Subject: Re: bug#46165: No media present

From: Maxime Devos <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2021 12:53:36 +0100

On Mon, 2021-02-01 at 10:57 -0300, Pablo Ferreira wrote:
> I friend
> 
> Are you saying that the upgrade of the guix did broke the boot system?

Perhaps it was an upgrade of guix, perhaps it was a change in the boot
configuration of the BIOS or UEFI (idk what the exact naming is), perhaps
there is a hardware problem ... I'm just guessing.

>  But they show not message.

What is ‘they’ here?  GRUB (from the Trisquel pendrive, or from the Guix
System installation, or from the Guix System installation pendrive)?
The output of the last ‘guix system reconfigure’?  The computer's boot
firmware?

>  How do I reinstall the boot using the pendrive
>  of Guix System Installation? Can I boot from pendrive then install the grub?
>  I think I need to think like a Guix user because guix deamon control many think.

I don't know what's going on with your system, so maybe the following won't
actually fix anything: if you have back-ups of everything important, you could
try to install the *whole* of Guix System again with the installation image.
Though ideally reinstalling everything shouldn't be necessary, it can still
be very effective.  I don't see how the guix daemon would interfere.

About just reinstalling GRUB bootloader + GRUB menu entries: that *should*
theoretically be possible, but I don't know how.

> I need to warning the GNU community that the grup.pdf has no instruction about
> how to boot a HDD from a pendrive manually.

I presume you meant grub.pdf (the PDF version of GRUB's manual) here.
I believed I found some instructions on how to do this on the Web somewhere,
but I can't find the document anymore )-:.  Is it really necessary to boot from
a pendrive, only to continue booting via a HDD, instead of booting the HDD
directory?

My (potentially wrong) guess, is that the BIOS boot configuration is set
incorrectly.  It depends on the specific computer model, but usually the
settings can be tweaked like this:

* Press some special keyboard configuration when powering on the computer
  (usually includes keys like control, alt, and function keys)
* Some menu pops up
* Verify whether ‘boot from hard disk’ or something like that appears in
  the boot order.  Check whether ‘secure boot’ is disabled.  If there is
  some kind of boot mode option (UEFI, Legacy, maybe some variants), make
  sure the right one for your operating system's installations are selected.

If you believe the manual needs instructions on this, you should raise
that issue at the appropriate grub mailing list.

> Thanks for the feedback.

If I understand correctly, you were able to boot a Trisquel system from a
pendrive on the computer.  Can you mount the root filesystem of the Guix
installation somewhere (e.g. at /mnt) and copy the configuration of guix?
(E.g. using gnome-disks)

Maxime.