Dual-trisquel install on two disks and UEFI

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Avron

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Iscritto: 08/18/2020

On my laptop that uses UEFI to boot, I have Trisquel on one disk, and I tried to install Trisquel also on a second disk. However, after the install is finished and I reboot, in the UEFI menu, there is only one Trisquel and it boots to the Trisquel instaled on the second disk.

For some reason, the second install has created an EFI partition on the second disk, but it has used the EFI partition of the first disk, and it has created /boot/efi/EFI/trisquel/grubx64.efi, overriding the previous one. I chrooted in the original install of Trisquel, ran grub-update and this has overriden that file again, then after reboot, I still have a single Trisquel entry but it boots into Trisquel on the first disk.

Is there a way to make it so that I have an entry for each in the UEFI menu? I am guessing that the UEFI menu can only look into a single EFI partition, but would there be a way to make grub use a different name than Trisquel, so that the file in the EFI partition does not override the one from the other Trisquel? Of course, I'd like that the modified name persists in case of any later grub update.

sam-d16
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Iscritto: 09/28/2023

Hello Avron.
Tell me please, did you have the opportunity to choose where to install grub of the second disk during the graphical installation?

Avron

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Iscritto: 08/18/2020

I first tried the triskel installer but Xorg was crashing (or killed) rather early during install (this is the computer on which I have problems with Xorg), so I used the net installer.

I cannot remember whether there was any option for grub. I see that there is /boot/efi/EFI/trisquel/grubx64.efi and /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI, that are exactly identical. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Startup_on_systems_using_UEFI_firmware, grub creates a /efi/<distro>/grubx64.efi file, so twice the same distro in the same EFI partition cannot work, unless I manage to change the files they generate, but that might be tricky.

In https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=392308, I found an interesting explanation that in the second install, the installer creates a second EFI partition but uses the one on the first disk, which is exactly what happened. The suggested trick is interesting, but now that the system is already installed, I guess I could just change /boot/efi in /etc/fstab of the second system to use the second EFI partition, chroot and run grub-update.

However, what I am not sure about is the entry in NVRAM, whether I need to do it manually with efibootmgr and, if I put "Triskel" as name rather than "Trisquel", at later updates, whether it will keep working or not. I guess I will just try.