Accessing /mnt/sysimage or /boot/efi from Rescue

User Support 4.1
#1

I have been using Qubes for some time. I did something that caused me to no longer be able to boot. I’ll spare a lot of the details here to get to my question.

I have extensively used this page, which was quite helpful. UEFI troubleshooting | Qubes OS

I am still having one issue when booting an installation thumb drive in rescue mode. Even after proceeding with decrypting my main LUKS drive (I can see it decrypted using lsblk) it says that “You don’t have any Linux paritions. Rebooting.” I’m also on TTY2.

I therefore cannot find or access /mnt/sysimage/ nor can I find /boot/efi where the files in question would be found. Is there something that I could do to access those directories? Simply mounting my EFI parition into /mnt/temp/ doesn’t give me access to all the expected files. I could find /mnt/sysimage during installation, but I can’t in rescue mode.

Thanks very much.

#2

Hi @dragoon,

Did you by any chance boot from a Windows ISO? That’s what borked my machine.

I just booted from it, and didn’t even proceed with an installation, and the ISO completely nuked by efibootmgr entries…

Microsoft, why!?!? :unamused:

That should still drop you into a recovery shell regardless.

I’ve heard reports that it’s a security feature, but it’s more security theatre than actual security…

But hey, it worked well enough for you to ask this question, so maybe it’s more effective than I thought :wink:

(When I first started using Qubes OS, it got me, too)

This should help you:

You should be able to rescue your Qubes system by mounting everything at /mnt/sysimage (or anywhere else you like).

#3

Hi @alzer89

Thanks very much for your reply. The page had some useful information on it.
The thumb drive I used was brand new in MSDOS format and I ran balenaEtcher on a Mac to create the Qubes.ISO. Is that what you mean by Windows ISO?
In the end, I got further, but couldn’t proceed, so I just ended up re-installing.
By the way, if I back up my entire Qubes computer, is there a way of restoring after a new install? (Just in case something happens in the future.)

Thanks again!

#4

Hahaha no. That wasn’t what I meant. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I meant actually booting into a Windows installer. All good.

Yeah….a lot of effort has been made to make Qubes OS difficult to boot after things have been changed in the system files.

We would have happily helped you through that part, though :slight_smile:

We’ll, that works too :slight_smile:

Qubes OS does come with its own backup and restore tool. I would recommend using that.

Yes, you can image your entire hard drive if you really want, but it’s a lot easier to use Qubes Backup (and a lot nicer too)