Can not boot [Esc] = no GUB menu

[steve7233]

Partition-less btrfs on all SSDs? Grub booting from what was called the MBR gap? IMO that's a way to live dangerously; the Arch wiki says "GRUB strongly discourages installation to a partitionless disk".

It seems the computer has booted grub from the space btrfs has left for a boot loader, but that grub can't now see anything.

I suggest installing an OS to a flash drive and getting a boot from that. Note I mean install, not just write an iso to it. I've seen posts from people who do this routinely. Then, persuade grub on that flash drive to boot into your Kubuntu from a btrfs.

I wasn't aware that GRUB could have a problem with this method. The Kubuntu installer should warn users about this. Ubuntu claims to try to be user friendly so why don't the different flavors warn people? This is like when I was able to upgrade from 22.04 to 23.10 and only after I mentioned that on these forums did some one tell me I shouldn't have done that. I did not know this when I did it. Discover should have more error trapping in the coding or do-release =upgrade where ever it needs to be to prevent users from unknowingly doing unwise things.

[steve7233]

Why is it that if I boot from my Kubuntu 19.10 USB and run Dolphin then I can see the /etc/grub directory and all the boot files and directors but when I use grub it goes into rescue mode and ls shows a blank line. Why can't GRUB2 see them while Dolphin can? I started to think maybe the kernel was bad but it sounds like Grub2 never gets that far. This happen after I ran a system update that Discover said was available. I shut down the computer and when I got back from sleeping the system would not boot. Whatever happened I suspect the update failed at least the boot part. Is there a way to tell apt to revert the update until the Oops can be found?

[steve7233]

I just found this on github. https://github.com/Antynea/grub-btrfs so it seems grub is getting btrfs support. If theses tools are in grub2 then maybe that is what the update broke and reverting might fix it. I will keep searching the www. *ok Google search time to get back to work.

[steve7233]

I might need the 3.6.2 kernel. It looks like udev is the culprit it might be ignoring the system link that was put in by the BTRFS folks.

[jlittle]

Why is it that if I boot from my Kubuntu 19.10 USB and run Dolphin then I can see the /etc/grub directory and all the boot files and directors but when I use grub it goes into rescue mode and ls shows a blank line.

I presume you mean that booted from an iso, and clicking in the "Devices" section a btrfs has been mounted to /media/<user>/something, and you can see etc and boot there.

Why can't GRUB2 see them while Dolphin can?

I would guess that the grub booting from the space left for a boot loader has lost its btrfs module. Or, maybe its btrfs module does not cope with the btrfs(s). Maybe you've done something with the file systems that grub doesn't support.

If grub's ls command shows nothing, I think that grub is toast, because it can't do anything.

Speaking in theory, I haven't successfully done this for a long time, you could boot from the iso, then chroot into the Linux in a btrfs, then run sudo grub-install /dev/sdX. (There's lots of web pages with instructions for doing a chroot, even posts on this forum.) But even if that worked, you'd be back to the fragile state, which I'd suspect would break again soon.

In 2024 doing a legacy boot (using methods from the 1980s) is IMO asking for trouble, and IME grub is good at finding trouble. IMO the simple way forward for you is to use a UEFI boot from a flash drive. Users with btrfs RAID set ups have been doing this for at least 15 years. The flash drive would not used after an OS from a btrfs is started. The OS on the flash drive would only be used while you're setting things up. You'd have to enable the OS prober so that grub finds the OS on your btrfs(s).

[steve7233]

I discovered that my USB 3 port isn't working correctly and when I ran my repairboot drive from another USB port the program was able to work and tried to repair my system.. It claimed it fixed it but no luck. It uploaded the report to a pastbin: http://sprunge.us/LONNKe

[steve7233]

The URL doesn't seem to work. Maybe that part of the program doesn't work anymore. This program used to be in the Ubuntu repository so maybe that part of the program is depreciated.

[Snowhog]

pastbin: http://sprunge.us/LONNKe

This isn't a good URL. It returns: LONNKe not found.

[steve7233]

This isn't a good URL. It returns: LONNKe not found.

I said that in comment # 22. Any way when I was using boot repair it said that the information grub needed waas very far from the start of my disk and My bios might not see it. I am resizing dev'sdc1 at the start of the disk and then making a 250 MB partition for the boot files. I will then reboot into grubrepair and tell the program where to install grub then hopefully it can unbork my system. This is what the tool recommended I do.

[steve7233]

The short answer is that it finally got my system to boot! Long answer I didn't at first because I forgot it said "Don't forget to tell your BIOS to make sdc bootable". Guess what I forgot to do? The takeaway from all this is that BootRepair can fix most things... Eventually, sometimes it takes a bit of work. One thing it did I didn't like was it deleted the swap partition I made for my games. My system boots about 3 or 4 seconds faster. It didn't fix my /dev/sdb2 Not being able to mount on my installed system even though I can mount it and browse the files with Dolphin via a Kubuntu 19.10 USB stick.

[steve7233]

My system will never boot automatically. I always have to go into rescue mode and select the kernel manually. Grub can't seem to do it on its own. Every time I update the system I always have to use boot-repair to fix the boot as the update keeps breaking the boot.

[steve7233]

I noticed the MOBO's splash screen says Hybrid EFI,