Dual booting problem - boot menu missing entries

Citfta

I have been using Solus Plasma since the first of the year. I have been trying out Solus Gnome for a couple of weeks in a VM. I wanted to see how it would work on real install. Since I have a 1TB SSD I decided to install it alongside the Plasma install. The Gnome install went fine and all seems to be working OK. However I have found out I can't get back to the Plasma install. I went to the Help Center and found this cli command "sudo clr-boot-manager set-timeout 5 && sudo clr-boot-manager update" .

I did that and it now brings up a menu but there is only an option to reboot into the uefi menu. I don't see any option to boot into my Plasma install. I know Solus doesn't use Grub so I can't edit the Grub file. So how do I get a start menu that will let me boot into either Plasma or Gnome?

TraceyC

Can you please open a bug report on our clr-boot-manager issue tracker? As far as I know, sudo clr-boot-manager update should have added entries to the boot menu for both your GNOME and Plasma sessions. Thanks.

Citfta

Bug report has been opened. Thanks for your help.

Julien68

I use rEFInd in these cases; it's a customizable boot menu.
I made a video about it (in French).
Installation et configurations de rEFInd

Citfta

After about a day working on this problem it appears that the installation of Gnome destroyed my boot files for Plasma. As per the advice of Julien I installed rEFInd onto a USB stick and booted from that. It showed that I had two versions of Solus. But when I tried to boot into the Plasma version my machine kept crashing with an error about missing files. At that point I could still boot into Gnome from the USB stick using rEFInd.

I then installed rEFInd onto my system and after that I couldn't boot into anything. Not Gnome or Plasma.

So I then used Ventoy and installed Budgie in place of Gnome. After that install and update I was able to get to my files from the Plasma side and copy them over to the Budgie side so I didn't lose them. I suppose my next move will be to replace the Plasma side with something as it will not boot. And I haven't found any way to repair the damaged boot files.

As a side comment after I installed Budgie I installed Opera browser and it is working great. Under Gnome it was very sluggish and crashed twice. It seems Gnome is just not for me. Glad Solus has other options because I really like Solus.

I suppose this could be marked solved. But I don't know why Gnome trashed my Plasma install.

brent

Citfta seen plenty of official/unofficial warnings (https://discuss.getsol.us/d/10382-sharing-home-between-kde-and-gnome) about pairing these. In that thread it leads to a solus help article about this ( a yr old this link so I did not read article myself).

many in that thread says shared /home is the worst you can do with these two but I think sharing a single boot with anything is the worst you can do.**

I know you did not want/need this info after the fact, so apologies. Seems to be taboo to pair them but I've never had plasma (someday) so no 1st-hand experience.

Citfta But I don't know why Gnome trashed my Plasma install.

when i ran WIN with Solus both together on a disk and separate disks and WIN mutilated Solus boot regularly. So WIN is under the bed. See what I wrote up there with the ** asterisks? you never did address that. if affirmative for either scenario that would get you closer to answering the question you posed.

I prefer Budgie with gnome stack underneath myself, so maybe this will have a happy ending for you.

Citfta

brent I have run dual boot before without any problems. I ran Win 7 and Zorin for a while before dumpiing Win altogether. I also ran Zorin and MX Linux as dual boot without any problems. So I was kind of surprised that I couldn't run two versions of Solus together. But as Axios said I have now learned my lesson. I won't try it again.

Axios

I went down that road briefly even tried refind after half dozen times nuking the other Os
and short on patience nowdays.
I stopped trying.

TraceyC

I apologize, but I had forgotten that installing both Plasma and GNOME is not supported because it's known to cause issues. If refind works, that's great. No guarantees, tho.