#1

With Nvidia support finally making its way in I’m ready to make the switch to Silverblue, but I wanted to play around with it for a while before putting it on my main PC. My main options for that are Gnome Boxes on my Arch install or dual booting on a laptop that my wife and I share, but I can’t get SB running in either place.

I’ll gloss over Gnome Boxes since the information I have seems to vague to be helpful. For this I’m not getting any error messages, but setting up the VM hangs either on Downloading Media or the “Writing Objects” phase depending on whether I’m using the Silverblue option in the menu or a locally downloaded Silverblue image respectively.

On the laptop installation fails with
mount ['--bind', '/mnt/sysimage/boot/efi', '/mnt/sysimage/ostree/deploy/fedora-workstation/deploy/<id>.0/boot/efi'] exited with code 32.

The log shows
INF program: Running... mount --bind /mnt/sysimage/boot/efi /mnt/sysimage/ostree/d.../f.../d.../<id>.0/boot/efi
INF program: mount: /mnt/sysimage/ostree/deploy/fedora-workstation/deploy/<id>.0/boot/efi: mount point does not exist.

Is it intended that Silverblue does not allow a boot/efi partition when installing? The installer will not accept /boot as the mount point on UEFI, so I’m not sure how to get around this. I could create the directory and manually mount the boot partition, but then I’d also have to complete the rest of the install manually which I don’t know how to do.

#2

I take it you’re trying to mount the ESP on /boot? AFAIK that’s flat-out not supported yet, I had gotten the exact same errors when trying a while back.

#3

I’m not sure if I’m explaining it clearly. I have no preference on whether the ESP is on /boot or /boot/efi, but the installer only allows /boot/efi. However, when the installer tries to mount the partition on the deployment image it fails because /boot/efi does not exist there (only /boot). Installer won’t allow ESP on /boot, SB image doesn’t work with /boot/efi, so it seems completely broken for dual-booting on uefi.

#4

Are you doing manual partitioning?

#5

Yes, so I can use the existing ESP partition.

#6

Go to manual partitioning but click the button to automatically change the partitions, then remove the auto-created ESP and add your own. (FWIW having >1 ESP is entirely fine as well.)

1 Like
#7

I completely forgot there was a button for automatic partition creation in the manual partition section. Apparently the solution is to have a partition for both /boot and boot/efi. The automatic option actually detected the existing ESP partition and kept it, so I did not have to replace it with my own. I did have to chroot into the deploy image and fix the nested EFI issue, but I now have a working Silverblue installation.

(FWIW having >1 ESP is entirely fine as well.)

I wondered about that. I read somewhere that Windows doesn’t really like it though, so I didn’t want to take any chances.

#8

Yeah I remember the error from it happening to me, Silverblue’s Anaconda can be pretty finnicky when using custom partitioning.

Hmm, I actually have multiple but am dual booting with Windows. :sweat_smile:

#9

I am having a similar issue on Silverblue 30. I deleted my keys in the BIOS on an Asus x205ta and deleted all partitions and did an automatic install. Now when it boots up it always goes to the BIOS screen and never passes farther but is listed as my boot option.
Do I need to add keys here?
This was an old windows 8 device.

From what I remember and read in the past this has a 32 bit uefi. If I reinsert my install USB I can get to grub cmd. Here I see
(hd0) (hd0,msdos2) (hd[1,2,3]) (hd1,gpt[3,2,1]) (lvm/fedora-[root, swap])
Using braces for brevity.
gpt1 is fat and contains efi/
gpt2 is ext2 and contains l+f/, efi/, ostree/, loader, grub2/, loader.0/

I have been reading


But I don’t think I want to do this.
I saw somewhere else about boot/EFI/EFI or something. Still trying to find more info. I am hoping I can get a 32bit EFI in there to get this puppy to boot.