.

EDIT: here's the question without needing to download the text file, since I have less user restrictions now

Hello, I've been using GNU/Linux for about a year now, and have used Arch and Artix for a few months, so while I'm not exactly an expert by any means, I'm pretty adventurous and am willing to try out new things and troubleshoot them, which is why I got to Arch and Arch-based distros. I decided to install Parabola because it is a completely free OS by default, and I decided to install it to an external hard drive, since I can't install it on the internal storage of a computer for several reasons. I used the Parabola OpenRC LXQT live image, since I assumed it would be handy to test if X even works on whatever PC I want to install it on, and troubleshoot why it doesn't work if it doesn't, but I still manually installed everything without using the CLI installer. The machine I used to install was a Black MacBook 2.1, not running coreboot or libreboot (yet :)). The external HDD I used was a Toshiba MK2035GSS, and doing a quick DuckDuckGo search shows that it is an internal hard drive, but mine is an old one lying around in an external case, that can't even be opened (hmmm).

What I did

I mainly used the Beginners' Guide, but when I needed to use btrfs instead of ext4, I referred to this link. I also referred to the Installation Guide occasionally for OpenRC related things that weren't mentioned in the Beginners' Guide or just to double check stuff. I also referred to the ArchWiki here and there when the Parabola Wiki itself referred to it. Before I start, I also want to mention that while I thought hard drive corruption could be possible since that HDD's age is unknown (but pretty old), I highly doubt it, since chrooting does nothing peculiar, and running fsck on /boot and btrfsck on /root partitions shows no corruption. I used a wired connection to the internet, and identified /dev/sdb as the HDD. I opened parted on it, made a 513MiB /boot partition, a 4GiB swap partition, and the rest was a btrfs root partition. The total size of the HDD was detected as about 183 GB. I ran mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdb1, mkfs.btrfs -f -L 'parabola HDD' /dev/sdb3, mkswap /dev/sdb2 and swapon /dev/sdb2. Everything went smoothly. I mounted /dev/sdb3 to /mnt and created the subvolumes I needed by referring to the GitHub link I mentioned earlier. I modified it to my needs, by changing the volume number and not creating a subvolume for /var, as I deemed it unnecessary. I then unmounted it and mounted it with all of its subvolumes by referring to the link. Everything went smoothly. Here's were stuff started to go south.
I used pacstrap to install base base-devel elogind udev-init-scripts, and made sure that the nonsystemd mirror was above other mirrors. I had a bunch of package that were 'corrupted' because the GPG keys didn't match the mirrors. After reinstalling the keyrings, deleting the pacman 's cache, and trying different mirrors, I finally got everything successfully installed. I ran genfstab, and chrooted into the HDD successfully, and installed vim and neovim, and maybe one or two other things that weren't in the guide (but no system services). I uncommented en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and another Arabic locale from /etc/locale.gen, ran locale-gen and wrote LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to /etc/locale.conf. I installed the Terminus font and wrote FONT=Lat12-Terminus16 to vconsole.conf. I ran ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GB /etc/localtime and hwclock --systohc --utc, and put my hostname in /etc/conf.d/hostname. I installed dhcpcd and ran rc-update add dhcpcd default, and also installed networkmanager, but I didn't test it as I was on a wired connection. I didn't set a password just in case something went wrong with the keyboard layout. Referring to here, I installed refind and efibootmgr was installed automatically as a dependency, as well as one or two other things probably. I ran refind-install and it ran succesfully. I exited, rebooted, removed the USB and left the HDD connected, only to be surprised that there was no 'EFI Boot' option when holding alt upon startup (apart from the internal Artix Linux EFI Boot).

I rebooted into the USB, ran fsck and btrfsck, with no errors. I might remove rEFInd and try GRUB instead later, but I doubt that that's where the problem lies, as the live USB uses rEFInd successfully. Chrooting into the HDD again is fine. Do I need to edit my fstab because this is a btrfs filesystem, or is it something else?

EDIT2: this is kind of solved since the problem wasn't with btrfs or OpenRC, but rather with installing rEFInd on a removable drive. I'll see what exactly is the problem and then mark it as solved once a solution is found.


Replies (4)

RE: Problems Installing Parabola OpenRC with BTRFS and rEFInd - not_a_robot - about 3 years ago -

I think I'm onto something now. I eliminated the possibility of hard disk corruption by installing Parabola on a small and slow USB, only changing what I had done last time by little bit. For example, I installed the linux-libre kernel on purpose, instead of assuming it was included in base, and other things like that. But it still didn't work. After that, I went ahead and searched how to uninstall rEFInd, only to realize that /boot contained nothing! It seems that although the refind-install script 'worked', it didn't write to /boot at all! So I went ahead and installed it by running refind-install --usedefault /dev/sdb1, and it actually showed up in the Mac boot screen! I selected it, only to realize that a bunch of previously installed OSes (but now deleted) were available, and I can only assume that their boot files still exist somewhere on the drive, as well as the old OSX partition, but Parabola was nowhere to be found.
I'll do the same thing on the hard drive, and experiment a little bit more, and see what happens.

EDIT: spelling

RE: Problems Installing Parabola OpenRC with BTRFS and rEFInd - antalepo - about 3 years ago -

I haven't used rEFInd nor Btrfs, but I know that for GRUB you need to add --removable for removable devices. Maybe rEFInd has a similar issue/solution?

Also, try clearing the other entries:
https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#clearing

fstab is first used during init and isn't available to the bootloader, so that can't be a problem yet.

RE: Problems Installing Parabola OpenRC with BTRFS and rEFInd - not_a_robot - about 3 years ago -

antalepo wrote:

I haven't used rEFInd nor Btrfs, but I know that for GRUB you need to add --removable for removable devices. Maybe rEFInd has a similar issue/solution?

Also, try clearing the other entries:
https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#clearing

fstab is first used during init and isn't available to the bootloader, so that can't be a problem yet.

I'll try the --removable option with GRUB once I get my hands on the machine again, because rEFInd doesn't have enough advantages to justify going through too much trouble with it instead of just installing GRUB (but I'll still figure out what's wrong once I get a working system). I also want to say that if I boot into rEFInd from the USB, with rEFInd installed on the HDD while it is connected, both rEFInd on the HDD and actually booting into the HDD show up as options. Going into the rEFInd on the HDD shows up like the same things as the USB, and booting into the HDD says 'booting with options: ' (I can't remember what the options were, but I'll post them here once I try again) and gets stuck for basically ever, without any activity from the HDD. The live ISO also hangs for about 40 seconds with no activity, but eventually boots.

RE: Problems Installing Parabola OpenRC with BTRFS and rEFInd - not_a_robot - about 3 years ago -

Success!

Thanks a lot antalepo!

I chrooted into the HDD, wiped out /boot, reinstalled the kernel, and installed GRUB with the --removable option, and it booted! I have finally attained freedom ;). I'll find a solution for rEFInd later and post it here, if anybody else has trouble with it in the future.

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