The officially official Devuan Forum!

Vlasov1996

Member

Registered: 2026-05-12

Posts: 2  

Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

I have a white MacBook 4.1. When I connect an external SSD with Ventoy, all Linux distributions boots only in Grub2 mode. But Devuan ISO does not boot, except for Live images. As it turned out later, Grub was removed from Devuan installation images. There is only Isolinux and EFI bootloader.

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 552  

Re: Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

I found that if you connect to the internet, it will download & install grub OK, if you don't connect to the internet before installing, you won't get grub installed.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,440  

Re: Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

Nothing was removed, Devuan Daedalus installers won't boot from Ventoy. Period. Known fact, please search the forum. ISOs up to Chimaera and Excalibur again do work.

Vlasov1996

Member

Registered: 2026-05-12

Posts: 2  

Re: Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

No, I'm not talking about installing the bootloader in the installed system. I'm talking about the bootloader in the Devuan installer ISOs. Devuan doesn't boot in Grub2 mode in Ventoy, but it's the only way to boot from ISOs on my old MacBook.

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,655  

Re: Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

Yes, Devuan installer ISOs since daedalus have included syslinux bootloaders only.

Quite possibly a Ventoy boot loader fails, especially if the newer versions have lost their syslinux ability, but in any case, Ventoy doesn't present the media as a bootable device so they might not work fully anyhow.

If you make sure that the Ventoy partition is labelled "Ventoy", and is of type exfat, then Devuan's Ventoy patching might kick in to make it work for you.

rbit

Member

Registered: 2018-06-12

Posts: 117  

Re: Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

There's a devuan excalibur grub2-efi netinstall iso at https://files.devuan.org/user/tempforever/
I haven't tested it extensively but it might work in those rare cases that syslinux doesn't work.

Last edited by rbit (Yesterday 16:21:23)

soulstenance

Member

Registered: 2026-05-10

Posts: 4  

Website

Re: Missing GRUB Bootloader in installer images, since Daedalus.

Ventoy is cool, but I stopped using it when I found certain Linux ISOs to be flaky or have issues at boot or install. This sounds similar to what I experienced though it was too long ago to recall what issues I had. If you want the convenience of having a ton of distros on one USB to test and mess around with, Ventoy is fine, but I'd recommend ditching it and just flash the specific distro you want onto your USB drive the normal way.