Help please with booting my system (again!)

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I have been away for a week or so and returned to find my office machine in an indeterminate state. I found it had been rebooted with an USB portable drive plugged in so I unplugged the drive and rebooted but it would appear my boot order has changed and I cannot remember what option I should use from the BIOS list for my normal boot.
I apologise as I am sure I have had this issue before. I but fear I am losing it and ageing fast.

The system is on an nvme drive but the hardware is too old to handle the boot so the boot starting files are on a hard drive which usually starts without difficulty. As I recall I do not have secure boot set but of course do have uefi.

I have tried booting all the options available but so far at best I end up with a grub prompt. Could it be the hard drive has failed? Perhaps I should have used an USB stick for the starting files as suggested by Malcolm a while ago but I took the easy option because accessing the internal USB ports is quite a challenge.

If anybody has time to remind me I would very much appreciate it.
Many thanks,
Budge

2

@Budgie2 this is the IBM system? Can you not select the BIOS boot menu and select the USB device (I’m assuming it’s UEFI?) from there?

3

Hi Malcolm,
Yes it is the IBM device but I tried to explain, after further upgrades of the hardware I put the starting files on an hard drive which was also still on the machine and did not in the end use the USB stick. My mistake but now I am lost.

4

@Budgie2 Boot from a USB Rescue system and check the drive and filesystem…

5

I am having to go between office and my system as for some reason I cannot log into you on my reserve system!!!
I am at the rescue prompt but please remind me what commands to get the info we need.

6

@Budgie2 lsblk and run smartctl -a /dev/<the boot drive> and maybe fsck /dev/<the boot drive_partition>

7

Hi Malcolm,
sda drive is 5.5 T so that is the raid main storage.
sdb drive is 14.8 G has two partitions, 1 at 3.6M and 2 at 4.1G so my guess is that the boot files are at sdb1 so I shall check this and report.

8

Ok so the drive is shown as OK and the partition I checked is probably OK but a fat partition with 9 files. I conclude I want to boot to that but how do I do it from the grub prompt?

9

@Budgie2 this is UEFI or Legacy boot?

10

AFAIK it is UEFI

11

@Budgie2 can you show the output from;
lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT

12

How can I get the screen to you. I have it on my phone and could email or WhatsApp. Let me know what works best for you.

13

@Budgie2 browse to https://paste.opensuse.org/ on your phone and upload it there…

14

I am very impressed but I took the picture and the system told me the file was too big.
As you can tell I do not often use my phone for this kind of work!!!
I shall try and sort out and get back to you.

15

Try this:-
https://paste.opensuse.org/pastes/0423994e2233

16

So it’s using sda1 for boot?

17

I don’t think so. I understood the boot process uses the few files on sdb1 and then the system is on NVME.
If my system gets me to the grub prompt this means those few files on sdb1 must be the source but then what?

18

@Budgie2 As root user what does gdisk -l /dev/sdb3.6MB seems awfully small…

19

It is small. The files on it are what you told me to put there when you helped me install the new NVME kit.
Here is what I have:-
https://paste.opensuse.org/pastes/7b1bbe98eff7

20

Since I have a rescue disk is it not possible to repair using the disk?
My only concerns is losing my data on the NVME etc.