EFI Dual Boot Windows 10 / LibreELEC on Intel NUC (Goal=rEFInd)

1st Official Post

    Hi Guys, I am pulling my ha!r out. (why on earth is h@ir sensored??) I've walked through a hundred walk throughs. I've installed OE, LE, Win10 in various orders. I've installed rEFInd and Grub2Win (at different times) and I've gotten very close.

    I can access LE from the system boot menu in Bios mode, but not EFI mode. With both Grub (current) and rEFInd (much preferred) I get this same error on boot. I know there is a startup log somewhere that might point to why, but I have been out of linux for a long time now and need a bit of help on this last step.

    ***Error in mount_flash: mount_common: Could not mount /dev/sda0 ***

    ###Starting debuggin shell... type exit to quit ###

    sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

    #

    In /dev I see an sda and sda 1, but no sda0

    I only have the one 50gb drive in there. I installed LE first to wipe everything, then used gparted to resize the last partition to make a Win10 ntfs partition, and installed windows.

    In previous attempt I was able to install rEFInd on the machine, load the boot menu, everything was autodetected and nearly perfect, except I got the same error as above. This time I started from scratch, used Grub2Win and was able to make a crappy boot menu (rEFInd is so much nicer with the auto/find) and get to the same point. Windows is in EFI mode, and I installed LE from a USB stick in EFI mode.

    Only reason I am doing any of this is so the wife can watch webinars at home for work, which requires a windows software to be installed. the other 99% of the time this is sole a media box. Any help making this wife compatible is appreciated!

    Even is someone could point me to the boot log, or to redirect my post to a proper forum would be a big help.

    Like I said, I think I'm one line of a config file away from actually getting this to work, just need a little help

    I also notice that Whatever folders were created originally by LE, after installing windows after I think perhaps Windows overwrites the \EFI partition? I feel like after installing Windows I lose one of the partitions that LE makes. I'm rolling back to my previous setup that had rEFInd operational and I'm going to verify all the partition layout and paths, that might shed some light.

    • Official Post

    Linux does not create /dev/sda0 nodes; numbering starts at /dev/sda1 and a default install of LE will either use UUID's or boot=/dev/sda1 and system=/dev/sda2. Check the bootloader configuration for a typo.

    Thanks for the reply chewitt, maybe this will help.

    So I gave up on dual boot and tried to make my life simpler by adding Ubuntu to the mix to get better use of linux tools than LE allows. So now I have Win10 and Ubuntu working perfectly side by side, with my LE_SYSTEM partition containing the KERNEL and SYSTEM files (and verified against the MD5 files) and the LE_DATA partition in place.

    I updated the grub2 config file following the triple boot guide I found referenced in another thread on this forum and I still have some small thing wrong. Probably the same damn thing that was wrong before, but now I am actually in a fully functional Linux so I can copy and paste log files or settings or anything else that might help resolve this.

    This is what I've added for my grub config file. The menu entry is now available on boot, but I get a /KERNEL not found error.

    Code
    menuentry "LibreELEC (KODI)" {
set root=(hd0,5)
linux /KERNEL KERNEL boot=/dev/sda5 disk=/dev/sda4 quiet nosplash
}

    This is my partition list from blkid. Does anything obvious jump out to anyone?

    Here's from lsblk running in Ubuntu

    Code
    NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 59.6G  0 disk
├─sda4   8:4    0  3.9G  0 part
├─sda2   8:2    0  100M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda5   8:5    0  512M  0 part
├─sda3   8:3    0 33.4G  0 part
├─sda1   8:1    0  499M  0 part
└─sda6   8:6    0 21.3G  0 part /

    Better avoid the number game:

    Code
    menuentry "LibreELEC (KODI)" {
  insmod part_gpt
  insmod ext2
  search --set=root --label LE_SYSTEM
  linux /KERNEL boot=LABEL=LE_SYSTEM disk=LABEL=LE_DATA quiet nosplash
}
    Code
    error: file `/KERNEL' not found.

Press any key to continue...

    My ultimate goal in this is to scrap grub and just use rEFInd to manage everything, but rEFInd didn't automatically find it this time either. I haven't spent much time in this iteration looking at it's config file yet though.

    okay, so lets look at this. I mounted the LE_SYSTEM partition in Ububtu

    Code
    brainsoft@Napolinux:/media/brainsoft/LE_SYSTEM$ ls
KERNEL  KERNEL.md5  lost+found  SYSTEM  SYSTEM.md5

    Ubuntu mounts it in /media/<username> when I click it from the menu bar, name seems to match

    I have no problem bypassing grub entirely if someone can help me get rEFInd configurted properly. I've actually got it installed already, it then selects the windows installer, or the Grub depending if I select windows of linux. I understand that Linux can bootload itself, i'm just not sure yet how to point to LE directly without running through grub first. that might be easier though, because my main goal is to have LE be the default, with Windows being the secondary boot option for my wife when she's working from home, and ubuntu only there to service the boot menu and provide linux supports apps to LE

    Quote from brainsoft

    I mounted the LE_SYSTEM partition in Ububtu [...]

    That is really odd. You can try the same with grub console. On the grub boot menu press 'c' to open the console. Then:

    Code
    ls -l (hd0,5)/

    I have no experiences with rEFInd but in general you have to pass 'boot=LABEL=LE_SYSTEM disk=LABEL=LE_DATA quiet nosplash' as parameters when booting the KERNEL file.

    That showed the KERNEL and SYSTEM files as expected. I noticed there is a lost and found folder... I wonder if something did some error checking... Maybe I should wipe and replace those two partitions and the files?

    Now if anyone has any experience with rEFInd I'd love to scrap grub entirely and just have (WINDOWS, KODI, UBUNTU), from rEFInd with the nice graphic menu. Now that it's booting I just need to get it wife friendly for KODI and Windows access