[windowsfx] boot failure after system update

[kaolincash]

Hi,

I just had standard updates and now windowsfx (an ubuntu distro) won't boot, it hangs at the loading initial ramdisk part and I'm not sure why the boot-repair-disk boot repair tool isn't working.
Here's the pastebin link it gave me, I hope this is the right place (I followed a link from here to here to here):
http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/gz8Xkd2ynY/

My main partition is sda2, for clarity, I'm not sure how clear or relevant that is, as I'm very out of my depth here.

Thanks for any assistance,
Maia

edit: gonna put any further pertinent information from later posts here, in the interest of clarity:

p1:
Also, there's only one OS here, I'm not dual booting: I'm in the process of migrating data FROM windows TO windowsfx, as I've decided to jump ship and this seemed an accessible-ish step for me.

What appears to be a windows drive is a copy of the windows install I had on THIS SSD, which I cloned to an HDD partition while I set up my main OS back over here on my SSD, and as I said this was working perfectly fine, fresh out the box so to speak, after a clean install directly to the SSD. That is, until this round of updates did something weird to the boot files, from what i can gather.

I followed the instructions I was given when I googled around and found the boot-repair-disk utility seemed to be the best option, and I already had it on my medicat drive, so gave it a go.

Now I'm in completely over my head and I'm afraid I need complete newbie level advice here. I am a brand new linux user.

sda2 is where my main OS is, from what I can tell, which is windowsfx, and I intend to use this machine to boot directly into windowsfx, and did have the boot manager hidden entirely until all of this suddenly started happening after those updates. Now I don't know WHAT'S going on.

p2:
I am and have always been booting in UEFI mode. My BIOS settings have remained unchanged since well before the round of updates that caused Windowsfx to begin hanging at "loading initial ramdisk".

I proceeded to plug in my ventoy-based wd passport that runs Jayro's Medicat USB recovery drive and through that booted into boot-repair-disk and ran the boot repair tool provided, on its recommended settings. You may be seeing that in there somewhere, as it's what I was running to generate the program output you see above.

After this failed, said output led me here with the pastebin link in hand, and that's all that's happened thus far.

I am still able to access the grub menu, I can select the correct operating system, and it just hangs seemingly indefinitely (I don't have the money for the electricity meter to keep my gaming rig on for 24 hours, waiting to see if it does anything, but if it takes more than a half hour--which it does--then something's deeply wrong regardless of how long I'm prepared to wait).

[deadflowr]

Thread move to Ubuntu/Debian BASED

[grahammechanical]

Here is the clue:

LegacyWindows detected. The boot of your PC is in EFI mode. You may want to retry after changing it to BIOS-compatibility/CSM/Legacy mode.

Both operating systems must be in the same boot mode. Either, EFI mode or BIOS-compatibility/CSM/Legacy mode. Also the Windows 8 boot loader will not give you an option to load an Linux OS. Whereas, the Linux boot loader (Grub) will give options to load both Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. Which is why if you accept Boot Repairs offer to reinstall Grub2 you should do this:

Please do not forget to make your BIOS boot on sda (ATA Samsung SSD 850) disk!

Oh, by the way, WindowsFX is built on Ubuntu software but is not officially recognised as a Ubuntu flavour. In fact it takes a lot from Kubuntu.

Regards

[kaolincash]

I'm afraid this is completely over my head, I'm fresh out of windows, and this was all working fine a few hours ago.

Also, there's only one OS here, I'm not dual booting: I'm in the process of migrating data FROM windows TO windowsfx, as I've decided to jump ship and this seemed an accessible-ish step for me.

What appears to be a windows drive is a copy of the windows install I had on THIS SSD, which I cloned to an HDD partition while I set up my main OS back over here on my SSD, and as I said this was working perfectly fine, fresh out the box so to speak, after a clean install directly to the SSD. That is, until this round of updates did something weird to the boot files, from what i can gather.

I followed the instructions I was given when I googled around and found the boot-repair-disk utility seemed to be the best option, and I already had it on my medicat drive, so gave it a go.

Now I'm in completely over my head and I'm afraid I need complete newbie level advice here. I am a brand new linux user.

sda2 is where my main OS is, from what I can tell, which is windowsfx, and I intend to use this machine to boot directly into windowsfx, and did have the boot manager hidden entirely until all of this suddenly started happening after those updates. Now I don't know WHAT'S going on.

[oldfred]

Are you booting in UEFI mode.
You have old grub entries in MBR of both sda & sdb, but they will not work.

The UEFI entry looks like it is using ESP on sda1, grub in ESP boots to sda2.
And fstab is loading /, swap & tmpfs which looks correct.

Do you get grub menu?
With one install, you may have to press escape (UEFI only) to get grub menu.
Then can you boot recovery mode or second line in grub menu?

[kaolincash]

I am and have always been booting in UEFI mode. My BIOS settings have remained unchanged since well before the round of updates that caused Windowsfx to begin hanging at "loading initial ramdisk".

I proceeded to plug in my ventoy-based wd passport that runs Jayro's Medicat USB recovery drive and through that booted into boot-repair-disk and ran the boot repair tool provided, on its recommended settings. You may be seeing that in there somewhere, as it's what I was running to generate the program output you see above.

After this failed, said output led me here with the pastebin link in hand, and that's all that's happened thus far.

I am still able to access the grub menu, I can select the correct operating system, and it just hangs seemingly indefinitely (I don't have the money for the electricity meter to keep my gaming rig on for 24 hours, waiting to see if it does anything, but if it takes more than a half hour--which it does--then something's deeply wrong regardless of how long I'm prepared to wait).

[oldfred]

Recovery mode uses nomodeset for video issues, and shows boot process.
That may show an issue. In old days the posting was slow enough you could easily follow it. Now it is a lot quicker.

Any issues are also in logs that are same file(s) you see when booting with recovery mode.
I prefer to always see boot process, so change a grub setting to use noplymouth as default.

Review log files
sudo egrep -i 'warn|error' /var/log/*g
If not mounted from inside your install, you have to modify /var/log to where you mount it with live installer.

[kaolincash]

Please be patient with me. I have essentially no foundational knowledge here, as this is my Baby's First Linux 😅

What does "Recovery mode uses nomodeset for video issues" mean? And I assume this "boot process" you mention is the console output of the OS as it attempts to boot? I haven't heard this referred to as a posting before, so that took me a while to figure out.

I'm also struggling to follow most of the implicit references you're making; How does one "change grub settings"?

I'm entirely new to this, coming straight from windows, so I don't know what "noplymouth" is, and when you say "If not mounted from inside your install," do you mean if sda2 isn't mounted? From within sda2? I'm completely baffled by this part, I'm afraid!

I also don't know what files you're referring to when you say booting from recovery mode, as for where to input your egrep command, I'm assuming you mean in the recovery mode's console?

Finally, I'm not sure what you mean by "live installer"--do you mean the iso I booted from in order to install Windowsfx in the first place?

I apologise for taking so long between updates, it's taking me this long to process each of the responses!

[oldfred]

Live installer is the ISO converted to DVD or flash drive to be bootable.
It has two modes as either installer or live system which you can use to test that it works on your system. You also should keep it (and a Windows recovery/repair flash drive) so you can boot system if issues and make repairs.

I was getting into weeds of details, that probably you do not even need to know at this point.

Recovery mode is the second line in grub menu, and may be under a sub menu. It has different settings to avoid video issue (if that is the issue) and boots to a command line and a simple menu of options to make repairs from the terminal or continue to boot.
Ubuntu installer now has a safe boot mode to avoid some of the old video issues. In the past particularly with nvidia, we had to add nomodeset boot parameter to boot.

If you get grub menu, then boot using recovery mode.

Your sda2 is your ESP - efi system partition. That is where UEFI has its initial boot files, both Windows & Ubuntu put boot loaders into the ESP. It must be FAT32 formatted and flagged as ESP for UEFI to find it. Windows also requires drives to be gpt partitioned for UEFI boot. The older MBR(msdos) partitioning is used for BIOS boot, even if a new UEFI hardware system. Systems have been UEFI/gpt since 2012 when Microsoft required vendors to install Windows 8 in UEFI mode. Vendors still often call it BIOS, as that is what they think users understand. Users can install in BIOS mode, but that really was available for pre-2012 systems. How you boot install media for both Windows & Ubuntu is then how it installs or repairs.

When you boot your system, you have standard paths for files.
But if you boot a live installer & mount one of those standard files, it will have a different path.
Default mount is often /media/$USER where user is the signed on administrator.
Or you can specify mount.

Normal boot with one system or only one system found will not show grub menu.
At that point we do not know if grub/booting is issue or if grub has booted and it is further in the boot process.
And if only one system found, you can force grub menu to appear by using escape key, just after the UEFI/BIOS screen showing vendor's icon. If old BIOS install, you use shift key, not escape key.

[kaolincash]

Okay. Thanks for explaining all that, I think I managed to follow it 😅

So, what exactly do I.... do?