Solus OS disappeared!

slipp

I've installed Solus OS alongside other linux OSes but when I boot up, it doesn't appear anywhere in the grub menu.

I ran os-prober and grub-mkconfig. Both displayed Solus so it is there on my system.

I re-installed Solus and the 2nd time I actually set the mount point which I was unable to do the first time. Made no difference.

I then installed Ubuntu Mate on another partition in the hope that it would detect all OSes but it did not display Solus.

I ran os-prober and grub-mkconfig again. The first time I did that, I had not done it in the OS that displayed the grub menu, i.e. the last OS to be installed. This time I did it in Ubuntu Mate but still had no success.

Any idea what is going on? I was so sure os-prober would find it and resolve it.

tomscharbach

slipp Is your BIOS set to UEFI or Legacy? I ask because the Solus bootloader that is installed with UEFI doesn't play well with Grub. You might find this thread helpful, and I have found several other discussions about Solus/Grub conflicts online in various forums. I see that you have posted the issue on LinuxQuestions, so you might get help there, as well. I dual-boot using dual-drive with independent-EFI partitions, and use the BIOS/UEFI Boot Menu as my "grub", so beyond pointing you to other threads, I won't be able to help. I hope that someone will come along who might be of more help.

kyrios

tomscharbach Is your BIOS set to UEFI or Legacy? I ask because the Solus bootloader that is installed with UEFI doesn't play well with Grub.

It is not that it doesn't play well : in UEFI mode Solus doesn't use grub at all it uses systemd-boot. The problem doesn't lie on Solus but on people who don't bother to read the doc and who assume it uses grub because many other distros do.

slipp

kyrios
That's probably what is happening here. I've installed loads of linux OSes, currently 5 on my PC, and they all played nicely, except for Manjaro. Although I'm a long time user of Linux, I'm no expert at all, just point and click!

What is the solution in this case if Solus uses systemd-boot and could you point me in the direction of the documentation?

slipp

Looks like the thread that tomscharbach linked to has the solution to my problem which is to give Solus its own EFI partition. Is that going to be a boot partition? Sadly I don't think I will go ahead with it as I don't want to mess up my boot/grub and end up with no accessible OS.

tomscharbach

slipp Looks like the thread that tomscharbach linked to has the solution to my problem which is to give Solus its own EFI partition. Is that going to be a boot partition?

The Solus EFI partition will have to be a separate 500mb EFI boot partition, independent of the boot partition that you use for Grub-based installations. What will happen is that you will use the UEFI/BIOS Boot Menu to select between Linux Boot Manager (Solus) and Grub (other distributions).

slipp Sadly I don't think I will go ahead with it as I don't want to mess up my boot/grub and end up with no accessible OS.

If you create a separate EFI boot partition for Solus, your Grub boot partition should not be affected.

Setting up two independent boot partitions on a single drive is not for the faint-hearted, however, because you will need to set flags to disable the Grub partition before installing Solus, and then re-enable the Grub partition after Solus has been installed. It is a good way to create a mess if you don't know exactly what you are doing. I don't use single-drive dual/multi-booting so I won't go beyond that, but there are threads in this forum that discuss the steps.

Another possibility would be to set up a Gnome Boxes (or other) VM for Solus, if all you want to do is take a look and see.

If a Budgie DE (rather than the Solus OS) is what you want to explore, consider Ubuntu Budgie. I've been evaluating the UB 22.04 LTS Beta, and it is a very good implementation of Budgie 10.6. Because it is Ubuntu, it will be compatible with Grub.

slipp

tomscharbach Setting up two independent boot partitions on a single drive is not for the faint-hearted, however, because you will need to set flags to disable the Grub partition before installing Solus, and then re-enable the Grub partition after Solus has been installed. It is a good way to create a mess if you don't know exactly what you are doing.

That's why I think I will give it a miss.

Thanks for all the options you offered (VM and DE). I wanted the full Solus experience with Budgie in its native environment. VM is too slow for day to day use which is why I set up numerous partitions to test OSes. I'll have to skip Solus for now then.

Last attempt: is there perhaps a not-too-difficult way to get Solus to boot? I'm thinking of a manual/"forced" or one-off way rather than a proper solution. It's already fully installed on my machine, I just need to access it... Once I manage to boot it, I don't need to turn off my PC.

tomscharbach

slipp Last attempt: is there perhaps a not-too-difficult way to get Solus to boot? I'm thinking of a manual/"forced" or one-off way rather than a proper solution. It's already fully installed on my machine, I just need to access it... Once I manage to boot it, I don't need to turn off my PC.

Have you tried booting from the UEFI/BIOS Boot Manager (repeat-click a specific key during the boot process -- e.g. F12 for Dell computers, other keys for other makes/models)?

I'm not sure this works when you have the Solus bootloader in a shared EFI partition (rather than separate EFI partitions), but booting into the UEFI/BIOS Boot Menu precedes Grub, so my guess is that you will see Linux Boot Manager listed along with your Grub boot manager in the Boot Menu. It is worth a few clicks to check, anyway.

slipp

tomscharbach
That was a great suggestion. Unfortunately it did not work.
I previously had Manjaro on this partition. The boot manager still displayed Manjaro as a boot option and when I select it, it gets stuck in grub, probably because there is no Manjaro anymore.

I had problems with multi-booting with Manjaro too. It overwrites all the other OSes in grub (or something like that) and I "lost" all my OSes. That's when I learnt to use os-prober.