The officially official Devuan Forum!

Devarch

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 86  

[SOLVED] Prevent Update from Overwriting EFI

Case 1: I had an Excalibur installation done in the following way: Debian Bookworm -> OpenRC -> Devuan Daedalus -> Devuan Excalibur.

Disk layout: EFI, boot-1, boot-2, root-1, root-2.
The installation created a folder "debian" on the EFI partition.
Then I made another install from the Excalibur net install ISO. Using the same EFI partition (no format), boot-2 and root-2. I've got two folders: debian and devuan on the EFI partition.

Problem: No matter if I choose Debian or Devuan from the F7 Boot menu, only the second installation is loaded.
I restored the EFI from a backup, added the second folder and reconfigured through efibootmgr to point at the corresponding files. So, I was able to choose again which of the two installs to boot.

Question: How can I prevent the second install from modifying the first install?

Case 2: I've made some installations and updates on the second Devuan and lost the ability to boot the first installation. Both entries (Debian and Devuan) only boot the second install.
Question: How can I prevent this behavior?

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,640  

Re: [SOLVED] Prevent Update from Overwriting EFI

I can't explain how that's happening, but I can offer some possible workarounds.

You could just use one bootloader to boot both systems. Boot whichever bootloader to the system you want first and then run update-grub to add other installations to the boot menu. You need to make sure that os-prober is installed and enabled in /etc/default/grub first.

Sometimes devuan installer makes a debian directory in the efi partition. I'm not sure why that is, but it's possible to give unique names to the bootloaders. e.g. Boot the first system and run something like grub-install --bootloader-id=firstsystem && update-grub and then boot the other systems and do the same to give each a different name.

It's also possible that the uefi implementation on your motherboard does not follow standard uefi methods. That's very common. I have one that lets me change the order of the bootloaders through efibootmgr, but the order only lasts until I reboot. i.e. it doesn't really change it.

Devarch

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 86  

Re: [SOLVED] Prevent Update from Overwriting EFI

fsmithred, thank you. I'll check what can be done. You are right; it prefers debian. I've updated the first install (grub, linux-image etc) and it did not destroy the second one named devuan. However, it changed the EFI boot order, making debian the first one and refind the last one. It also completely eliminated "the second partition on the SD card" (which is Ventoy with .iso files). This strange behavior might be linked to the motherboard.

This is why I want to keep two similar systems for a while to test different configurations and approaches. There are too many things to resolve: find the right values for nbfc, make ryzenadjdJ understand ryzen_smu (it doesn't currently), etc.

I'll mark this topic as solved.