It sounds like you installed the bootloader to the flash drive instead of the internal hard drive or didn't install the bootloader at all.

Boot the system with the flash drive plugged in. Open a terminal and as root (or with sudo) run fdisk -l to see which drive is which. I assume this system uses legacy bios boot. If it's uefi, we need to talk more before you do anything else.

Then you can run grub-install and update-grub. Assuming that fdisk tells you that /dev/sda is your internal hard drive, run the following.

grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub

Change sda to whatever is really your first hard drive if it's not showing drives in the right order. Sometimes booting from usb results in a mis-match between what grub sees and what the kernel sees.

Then you should be able to reboot and start the system without the flash drive.

czeekaj,

I recently changed something in refractasnapshot regarding encryption. In 10.3.0 (in daedalus) you can turn off the initrd check for encryption support because cryptsetup changed. There's no longer an option in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf for CRYPTSETUP=y. I'm pretty sure this applies to Chimaera, too. Look in /etc/refractasnapshot.conf for more details.

Here's that section in the conf file:

# Change this to "no" (or comment it) to turn off all initrd checks. 
# In Bookworm/Daedalus use this instead of initrd_crypt=yes 
# if you want encrypted persistence. Make sure to have all necessary
# cryptsetup packages installed.
initramfs_checks="yes"
# Prepare the initrd to support encrypted volumes. Uncomment this
# if you plan to use the snapshot on a live usb with an encrypted
# persistent volume. This will edit /etc/cryptsetup-initramfs/conf-hook
# to set CRYPTSETUP=y (This does not work right in Bookworm/Daedalus)

#initrd_crypt="yes"

For xfs support you need to install something in the system, and it will be included in the snapshot. When it comes to installing with refractainstaller, pre-format your xfs partitions and tell the install not to format.

For multiple grub types, the way I deal with it is to have grub-efi-amd64 and efibootmgr installed, also all of the grub-*-bin packages installed, and then put the deb packages for grub-pc and grub-efi-ia32 in the root of the filesystem before you make the snapshot. If you boot in bios mode, the installer will ask if you want to copy grub-pc and install the bootloader. I don't know anything about grub-coreboot, but if it's a replacement for grub-pc, you could include the deb package and install it manually at the proper time or maybe edit the script to use it. (I'd have to look at my code to recall how/where to do that.)

For me, amd64 netinstall iso work on bare metal in bios or uefi modes.

I can't get that iso to boot in qemu or virtualbox in uefi, but bios mode works.
The sfdisk activate trick didn't help.
If I attached the cdrom to the sata interface in vbox, I could hit ESC and then exit to get to the uefi menu that includes "Boot from file" but I couldn't get any files to boot.

I can't get the rc5 netinstall iso to boot in uefi mode in qemu or vbox.

For the hardware boots, I used a usb stick prepared with dd.

The bootloader section of the installer does not give you a choice of uefi or bios. That choice is made when you boot the system. You can check this by booting the installer media and when you get to the first screen asking about locale, press alt-F2 to open a shell and run ls /sys/firmware/efi and if that directory exists, you booted in uefi mode.

If the boot device menu doesn't exist or doesn't give you a choice between legacy or uefi for the usb, then check your motherboard settings for the boot order or possibly whether to use legacy or uefi first on removable media.

Maybe a script started by rc.local at the end of boot that checks to see if /home is mounted, and if it is not, it runs 'cryptsetup open <whatever>' and asks for the password. If your boot process without the usb stick is landing at a graphical login screen, you'll probably need to disable the display manager. Maybe the same script that mounts /home could start the DM, too.

Edit: Something like this. I didn't test this but I think it will work. Adjust the names for your setup.Disable the display manager in runlevel 2 using update-rc.d or sysv-rc-conf

#!/bin/sh

if grep -q '/dev/mapper/<name>' /proc/mounts ; then
	/etc/init.d/<display-manager> start
else
	cryptsetup open /dev/whatever  <name>
	mount /dev/mapper/<name>  <mountpoint>
	/etc/init.d/<display-manager> start
fi

exit 0

Are you trying to migrate debian stretch to devuan or are you on some other release of debian? The instructions for migration are not the same for every release. And sometimes you have to do something different from the instructions. Say more about what you're doing.

I guess your test works. Since it's already running, runit doesn't have to start it or log it. Find out why/how it's running already.

Devuan Daedalus is the same as Debian Bookworm. We use the exact same kernel.

$ grep -i fanotify /boot/config-6.1.0-9-amd64 
CONFIG_FANOTIFY=y
CONFIG_FANOTIFY_ACCESS_PERMISSIONS=y

Looks like it's in Chimaera, too.

$ grep -i fanotify /boot/config-5.10.0-23-amd64 
CONFIG_FANOTIFY=y
CONFIG_FANOTIFY_ACCESS_PERMISSIONS=y

Nope.

root@devuan:/home/user# aptitude -s install systemd
No candidate version found for systemd   
Unable to apply some actions, aborting
root@devuan:/home/user# apt policy libc6
libc6:
  Installed: 2.36-9
  Candidate: 2.36-9
  Version table:
     2.37-6 10
         500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged ceres/main amd64 Packages
 *** 2.36-9 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
root@devuan:/home/user# apt policy systemd
systemd:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
root@devuan:/home/user# grep -v ^# /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged ceres main

http://archive.debian.org/debian-securi … refox-esr/

Edit: I just noticed that those might be too old.

Better...
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/ma … refox-esr/

I like links2 for lightweight graphical browsing. It makes the internet look like 1995, which I find very soothing.

Live isos can boot the entire iso into RAM. That's an option in live-boot that isn't available in the installer isos. Add "toram" or maybe "toram=filesystem.squashfs" to the boot command for a live-usb and then it's not running from the usb stick. You could even remove the usb stick and keep running the system. Booting that way might allow you to install over the imaged usb, but then you have to get it right the first time or else start over with imaging the stick.