Installation failure, Grub2: cannot find EFI directory

[daanheuvelbeuk]

Hi,

I have had a running dual boot dual disk system since 2016. While I was on my Ubuntu install I got the message to update my 18.xx version to 20.04. After some time the installation halted. Nothing happened, except a spinning HD. I rebooted my system, and burned a Live CD (20.04.1) on a DVD while running Windows 10. When installing Ubuntu from the live DVD it fails on installation of Grub2:

Executing 'grub-install /def/sda' failed
This is a fatal error.

I still had about one third of the installation to run.


Next I looked on the Internet to find out how to Repair Grub2 with Live CD. I followed the instructions carefully, although I made a typo, which I could correct. But this try also failed:

grub-install /dev/sda
grub-install: error: cannot find EFI directory

And to make matters worse, my Windows is missing from the Grub menu. So I am writing this in Firefox of the Live DVD.

What can I do?

[daanheuvelbeuk]

Fwiw:

/dev/sda
    /dev/sda1/    swap
    /dev/sda2/    ext4    root
    /dev/sda3/    ext4    data

[daanheuvelbeuk]

Trying the Internet, I read that "by default it assumes the EFI system is mounted as /boot/efi"

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ mount | grep /boot/efi

No result.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ mount | grep efi
efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

And that is not the same as /boot/efi.

[daanheuvelbeuk]

Tried it again. The error message now is:

The 'grub-efi-amd64-signed package failed to install into / target/. Without the GRUB boot loader,  the installed system will not boot.

Sigh.

[daanheuvelbeuk]

Still trying to finish the installation, using Repair Grub2 with Live CD I tried:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sda /mnt
mount: /mnt: /dev/sda already mounted or mount point busy.

Continue?

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev &&
> sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts &&
> sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc &&
> sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount: /mnt/dev: mount point does not exist.

So, still no luck. And I do want at least my Windows 10 back.

[daanheuvelbeuk]

Found the solution. In UEFI - Community help it is explained that you have to create an EFI System partition.

If you are manually partitioning your disk in the Ubuntu installer, you need to make sure you have an EFI System Partition (ESP) set up. This partition holds EFI-mode boot loaders and related files.

• If your disk already contains an ESP (eg if your computer had Windows 8 preinstalled), it can be used for Ubuntu too. Do not format it. It is strongly recommended to have only 1 ESP per disk.
• An ESP can be created via a recent version of GParted (the Gparted version included in the 12.04 disk is OK), and must have the following attributes:
  
  • Mount point: /boot/efi (remark: no need to set this mount point when using the manual partitioning, the Ubuntu installer will detect it automatically)
  • Size: minimum 100Mib. 200MiB recommended.
  • Type: FAT32
  • Other: needs a "boot" flag
  
  

I still have to repair my bootloader. My system started as if Windows was not there. And I need to change my home directory to my existing home partition.