Dual Boot LibreELEC and Volumio on Intel NUC

  • Hello.

    Can someone advise how could I install both LibreELEC and Volumio on the same hard drive of my Intel NUC, so that I could use a boot menu to select which one I would like to start. I can't find any solution to this problem so far.

    Thanks,

    Balazs

  • Hi Balazs,

    I didn't even hear about Volumio before but basically you need a bootloader like grub and manually placing the content on the partitions...

    On high level:

    • Get a linux live system - e.g. Ubuntu Live on USB - that has grub2 and UEFI support
    • Set UEFI and boot the live system
    • With GParted create the required partitions:
      • one fat32 ~100M for EFI (boot,efs)
      • two for LibreElec (e.g. one ext3 for boot and another, ext4 for storage, as large as you need
      • other partitions as Volumio requires
    • Update your live system and add grub-efi-amd64
    • Install grub into the first partition
    • Create your grub config for both LibreElec and Volumio
    • Copy required content on the target partitions for both libreelec and volumio
    • Enjoy!

    R, Janos

  • I would go with the solution proposed by Janos. It looks much cleaner for me and it is not a requirement to be able to use both systems at the same time. Although I am not an expert of configuring grub.

    Btw I am not sure whether LibreELEC or Volumio requires efi to boot. At least my LibreELEC is running on legacy boot and my volumio on a RBPi which is surely not efi.

  • I mentioned EFI as I think it's easier, but basically MBR could also work.

    Does your NUC support EFI?

    Do you know what partitions would be needed for Volumio? Does it boot via syslinux like LibreElec?

  • Hello.

    Yes, my NUC supports UEFI and it seems both volumio and LibreELEC can run on UEFI. I just tried it. Both of them use syslinux, so maybe I should not fight with grub2, just eg. install LibreELEC, then add the two partition for volumio, copy its files over to these partitions and add an entry for volumio to the syslinux.cfg of LibreELEC. Is that possible?

  • So here is what I did so far:

    1. Installed LibreELEC to the hard drive using the standard Installer

    2. Installed volumio to another drive

    3. mounted the volumioimg and volumio_data partitions and backed up all the files (incl. hidden, system, everything). I also got the contents of volumioboot partition, but since it seems a standard syslinux boot partition (fat32) I not used it for the final compilation, just examined what is inside of syslinux.cfg for volumio and I reused this information to expand the syslinux.cfg of LibreELEC.

    4. Resized the "Storage" partition on the hard drive of LibreELEC.

    5. Created two ex4 partitions using the free space.

    6. Copied the previously backed up volumio files to the two new partitions accordingly

    7. Mounted LibreELEC "System" partition and updated syslinux.cfg using the information I extracted from volumioboot partition.

    The problem is that it is not working. The NUC is keep booting to LibreELEC and the boot menu is not appearing at all. Here is the contents of my edited syslinux.cfg. Can you please tell me what did I missed?

    Of course I updated the imgpart=UUID for volumio accordingly (I checked the new UUID of the partition in gparted), although I don't know what bootpart=UUID is for, so I did not touched it. But as I mentioned the problem is that the menu does not appear at all.