upgrade failed, grub confused, working my way back

[aeronutt]

23.10 to 24.04 upgrade crashed spectacularly. I "had" to reinstall an OS to get back to a booting system (back to KDE and Windows at least).

But something weird is going on with Grub. If I run "boot-repair" in KDE, it gives an error that it "can't create a boot option for the current OS", but then if I run update-grub, it creates it. Looking at UEFI during boot, shows some weird stuff. Running 'bootinfoscript' doesn't reveal anything to me.

bootinfoscript:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...0DhtW00r0e-Ej0

Pic of UEFI:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BDG...VFWSa8eyjq7F9F

Next step to figure out what's going on?

[yancek]

The output you posted is uninformative and does not show even a fraction of the information we would expect from the boot repair software so boot your system or the live usb and go to the boot repair site at the link below and download and run the script using the 2nd option described on the page. Select the Create Bootinfo Summary option and post the link here that you get when the script finishes.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

[aeronutt]

Thanks,
Here we go, this is more like it:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...-tFfOszJVoyb9M

[yancek]

The output from efibootmgr only shows an entry for Neon Boot0004. When you select that option, does it boot? If you scroll down the page, you can see 2 identical grub.cfg file on the EFI partition, 1 in the neon directory and one in an ubuntu directory. They both point to the same partition, partition 10. Partition 9 looks like the old neon install and you installed again to partition 10 rather than over the previous install?

Your /boot/grub/grub.cfg on partition 9 shows an entry for Ubuntu 24.04 on partition 8 but that partition does no show at the top of the report where there is information on the other partitions. Are you using encryption?

What are you able to boot now? Ubuntu, Neon, Windows. If you can boot Neon or Ubuntu, open a terminal when you do an run the command: df -h
That should show which parittion is the root / filesystem partition for each.

Your boot repair does not look right as if you use the 2nd option on their page as suggested, the lines in the file would be numbered which makes it a lot easier to point out problems.

[aeronutt]

Messy, huh?

Here are the options shown on power up.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KD4...CsjoJw7VJgRx_q
I just noticed, I am confused about the references to /dev/dev/nvme1n. None of the OS's are installed on that disk. And nvme1n has only 2 partitions, nvme1np1 and nvme1np2

The first OS, Neon, is installed on partition /dev/nvme0n1p10, and boots. This is the KDE partition I installed after the 24.04 upgrade failed (it's the USB iso I had handy).
"Windows Boot Manager boots on /dev/nvme1np1" boots fine.
"KDE 6.0 neon 22.04 (on /dev/nvme1n1p9)" does not boot. It hangs late in the stage of boot but before login page.

None of the OSs partitions are encrypted, BUT, /dev/nvme1np1 IS.

It's like grub is getting nvme1n and nvme0n confused?

[aeronutt]

Ok, something is really messed up.
Can the /dev location of a disk change?
I'm now showing my OS's to be on nvme1n1

[aeronutt]

I may be going crazy and have too much caffeine, lol, but.....

A snippet from bootinfo from yesterday:
nvme0n1:512GB:nvme:512:512:gptC801 NVMe SK hynix 512GB

A snippet from fdisk -l today:
Disk /dev/nvme1n1: 476.94 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: PC801 NVMe SK hynix 512GB


The same physical disk getting mounted at /dev/nvme0n1 yesterday and /dev/nvme1n1 today.

Does grub use mount point or UUID or?

[yancek]

I just noticed, I am confused about the references to /dev/dev/nvme1n.

Why? What is on the first partition? Is that just a Linux encrypted data partition. The second partition on that drive looks to be just a windows data partition.

"Windows Boot Manager boots on /dev/nvme1np1" boots fine.

No, are you referring to nvme1n1p1, because that shows as "crypto LUKS" which is " a specification for block device encryption" so it should have nothing to do with windows. I don't know why your EFI boot options show that? Did you at some point switch ports for the drives?
Your EFI partition which contains both the LInux and windows EFI boot files is nvme0n1p1:
Windows filesystem partition is nvme0n1p3 which shows in boot repair under OS detected. That also shows Neon on partition 9 and 10 but does not show any sign of Ubuntu on partition 8.

Disk device names can change so if you have an internal drive showing as sda and you boot up a flash drive, the flash drive OS would show as sda and the internal drive formerly shown as sda would show as sdb/sdc, etc. depending upon the number of drives. The SSD device names can also change but should not unless a user is removing/replacing or adding drives or changing ports. If you have been removing and replacing drives, don't do that as it confuses everything. If you have not been doing that, I don't know why they are changeing. If you have looked at any grub.cfg file, you will see that it uses UUIDs.

Your boot repair does show a partition 7 with an ext4 filesystem exists. Is that where you tried to install Ubuntu? Can you boot into Neon and try to mount that partition to see if the expected Ubuntu files are there?

Boot repair shows partition 7 with no OS and partition 8 does not even show. It shows an OS installed on partition 3 (windows), 9 and 10 (Neon).

If I understand, your problem is that your upgraded Ubuntu which is supposed to be on partition 7 of the first %12GB drive does not boot so mount that partition and take a look at it to see if the necessary files are there. Boot repair detected an ext4 filesystem on that partition but not an OS and it shows that partition as less than 10GB so that is too small for an Ubunt install.

Did you adopt the suggestion at the end of boot repair to mount the encrypted partition so contents could be verified? Not sure if that would be useful as I don't know what is on that partition.

[aeronutt]

First, thanks for the quick responses and help.

My current problems:
- I can't boot previous install of KDE (partition 9), which was working fine before crashed upgrade of Ubuntu.
- When I run boot-repair, it always says "can't add current OS to grub". Which seems to imply something is fundamentally wrong, and I'm concerned about what will happen when update-grub is run during an update.

I have 2 SSDs. On one I have all the OS's. The other has 2 partitions, an encrypted partition for data, and an NTFS partition for data.
Oddly, mount points are changing between boots. (It literally just swapped /dev/dev/nvme1n and /dev/nvme0n after a few boots.)
But, maybe that's not the root problem if grub uses UUID's.

"...your EFI partition which contains both the LInux and windows EFI boot files is nvme0n1p1"
To be clear, that sometimes changes between nvme0n1p1 and nvme1n1p1 after a reboot.

"Did you adopt the suggestion at the end of boot repair to mount the encrypted partition so contents could be verified? Not sure if that would be useful as I don't know what is on that partition. "
Yes, I did do that at least once during boot-repair. My 2 problems stated above didn't change.

"...your problem is that your upgraded Ubuntu which is supposed to be on partition 7"
Sorry, nope. Partition 7 is just a small data partition with some scripts. Ubuntu was installed on partition 8. What started all this, was an attempt to update that from 23.10 to 24.04 which crashed, and laptop wouldn't boot. After a few failed attempts of using boot-repair from USB, I deleted partition 8/Ubuntu. Eventually, I installed KDE from USB, and at least got a system that boots.

[yancek]

I can't boot previous install of KDE (partition 9), which was working fine before crashed upgrade of Ubuntu.

So is that what you now want to do, to be able to boot Neon on partition 9? When you boot Neon, verify if you have not yet, that you are using Neon on partition 10. You can do that with the df -h command which should show output similar to the example below:

 /dev/nvme0n1p10   47G   20G   25G  45% /

You should see the forward slash indicating the root system partition at the end of that line. If you are booted into Neon on partition 10, go to the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file and check it for any entries for Neon on partition 9. If there are any entries, check the UUID used in each entry with the UUID you get for partition 9 using sudo blkid.

I'm not sure what your problem is now. Do you want to be able to access Neon on partition 9 or do you want to install Ubuntu over that partition?

Oddly, mount points are changing between boots. (It literally just swapped /dev/dev/nvme1n and /dev/nvme0n after a few boots.)

Those are device names not mount points and should not change if you are booting from the USB shown as sda in boot repair or if you are booting from Neon on the /dev/nvme0n device, the one on partition 10. I noticed in your boot options from an earlier image that windows was shown as nvme1n1p1? Boot repair shows it on nvme0n1p3. This is not expected to change unless the drives are being attached to different ports between boots so I don't know why that happens.