Windows 10 update ate Fedora 25 boot info: EFI. LVM, LUKS, oh, my!

[Ted Roche]

Booted into Windows 10 to start the annual TurboTax stuff, and it
asked to do an update, as usual. It turned out the "Features Update"
was an entirely new version of Windows 10, Fall Creator's Update
update, or something.

Rebooting to go back into Fedora 25, and the boot menu is gone, replaced with:

grub>

Trying to follow the clues at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Encountering_the_dreaded_GRUB_2_boo...

(This is a Dell Inspiron 5558, i5, 12 Gb RAM, 1TB HDD)

I've done the following: determined the boot files are on (hd1,gpt6),
booted an F25 live USB and found the LVM listed below. Fedora25 is
installed in an LUKS-encrypted partition, and is managed with LVM,
volgroup is 'fedora' and root is in LV root.

I'm guessing on a couple of these settings and would welcome
suggestions. Please forgive typos.

grub>insmod xfs
grub>insmod lvm
grub>set root=(dev/fedora/root)
grub>linuxefi (hd1,gpt6)/vmlinuz-4.13.16-100.fc255.x86_64
root=/dev/fedora/root ro quiet rhgb
rd.luks.uuid=luks-95ed05-2b2b-40ef-8eca-95ca54cf22a7 rd.lvm.lv=root
grub>initrdefi (hd1,gpt6)/initramfs-4.13.16-100.fc25.x86_64.img
grub>boot

I see the LUKS unlock dialog and type the proper password, it chugs
along, and after a few I am back at the login screen. Whew!

So, I am back up and running. Now, how can I preserve these settings
so I never have to type these things again?

The fedoraproject page above suggests:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

and

grub2-install --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sda

Finally, my question: are these last two commands correct with all the
variations of EFI, GPT, LVM, LUKS etc that is my configration? After
all this, I'd really hate to write to the wrong place!




-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com

[Michael Young]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017, Ted Roche wrote:

>  Booted into Windows 10 to start the annual TurboTax stuff, and it
>  asked to do an update, as usual. It turned out the "Features Update"
>  was an entirely new version of Windows 10, Fall Creator's Update
>  update, or something.
>
>  Rebooting to go back into Fedora 25, and the boot menu is gone, replaced with:
>
>  grub>
>
>  The fedoraproject page above suggests:
>
>  grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
>
>  and
>
>  grub2-install --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sda
>
>  Finally, my question: are these last two commands correct with all the
>  variations of EFI, GPT, LVM, LUKS etc that is my configration? After
>  all this, I'd really hate to write to the wrong place! 
For EFI booting the location of grub.cfg is /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg 
which I am guessing has been corrupted by your Windows 10 update. As your 
boot gets as far as the grub2 prompt this is probably all you have to fix, 
eg.

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

You could write the output of grub2-mkconfig somewhere else first so you 
can check what it will do before you overwrite anything. eg.
grub2-mkconfig -o /tmp/grub.cfg

A good place to look for instructions is 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Updating_GRUB_2_configuration_on_UE...
which includes the line
grub2-install shouldn't be used on EFI systems
so I don't suggest you use it.

Note Fedora 25 is going EOL (today, I think) so you might want to update 
to a later version when you have everything working.

 	Michael Young

[Ted Roche]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 12:12 PM, Michael Young <m.a.young(a)durham.ac.uk&gt; wrote:
>  On Tue, 12 Dec 2017, Ted Roche wrote:
>
>
>  For EFI booting the location of grub.cfg is /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
>  which I am guessing has been corrupted by your Windows 10 update. As your
>  boot gets as far as the grub2 prompt this is probably all you have to fix,
>  eg.
>
>  grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
>
>  You could write the output of grub2-mkconfig somewhere else first so you can
>  check what it will do before you overwrite anything. eg.
>  grub2-mkconfig -o /tmp/grub.cfg
>
>  A good place to look for instructions is
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Updating_GRUB_2_configuration_on_UE...
>  which includes the line
>  grub2-install shouldn't be used on EFI systems
>  so I don't suggest you use it.
>
>  Note Fedora 25 is going EOL (today, I think) so you might want to update to
>  a later version when you have everything working.
>  
Thank you! I see the grub.cfg at that location was truncated to zero
bytes on Friday, and now it appears to be resurrected.

re: Fedora 25 EOL.  Yep, I tend to run on the trailing edge: new
features pretty soon, but avoid the heartbreak of the new distro. F26,
here I come!

Thanks again.


-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com

[Joe Zeff]

On 12/12/2017 10:25 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
>  re: Fedora 25 EOL.  Yep, I tend to run on the trailing edge: new
>  features pretty soon, but avoid the heartbreak of the new distro. F26,
>  here I come! 
I tend to stay back a little too, and wait until the early adopters have 
found all of the last minute bugs the hard way.  And, on rare occasions 
I've skipped a version because there were so many problems being reported.

[wwp]

Hello Michael,


On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:12:04 +0000 (GMT) Michael Young <m.a.young(a)durham.ac.uk&gt;
wrote:

>  On Tue, 12 Dec 2017, Ted Roche wrote:
>  
>  > Booted into Windows 10 to start the annual TurboTax stuff, and it
>  > asked to do an update, as usual. It turned out the "Features Update"
>  > was an entirely new version of Windows 10, Fall Creator's Update
>  > update, or something.
>  >
>  > Rebooting to go back into Fedora 25, and the boot menu is gone, replaced with:
>  >  
>  > grub>  
>  >
>  > The fedoraproject page above suggests:
>  >
>  > grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
>  >
>  > and
>  >
>  > grub2-install --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sda
>  >
>  > Finally, my question: are these last two commands correct with all the
>  > variations of EFI, GPT, LVM, LUKS etc that is my configration? After
>  > all this, I'd really hate to write to the wrong place!  
>  
>  For EFI booting the location of grub.cfg is /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg which I am
> guessing has been corrupted by your Windows 10 update. As your boot gets as far as the
> grub2 prompt this is probably all you have to fix, eg.
>  
>  grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
>  
>  You could write the output of grub2-mkconfig somewhere else first so you can check what
> it will do before you overwrite anything. eg.
>  grub2-mkconfig -o /tmp/grub.cfg
>  
>  A good place to look for instructions is
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Updating_GRUB_2_configuration_on_UE...
>  which includes the line
>  grub2-install shouldn't be used on EFI systems
>  so I don't suggest you use it. 
[snip]

I've experienced the same here, since then I'm no longer booting into
Windows on my (dual-boot) laptop, but fixing it afterwards doesn't seem
very satisfying, isn't it possible to prevent Windows from killing
other systems from the EFI? How come such situation where Windows can
do that?


Regards,

-- 
wwp

[Tom Horsley]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 23:51:06 +0100
wwp wrote:

>  isn't it possible to prevent Windows from killing
>  other systems from the EFI? 
That's why I run my windows 10 in a qemu virtual machine :-).

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2017-12-12 at 18:08 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
>  On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 23:51:06 +0100
>  wwp wrote:
>  
>  > isn't it possible to prevent Windows from killing
>  > other systems from the EFI?
>  
>  That's why I run my windows 10 in a qemu virtual machine :-). 
Same here. There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal, and
it's an easy way to avoid this kind of issue.

poc

[Greg Woods]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com&gt;
wrote:

>  There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal 

There is if you use Windows to play 3-D games.

--Greg

[Robert Nichols]

On 12/12/2017 05:23 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
>  
>  
>  On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com
> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>  
>      There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal
>  
>  
>  There is if you use Windows to play 3-D games. 
Or if you want to view DRM-encumbered content. (Comcast won't even let me see the TV
schedule if it can't verify that the path to the display is secure.)

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.

[Rick Stevens]

On 12/12/2017 03:23 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
>  
>  
>  On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
>  <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>  
>      There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal
>  
>  
>  There is if you use Windows to play 3-D games. 
In my experience, Windows has never played nicely with any other OS on
the disk. M$ thinks they own the world and they used either
unceremoniously evict any bootloader that wasn't theirs from the disk
or bitch loudly that the drive was used and refuse to install at all.
For those who had to have M$ on their system, my advice was to install
Windows first, reserving enough space on the disk for Linux to live in.
Second, install Linux into that reserved location. Linux would set up
grub to load Linux or chain-load Windows and Bob's your uncle.

If you must run Windows on bare metal rather than a VM, I'd use a second
disk, install Windows on it and have your BIOS boot that second drive
when you want to bring up Windows. A second drive may not work so well
on a laptop, but you could use a USB3 external drive for the times you
need Windows. This also allows you to cart your Windows environment
around with you as you move from machine to machine (and you'd only
need one license). I use a VM for Windows but I use it very rarely--
usually only if someone holds a large gun to my head or threatens my
dog. Well, that only happened once and the person threatening my dog
was, uhm, "disapeared". :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks(a)alldigital.com -
- AIM/Skype: therps2        ICQ: 22643734            Yahoo: origrps2 -
-                                                                    -
-         Okay, who put a "stop payment" on my reality check?        -
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Ed Greshko]

On 12/13/17 08:18, Rick Stevens wrote:
>  On 12/12/2017 03:23 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
> > <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> >
> >     There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal
> >
> >
> > There is if you use Windows to play 3-D games.
>  In my experience, Windows has never played nicely with any other OS on
>  the disk. M$ thinks they own the world and they used either
>  unceremoniously evict any bootloader that wasn't theirs from the disk
>  or bitch loudly that the drive was used and refuse to install at all.
>  For those who had to have M$ on their system, my advice was to install
>  Windows first, reserving enough space on the disk for Linux to live in.
>  Second, install Linux into that reserved location. Linux would set up
>  grub to load Linux or chain-load Windows and Bob's your uncle.
>
>  If you must run Windows on bare metal rather than a VM, I'd use a second
>  disk, install Windows on it and have your BIOS boot that second drive
>  when you want to bring up Windows. A second drive may not work so well
>  on a laptop, but you could use a USB3 external drive for the times you
>  need Windows. This also allows you to cart your Windows environment
>  around with you as you move from machine to machine (and you'd only
>  need one license). I use a VM for Windows but I use it very rarely--
>  usually only if someone holds a large gun to my head or threatens my
>  dog. Well, that only happened once and the person threatening my dog
>  was, uhm, "disapeared". :-) 
I don't use Windows at all.  But I have question anyway.  I thought that Windows
would complain, and maybe refuse to run, if you used an external drive and the
hardware it is running on has changed.


-- 
Fedora Users List - The place to go to speculate endlessly

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2017-12-12 at 16:23 -0700, Greg Woods wrote:
>  
>  
>  On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com&gt;
> wrote:
>  > There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal
>  
>  There is if you use Windows to play 3-D games. 
Glad you brought that up. I actually do play 3-D games on my Windows
VM, e.g. Mass Effect 3, Witcher 3, Deux Ex, Assassin's Creed,
Obduction, The Witness, Portal I and II, Talos Principal etc. all play
at close to native speed. It takes some work (at a minimum you need two
GPUs and a suitable mobo/BIOS/cpu combo) but it can be done.

poc

[Tom Horsley]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:18:39 -0800
Rick Stevens wrote:

>  In my experience, Windows has never played nicely with any other OS
> on
>  the disk. 
Not even "the" disk. I remember trying to install some version
of windows once on a completely separate disk, and the installer
would crash every time it scanned the disk because it didn't
know what the linux filesystems were on the other disks. I had
to unplug all but the windows disk to get it to install.

[Rick Stevens]

On 12/12/2017 04:27 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
>  On 12/13/17 08:18, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > On 12/12/2017 03:23 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
> >> <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> >>
> >>     There's almost no reason to run Windows on bare metal
> >>
> >>
> >> There is if you use Windows to play 3-D games.
> > In my experience, Windows has never played nicely with any other OS on
> > the disk. M$ thinks they own the world and they used either
> > unceremoniously evict any bootloader that wasn't theirs from the disk
> > or bitch loudly that the drive was used and refuse to install at all.
> > For those who had to have M$ on their system, my advice was to install
> > Windows first, reserving enough space on the disk for Linux to live in.
> > Second, install Linux into that reserved location. Linux would set up
> > grub to load Linux or chain-load Windows and Bob's your uncle.
> >
> > If you must run Windows on bare metal rather than a VM, I'd use a second
> > disk, install Windows on it and have your BIOS boot that second drive
> > when you want to bring up Windows. A second drive may not work so well
> > on a laptop, but you could use a USB3 external drive for the times you
> > need Windows. This also allows you to cart your Windows environment
> > around with you as you move from machine to machine (and you'd only
> > need one license). I use a VM for Windows but I use it very rarely--
> > usually only if someone holds a large gun to my head or threatens my
> > dog. Well, that only happened once and the person threatening my dog
> > was, uhm, "disapeared". :-)
>  
>  I don't use Windows at all.  But I have question anyway.  I thought that Windows
>  would complain, and maybe refuse to run, if you used an external drive and the
>  hardware it is running on has changed. 
Dunno. As I said, I use VMs and I move the qcow2 file around on a USB
drive. I paid for one license. I won't buy more so I can use their code
when I'm at the office or on the road. I also don't have to sync the
drive to the cloud to carry data from site to site.

That being said, the VMs on all my hosts are configured identically and,
being KVM/Qemu based, they probably look the same as far as Windows
knows because I copied the /etc/libvirt/qemu/blah.xml file around, even
though one VM host is i7-based and two are i5-based. That and I'm not
all that interested in experimenting to see what makes M$ happy.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks(a)alldigital.com -
- AIM/Skype: therps2        ICQ: 22643734            Yahoo: origrps2 -
-                                                                    -
-               The Theory of Rapitivity: E=MC Hammer                -
-                                  -- Glenn Marcus (via TopFive.com) -
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[M A Young]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017, wwp wrote:

>  Hello Michael,
>  
>  
>  On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:12:04 +0000 (GMT) Michael Young <m.a.young(a)durham.ac.uk&gt;
> wrote:
>  
>  > On Tue, 12 Dec 2017, Ted Roche wrote:
>  > 
>  > > Booted into Windows 10 to start the annual TurboTax stuff, and it
>  > > asked to do an update, as usual. It turned out the "Features Update"
>  > > was an entirely new version of Windows 10, Fall Creator's Update
>  > > update, or something.
>  > >
>  > > Rebooting to go back into Fedora 25, and the boot menu is gone, replaced with:
>  > >  
>  > > grub>  
>  > >
>  > > The fedoraproject page above suggests:
>  > >
>  > > grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
>  > >
>  > > and
>  > >
>  > > grub2-install --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sda
>  > >
>  > > Finally, my question: are these last two commands correct with all the
>  > > variations of EFI, GPT, LVM, LUKS etc that is my configration? After
>  > > all this, I'd really hate to write to the wrong place!  
>  > 
>  > For EFI booting the location of grub.cfg is /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg which I am
> guessing has been corrupted by your Windows 10 update. As your boot gets as far as the
> grub2 prompt this is probably all you have to fix, eg.
>  > 
>  > grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
>  > 
>  > You could write the output of grub2-mkconfig somewhere else first so you can check
> what it will do before you overwrite anything. eg.
>  > grub2-mkconfig -o /tmp/grub.cfg
>  > 
>  > A good place to look for instructions is
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Updating_GRUB_2_configuration_on_UE...
>  > which includes the line
>  > grub2-install shouldn't be used on EFI systems
>  > so I don't suggest you use it.
>  [snip]
>  
>  I've experienced the same here, since then I'm no longer booting into
>  Windows on my (dual-boot) laptop, but fixing it afterwards doesn't seem
>  very satisfying, isn't it possible to prevent Windows from killing
>  other systems from the EFI? How come such situation where Windows can
>  do that? 
I can't give a definite answer because I had this problem on a box but it 
has stopped happening (it is running Windows Insider on the slow ring so 
it gets updated a fair amount) and I am not sure if it was something I 
did or just coincidence. I may have tried fscking the EFI partition but I 
can't remember if that worked or made a difference.

	Michael Young