I have Arch Linux installed on the internal hard drive of my HP laptop and it boots in UEFI mode.
I had Debian Testing installed on an external hard drive and it also booted in UEFI mode.
I wanted to replace Debian by Zenwalk preferably, or some other Slackware derivative.
The installation appeared to go fine until the elilo step ...

1) The installer did not offer me the option of installing to the /boot partition on the external hard drive, which I had prepared. (It would be nice to be able to choose this in future.)

2) The installer said it would add Zenwalk to the existing /boot partition of the internal hard drive, and I accepted this option.

3) When I tried to boot the "installed" Zenwalk system, it wouldn't.

4) The /boot/efi on the external hard drive is empty and the /boot/efi on the internal hard drive contains no Zenwalk/Slackware entries.

Apart from trying another Slackware derivative and installer, I'm at at a loss of how to fix this. All my experience is with Arch and Debian and grub2. Slackware and elilo are new territory for me.

Any suggestions?

Kind regards,
T

Hi,

Not sure to understand what happened..

Please could you try using the updated ISO (3a) from zenwalk.org , and do the install without the external HDD plugged?

Jp

Hello H1p8r10n,

I downloaded the new ISO (3a) and used dd to put it on a USB stick.

I prepared the following partitions on an external USB hard drive (250GB Western Digital):
512 MB FAT32 for the EFISYSP (boot and eps flags set)
8 GB swap
40 GB ext4 for the OS
remainder XFS for /home

I booted my laptop from the USB stick. I picked the UK keymap and then started setup.
I assigned the above partitions and went for a full install.
During the installation (terse output) I noticed that there were some warnings that files couldn't be renamed or executed, e.g. chroot: can't execute '/bin/cp' No such file or directory.

I created a user and set a root password.
Skipped LILO, installed ELILO.
Agreed to add boot entry (In the future, it would be nice to be told where this boot entry will be put, since I was afraid that it might mess up my Arch boot entry on the internal drive).

My laptop wouldn't boot from the external drive (it does boot from USB sticks or other externally installed distros, such as debian). If I booted, pressed ESC, then F9 to get the boot menu entry, I could see a Zenwalk/Slackware entry for the external drive. When I selected this, it began to boot and then stopped with a "kernel panic - not syncing VFS unable to mount root fs." I copied this by hand, so apologies if I missed something.

As before:
the /boot/efi and /boot/grub folders are still empty.
the /boot/efi on the internal hard drive contains no Zenwalk/Slackware entries.

So, still confused as to what's happening.

Kind regards,
T

with the 250gb usb drive and the installation usb plugged in post the output of

Hello colorpurple21859,

Output from parted -l:

Model: ATA TOSHIBA MQ01ABD1 (scsi) [This is the internal drive with Arch installed.]
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 538MB 537MB fat32 boot, esp
2 538MB 17.7GB 17.2GB linux-swap(v1) swap
3 17.7GB 60.7GB 42.9GB ext4
4 60.7GB 1000GB 940GB xfs


Model: asmedia ASM1053E (scsi) [This is the external drive.]
Disk /dev/sdb: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 538MB 537MB primary fat32 boot, esp
2 538MB 9128MB 8590MB primary linux-swap(v1)
3 9128MB 52.1GB 42.9GB primary ext4
4 52.1GB 250GB 198GB primary xfs


Model: HP v135w (scsi) [This is the USB stick with the Zenwalk installation, made using dd]
Disk /dev/sdc: 4041MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
2 1157kB 2632kB 1475kB primary esp


Output from lsblk -f:
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda
├─sda1 vfat FAT32 EFISYSP B9CE-0659 448.8M 12% /boot
├─sda2 swap 1 595a8da3-b9d7-4d9b-8297-89c94a7de7f8 [SWAP]
├─sda3 ext4 1.0 ArchOS 0b7a3901-646b-4487-9152-f1bddb4a859a 15.8G 55% /
└─sda4 xfs Home 7b74856c-e6f3-4577-b5f4-8bed30f3bc92 377.6G 57% /home
sdb
├─sdb1 vfat FAT32 EFISYSP 8681-A149
├─sdb2 swap 1 4513b0bf-62c2-4cc4-a80d-7ca90701a74e
├─sdb3 ext4 1.0 OS 3c25fd81-fa28-4330-870d-77c0a6500595
└─sdb4 xfs DATA a64b5976-f3ef-41d3-80e1-bb1ea5750484
sdc iso9660 Joliet Extension Zenwalk 2020-07-02-17-46-01-00
├─sdc1 iso9660 Joliet Extension Zenwalk 2020-07-02-17-46-01-00
└─sdc2 vfat FAT12 CE25-385D

sda is the internal drive with Arch.
sdb is the prepared external drive where I tried to install Zenwalk.
sdc is the USB installation stick.

I hope this helps.
T

Your output shows the efi partition on debian mounted at /boot and not /boot/efi, on an efi system the efi partition should be mounted at /boot/efi.
boot into debian, post the output of If you booted in efi mode, /sys/firmware/efi directory will exist.

Hello colorpurple,

The output of the cat /sys/firmware/efi from my Arch system installed on the internal hard drive is
cat: /sys/firmware/efi: Is a directory

There is no debian in the previous outputs I sent, so I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Regards,
T

Okay, I was mixing you up with another thread I’ve been replying too. I remember now that arch mounts the used the efi partition as a boot partition and mounts it to /boot. On slackware based systems the efi partition is mounted at /boot/efi. If had set up the efi partition to mount at /boot is most likely the problem. You may have to maually set up sdb1 to mount at /boot/efi as setup may try to use the internal drives efi partition

When you start the machine on the EFI boot menu : what are the boot options you are prompt for ?
Is the "Slackware" the default ?
Is you external disk detected by EFI firmware ?

Hello colorpurple and h1p8r10n,

I reformatted the EFI partition and the partition for the Zenwalk OS. The /home partition was empty anyway except for a directory for the user I created.
I did a full install from scratch. The installer said that the /etc/fstab entry for the EFI was /boot/efi vfat ...
I chose ELILO and chose to install a boot menu entry. The installer did not ask me where I wanted it put and didn't give me any other output.
When the installer was done, I rebooted. The Zenwalk drive didn't boot (my laptop BIOS is set to boot from external USBs in case I ever need to do a recovery), so it should have.
I rebooted again, hit ESC, then F9 to get the boot menu entries. There was a UEFI entry with Slackware next to it, so I chose that. It started booting, stuff scrolling down the screen and then the same kernel panic I mentioned above.

/etc/fstab from the installation is:
/dev/sdc2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sdc3 / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/sdc4 /home xfs defaults,noatime 1 2
/dev/sdc1 /boot/efi vfat defaults 1 0
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro,comment=x-gvfs-show 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0

So the partition is being mounted at /boot/efi which was created by the installer.

/boot/efi and /boot/grub both exist and are empty.

The list of files in /boot is the following:
/boot/README.initrd
/boot/zen.bmp
/boot/slack.bmp
/boot/vmlinuz-huge-5.4.50
/boot/vmlinuz-huge
/boot/vmlinuz
/boot/System.map-huge-5.4.50
/boot/System.map
/boot/config-huge-5.4.50.x64
/boot/config
/boot/tuxlogo.dat
/boot/tuxlogo.bmp
/boot/onlyblue.dat
/boot/onlyblue.bmp
/boot/inside.dat
/boot/inside.bmp
/boot/elilo-x86_64.efi
/boot/elilo-ia32.efi

So, what's going on?

Kind regards,
T

run lsblk to get uuid of your slackware partitions, edit your slackware fstab to use uuids it will be somehthing like this
/etc/fstab from the installation is:
UUID=<swap uuid number swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=(some uuid numbe for rootfs) / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
UUId=(uuid number) /home xfs defaults,noatime 1 2
UUId=uuid number /boot/efi vfat defaults 1 0

Hi colorpurple,

I used lsblk -f to get the UUIDs.
I edited the /etc/fstab file manually to use the UUIDs instead of /dev/sdc...
I rebooted, and laptop didn't boot from the external drive.
I rebooted again, pressed ESC, then F9 and the UEFI Slackware entry was no longer there. I selected the external drive for booting and I got a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

And if UUIDs are necessary, then why didn't the installer use them instead?

I've been using Linux exclusively since 2007 and I have never had this much trouble trying to install a distro to an external drive.

Kind regards,
T

Slackwware by default uses /dev in fstab and lilo/elilo for bootloader, where as most other distro uses grub bootloader and uuids in fstab. most other distros will generate an initrd during installation whereas slackware does not, the -current installer will generate an initrd. When I install slackware to a extenal drive at the install of lilo/elilo during setup, I open a second console, and run the following command to install grub this is assuming sdb is the external drive.
edit /etc/fstab to use uuid
for an initrd run to determine the mkinitrd command to run to generate an intrd.gz, then rerun grub-mkconfig.
exit

answer no/skip for the lilo/elilo items, continue with the rest of the setup


or run the mount --binds for /dev /sys /proc /run and chroot from your arch installation.

Hello colorpurple,

I started the installation again from scratch.
When prompted for swap, /, and /home I selected the partitions and agreed to a quick format on each. Note, this time the external drive was sdc.
Did a full install, terse.
When I got to the install lilo step, I opened a second terminal window.
I typed:

chroot /mnt -> no problem
mount /dev/sdc1 /boot/efi -> I was told it was already mounted.
grub-install --removable /dev/sdc -> told installing for x86_64-efi platform. Installation finished. No error reported.
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/ -> told generating grub configuration file, found /boot/vmlinuz-huge-5.4.50 and /boot/vmlinuz-huge. then it sat there for a while with the cursor blinking and then I got 21 lines of:
grep: /tmp/os-prober .EbCn2c/<various text labels>-map: No such file or directory
Then it sat there with a blinking cursor ...

I appreciate your efforts and that of H1p8r10n to try and get it working, but I think I'm pulling the plug on this exercise.

Kind regards,
T

hi, did you try to install the Slackware/Zenwalk efi bootloader entry (elilo) on the internal drive's EFI partition ? (I guess it's where other operating systems that you installed on this machine have installed their efi bootloader?)