[HELP] /efi fails to mount

Wilmo , 7 days ago

Per this article from EndeavourOS discovery I was able to repair my similar issue.

https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot/2022/12/

However my device wasn't encrypted. However near the bottom are instructions if you are and they don't quite match what you said you did. Maybe give it a try?

"Encrypted installs
In case /dev/sda2 is the encrypted root partition you need to unlock:

sudo cryptsetup open /dev/sda2 mycryptdevice

It will ask for your LUKS passphrase and unlocks the device into the path /dev/mapper/mycryptdevice

This path can be used to mount the device:

sudo mount /dev/mapper/mycryptdevice /mnt

Followed by mounting the ESP (EFI-System-Partition) into the already mounted system:

sudo mount /dev/sdXn /mnt/efi

where in all cases /dev/sdXn needs to be changed according to what is used on your install as partition/device path and the mount path for the ESP needs to get changed according to your installed system in case. If it is /efi you need to mount on /mnt/efi if it is /boot/efi it would be /mnt/boot/efi …"

Para_lyzed , 8 days ago

Are you able to manually mount the EFI partition while chrooted? Running an update won't fix the problem if you don't have the EFI partition mounted properly. To that end, are you able to manually mount the EFI partition at all? That would be a very big problem if not.

While chrooted, try the following before updating:

mount /dev/sda1 /efi

I'm a bit confused by the partitioning scheme, as I don't see a /boot mount, are the files usually stored in /boot stored in /efi here? Usually the EFI partition only contains EFI binaries. Unless perhaps your /dev/sda3 is a LUKS encrypted boot partition? Sorry, I'm not very familiar with Arch, it's strange to me to not see a /boot mountpoint in the /etc/fstab

It may be a good idea to just roll back the snapshot if none of this works, though that will only change the btrfs partition, so it won't fix any issues inside the EFI partition if there are any issues there. Here's an article about how to do that with btrfs.

governorkeagan OP , 8 days ago

It was causing me too much of a headache to try troubleshoot and fix that I decided to wipe the drive. I've got Fedora Silverblue running on the machine now. Thanks for the help!

Para_lyzed , 8 days ago

Great choice, I'm running Kinoite (Fedora Atomic KDE) myself! The atomic nature of the distros make them less prone to breakage, and much easier to recover from (since you can just roll back to the previous branch instead of restoring a BTRFS snapshot).

bloodfart , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

What does lsblk say?

E: uhh, let me be clear, use lsblk to figure out what the name of your encrypted volume is then append it to the unlock commands. You have to specify both the physical device (/dev/sda2?) and the encrypted volume name.

governorkeagan OP , 10 days ago

[[email protected] ~]$ lsblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE      FSVER            LABEL       UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0  squashfs    4.0                                                                     0   100% /run/archiso/airootfs
sda                                                                                                 
├─sda1 vfat        FAT32                        0BC7-CF22                                           
├─sda2 crypto_LUKS 2                            5c6d5430-3706-48e8-bffb-f680d8c19dda                
└─sda3 crypto_LUKS 2                            81a912d5-fb81-40ed-a60f-0af27314b661                
sdb    iso9660     Joliet Extension EOS_202404  2024-04-20-15-57-10-00                              
├─sdb1 iso9660     Joliet Extension EOS_202404  2024-04-20-15-57-10-00                     0   100% /run/archiso/bootmnt
└─sdb2 vfat        FAT16            ARCHISO_EFI 7156-9697  

Would I be able to append the UUID?

bloodfart , 10 days ago

Hmm, I hat about lsblk -a?

governorkeagan OP , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

[[email protected] ~]$ lsblk -a
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0    7:0    0   2.3G  1 loop /run/archiso/airootfs
sda      8:0    0 238.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0  1000M  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0 228.7G  0 part 
└─sda3   8:3    0   8.8G  0 part 
sdb      8:16   1  57.3G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   1   2.5G  0 part /run/archiso/bootmnt
└─sdb2   8:18   1   159M  0 part 

EDIT:

I was able to chroot into the drive. The drive was unlocked as /dev/dm-0.

bloodfart , 10 days ago

Wait it was already unlocked and ready to go?

governorkeagan OP , 9 days ago

Yes and no. Initially it was unlocked because I mounted and unlocked it via Dolphin. The second time round I was able to unlock and mount it with udsiksctl

MsFlammkuchen , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

It looks like /dev/sdb2 is your efi partition. Your disk names probably got swapped. It might be worth to switch to UUIDs. lsblk -f gives you your filesystem types and UUIDs for your partitions.

Edit: This is incorrect.

felsiq , 10 days ago

sdb looks like the bootable USB to me - /dev/sda1 should be the system’s EFI, no? OP, could you try mounting that one (shouldn’t be encrypted afaik) and/or post the output of cat /etc/fstab?
Edit: just realized you were unable to mount the encrypted drive in the first place so /etc is inaccessible, sorry

MsFlammkuchen , 10 days ago

You're right. /dev/sda1 is the efi partition for the hard drive. I would still be interested in the output of lsblk -f to see what it says about the file system type.

governorkeagan OP , 10 days ago

I was able to get the output via Emergency Mode as the root user.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system>             <mount point>  <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
UUID=0BC7-CF22                            /efi           vfat    fmask=0137,dmask=0027 0 2
/dev/mapper/luks-5c6d5430-3706-48e8-bffb-f680d8c19dda /              btrfs   subvol=/@,noatime,compress=zstd 0 0
/dev/mapper/luks-5c6d5430-3706-48e8-bffb-f680d8c19dda /home          btrfs   subvol=/@home,noatime,compress=zstd 0 0
/dev/mapper/luks-5c6d5430-3706-48e8-bffb-f680d8c19dda /var/cache     btrfs   subvol=/@cache,noatime,compress=zstd 0 0
/dev/mapper/luks-5c6d5430-3706-48e8-bffb-f680d8c19dda /var/log       btrfs   subvol=/@log,noatime,compress=zstd 0 0
/dev/mapper/luks-81a912d5-fb81-40ed-a60f-0af27314b661 swap           swap    defaults   0 0
tmpfs                                     /tmp           tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

felsiq , 10 days ago

Well your /efi entry looks right to me - maybe try mount -a (maybe capital A, going off memory here but whichever option is all) and watch for error messages or check dmesg?

governorkeagan OP , 10 days ago

NAME   FSTYPE      FSVER            LABEL       UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0  squashfs    4.0                                                                     0   100% /run/archiso/airootfs
sda                                                                                                 
├─sda1 vfat        FAT32                        0BC7-CF22                                           
├─sda2 crypto_LUKS 2                            5c6d5430-3706-48e8-bffb-f680d8c19dda                
└─sda3 crypto_LUKS 2                            81a912d5-fb81-40ed-a60f-0af27314b661                
sdb    iso9660     Joliet Extension EOS_202404  2024-04-20-15-57-10-00                              
├─sdb1 iso9660     Joliet Extension EOS_202404  2024-04-20-15-57-10-00                     0   100% /run/archiso/bootmnt
└─sdb2 vfat        FAT16            ARCHISO_EFI 7156-9697  

I've added it to the original post as well.