Have just cloned a 500gb drive to a 1tb drive.
All appears to be working fine, except:
On boot, grub gives me the message (on selection of ANY OS):
error: ../../grub-core/commands/loadenv.c:289:sparse file not allowed.
Loading linux 6.1.8-1-default ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...
Press any key to continue...
Have googled, and looks like there isn’t really any fix without reinstalling Tumbleweed.
Is there? 
I’m not sure, but you may only need to reinstall grub.
You may boot some openSUSE-Tumbleweed-NET-x86_64-Snapshot20230127-Media.iso and start the OS on disk from netinstall grub.
Can start Tumbleweed OK, but can’t setup the Default=saved for grub - not a major issue…
Apparently a reinstall of Tumbleweed, or a separate /boot partition - doesn’t like btrfs…
I am only guessing. I suspect that the file it is complaining about is “/boot/grub2/grubenv”.
I would try (as root):
cd /boot/grub2
mv grubenv grubenv.old
cp grubenv.old grubenv
and see if that makes it a regular (non-sparse) file. If that works to solve your problem, you can then remove that “grubenv.old”.
Show as root
stat -f -c %T /boot/grub2/grubenv
grub2-editenv - list
grep -Ev '^(#.*| *)$' /etc/default/grub
What exactly does it mean?
Nope, no change…
boss:/boot/grub2 # stat -f -c %T /boot/grub2/grubenv
btrfs
boss:/boot/grub2 # grub2-editenv - list
(nothing....)
boss:/boot/grub2 # grep -Ev '^(#.*| *)$' /etc/default/grub
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=8
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash=silent quiet security=apparmor net.ifnames=0 mitigations=auto"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT="true"
GRUB_TERMINAL="gfxterm"
GRUB_GFXMODE="auto"
GRUB_BACKGROUND=
GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub2/themes/openSUSE/theme.txt
SUSE_BTRFS_SNAPSHOT_BOOTING="true"
GRUB_USE_LINUXEFI="true"
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="false"
GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK="n"
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN_DEFAULT="vga=gfx-1024x768x16"
Saves the last booted item, so on a reboot, will start that option…
And, as I said, if set to boot one of the options - works fine. Is only when I set the default=saved
Thanks.
OK. Bit more of interest after a bit of reading…
Apparently, if /boot is BTRFS, the savedefault stuff should NEVER work…
I have been using savedefault+btrfs for several years (at least?), and has always worked perfectly.
The ONLY reason it has stopped is I cloned the original hard drive to a new one, but BTRFS was being used on both…
Beats me!
Thanks.
I know what GRUB_DEFAULT=saved does (and you spelled it wrong anyway) and it does not do what you describe and should not cause this error. I asked what “can’t setup” means - what you did, what results you observed.
Run
grub2-editenv - set next_entry=0
grub2-editenv - unset next_entry
grub2-editenv - list
and post full output.
??
Can’t setup means setting:
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT="true"
in /etc/default/grub, and running sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
does not work - always boots option 0
boss:/home/john # grub2-editenv - set next_entry=0
boss:/home/john # grub2-editenv - unset next_entry
boss:/home/john # grub2-editenv - list
env_block=512+1
OK, I expect it should work now.
Yep, brilliant!
Thank you.