After installing Qubes on external scandisk extreme portable SSD 500Gb using Lenovo Ideacentre AIO core i7 16Gb memory. Now
Unable to boot Qubes from the external scandisk extreme portable SSD 500Gb even though I disable secure boot
id
Hello @mens,
What errors are you seeing? Any logs you can provide about your errors can help diagnose the problem. You should also review the Installation Troubleshooting document to see if the problem you are experiencing is mentioned there.
Regards,
John
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Hello @JTeller3
Thanks for your prompt respond, there were no error messages, nothing, when i select the external scandisk extreme portable SSD 500Gb from BIOS to boot it shows blank screen with cursor blinking about 4 times, then it switches to boot windows 10 instead. I reviewed the installation troubleshooting, turn off safe boot, and also selected to boot from USB under Update & Security > Recovery all did not work.
Regards
Ben
Apologies for the delay, I have been busy with my own troubleshooting woes.
It sounds like you are dual-booting from the external SSD drive. Is that correct? If so, then have you consulted the Qubes OS documentation on multibooting (GitHub mirror here)?
If you otherwise believe that you have successfully installed Qubes OS (no “Pane is dead” fatal error or other failure during installation), you can boot into the live system on the Qubes Installer, either by booting into the Installer and pressing CTRL+ALT+F2 to get a shell or by booting into the rescue disk mode from the GRUB screen, and chroot your way into the disk to check the GRUB configuration and other settings. You can also inspect the state of your drive from the live system, either with the tools provided by it or from within the chroot jail, though be very careful to not do anything that may destroy the partitioning or partition table on the SSD or otherwise touch the Windows installation.
If you decide to do so, here is what you need to do to chroot into your Qubes installation and where to look for the relevant files. This assumes you have already located a shell in the live system and have plugged in your external drive.
# check the device tree to orient yourself and
# locate the Qubes OS root partition, which is
# likely to be the LUKS-encrypted one if you
# enabled LUKS encryption
lsblk -f
# unlock the LUKS volume (skip if unencrypted)
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/$ROOT_PARTITION # such as /dev/sdb2
# activate LVM volumes if deactivated and verify
vgchange -ay qubes_dom0
lsblk -f
# mount the root partition
mount /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root /mnt
# mount the boot partition (optional - only needed
# if you intend to update GRUB or the initramfs)
mount /dev/$BOOT_PARTITION /mnt/boot # usually the partition preceding the root partition, like /dev/sdb1
# prepare to chroot
mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
mount -o bind /run /mnt/run
# chroot into Qubes OS
chroot /mnt
--
# to exit chroot
exit
# clean up afterward
umount /mnt/boot
umount /mnt/proc
umount /mnt/sys
umount /mnt/dev
umount /mnt/dev/pts
umount /mnt/run
umount /mnt
# shutdown computer
shutdown now
After chrooting into the system, you can cat or nano or vi or whatever you want to any of the files. The GRUB configuration settings file is located at /etc/default/grub and the actual configuration file is at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg (notice the “2” in “grub2”, specifying GRUB2 is a Red Hat/Fedora convention). This assumes you are using legacy MSDOS/BIOS boot; UEFI boot will not have this and I think the xen.cfg will instead be located in the EFI directory. To reconfigure GRUB after modifying its settings, run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. To reconfigure initramfs after modifying Dracut, dracut --force is sufficient. All of this only works while chrooted in Qubes OS and while /boot is properly mounted.
If you come across any more information that might help us troubleshoot further, such as error logs or odd configuration settings or more unexpected behavior, let us know. I wish I had more for you, but I’m just as mystified as you are.
Hope this helps,
John