X86 system do not find boot device after installation (solved)

After I was not very happy about the fact that umbrel 1.x comes with a complete system, I dared to update anyway. So, as described, I first created a backup of my V0.5.4 and installed Umbrel 1.x.
On first reboot, however, no boot device was found!
I was able to solve this for me on that way:

  1. No boot device is found after installing Umbrel 1.x (x86)
  2. Create a Supergrubdisk USB stick (short SG-USB)
  3. Connect the backup (if available) and the SG-USB stick to the PC
  4. Boot from SG-USB > select:Detect and show boot methods and then select the disk with the new Umbrel 1.x installation to boot.
  5. Open with a browser the IP of your Umbrel, wait until the migration wizard is finished* (restore) and shutdown the system.
  6. Unplug the backup
  7. Boot SG-USB as in step 4.
  8. SSH into Umbrel
  9. execute the following commands in sequence:
    sudo apt install grub-efi
    sudo update-grub
    sudo grub-install
  10. shutdown, disconnect SG-USB and boot as usual into your (restored) umbrel 1.x (may youā€™ve to select the proper umbrel boot device in BIOS again)

5./6./7. can be ignored if no backup is available.

Because Iā€™m not a native speaker, I hope it is clearly described and I can help some by solving the boot problem on x86 systems.

Good Luck! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Itā€™s awesome, that solution is great

1 Like

Iā€™m new to umbrelOS and have the same problem. I want to install umbrelOS to a ESPRIMO Q556/2 with SATA SSD, 8 GB RAM and i3 processor. Thank you @servietos for your great HowTo. Using Supergrubdisk I at least was able to boot umbrelOS.

After that I had problems connecting via SSH. I thought that my umbrel user name is also my user name for SSH. But than I found:

Where I got to know, that umbrel is the user name.

But installing grub does not work for me. Using sudo grub-install first gave the following error:
grub-install: error: /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please specify --target or --directory.

Than I found the following:

But installing the following does not help:
sudo apt-get install grub-pc

Now I get:

umbrel@umbrel:~$ sudo grub-install
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: error: install device isn't specified.
umbrel@umbrel:~$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

I have no glue why a part of the text is red now! Pleas ignore that!

How to install umbrelOS that it can boot without manually installing grub? Or how to install grub?

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Hi, Iā€™m just a customer ;-)ā€¦
But what is the output of command ā€šlsblkā€˜?

umbrel@umbrel:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 476.9G  0 disk
|-sda1   8:1    0   200M  0 part /mnt/root/boot/efi
|                                /boot/efi
|-sda2   8:2    0   9.8G  0 part
|-sda3   8:3    0   9.8G  0 part /mnt/root
|                                /
`-sda4   8:4    0 457.1G  0 part /mnt/root/var/log
                                 /var/log
                                 /mnt/root/var/lib/docker
                                 /var/lib/docker
                                 /mnt/root/home
                                 /home
                                 /mnt/root/data
                                 /data
sdb      8:16   1  29.4G  0 disk
|-sdb1   8:17   1   146K  0 part
|-sdb2   8:18   1   2.8M  0 part
`-sdb3   8:19   1  12.6M  0 part

sdb is the USB stick with supergrubdisk.

Today my raspi with HomeAssistant ā€œdiedā€. So I had to do something. So I installed Proxmox on my machine and created a VM for HomeAssistant. Later IĀ“m going to install UmbrelOS as a VM on my Proxmox virtual environment like discussed in the following thread:
https://community.umbrel.com/t/umbrel-1-1-on-proxmox/

With proxmox there is no problem bootingā€¦ My problem is ā€œsolvedā€.

1 Like

Excellent solution @servietos !

Finally I could do a proper upgrade on my +decade old umbrel host.

Regards.

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FYI, and for anyone looking for an answer laterā€¦

You are most likely seeing this because you accidentally didnā€™t boot your USB in UEFI mode. You can probably fix this by installing grub-pc-bin, but a probably ā€œmore correctā€ fix is probably going to be to reboot your device and select UEFI mode for your USB; then you wonā€™t see the initial error:

grub-install: error: /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please specify --target or --directory.

I say probably ā€œmore correctā€ because I GUESS itā€™s feasible that someone is running this on a pre-UEFI machine, but UEFI has been around for a long time, so I am guessing anyone reading this is not using legacy bios mode by choice.

1 Like

Hi @jtirelli, I believe thatā€™s my case - my machine is pretty old and I get the same error as you mentioned. Unfortunately grub-pc-bin hasnā€™t solved the issue for me, since Iā€™m still getting the following error:

Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: error: install device isn't specified

Do you have any advice? Thanks!
PS: More info about my case: [umbrelOS 1.1 update] Fail to boot from usb stick - #8 by brnbc