Hi folks,
I have a N54L where I want to install microOS on it. I want to keep the 4 HDDs untouched and install microOS on a nvme (converted to pcie) disk. The problem is that the N54L bios doesn’t allow you to boot from pcie, only from the regular disks or USB… so I’ve plugged a 8GB USB drive that I would like to use just to ‘boot’ the system where keeping the nvme disk as the root filesystem.
The problem is that I’ve tried to install it a couple of times but either grub doesn’t recognize the filesystem or it doesn’t work at all.
The USB disk is small enough for the installer to complain microOS cannot be installed there “only” and when selecting both disks it always prefers the nvme one (of course! :D)
I’m doing the following partitions trying to mimic what the installer does but spreading them on the two disks:
8 MiB BIOS filesystem on the USB drive (N54L requires BIOS not EFI)
The rest of the USB drive as BTRFS (umounted) to host the @/boot/* subvolumes (grub2/i386-pc, grub2/x86_64-efi and writable)
Two btrfs partitions on the nvme to host the / (and subvols) and /var
Then I change the default grub2 installation to be installed on the usb drive (whole disk, not partition) instead.
The installation finish successfully but grub2 fails to boot. There are a (hd0), (hd0,gpt1) and (hd0,gpt2) where only the last one has “something” which is just @/ (ls (hd0,gpt2)/ output is literally @/), the others complain to list the content because unknown filesystem to grub rescue> prompt.
grub needs access to your root filesystem with /boot directory. It does not matter where grub itself is installed - if BIOS cannot access PCIe, grub (which is using BIOS services) cannot either. You can create separate filesystem for /boot on USB, but it means you will not be able to boot from snapshots (at least, SUSE does not support it) and MictoOS depends on it. You may try, but I doubt it will work.
If your system supports EFI, I do not understand the problem at all. MicroOS supports systemd-boot which loads kernel/initrd from ESP and since recently SUSE also supports booting from snapshot in this configuration.
That’s the problem, it does not support EFI. I’m going to give a try to Clover that way I keep the USB stick with minimal read/write operations (so it lives longer) and keep microOS installation with sane defaults.
Ah, OK, you are right, Clover actually provides UEFI emulation. It may work. If Clover includes necessary drivers, it may even work with grub2, otherwise systemd-boot is still an option.
