Multiboot Qubes with GRUB on a different drive

User Support
1

I have a unique use case, I mainly produce music with Windows, use Qubes for school and development, and Gentoo for everything else. This facilitates the need for a tri-boot setup, with GRUB installed on a separate Gentoo SSD which has an entry for windows. The issue is that I have not found any documentation regarding adding an entry to successfully boot Qubes from GRUB on my Gentoo install. Could anyone point me in the right direction?

I should note that I am on Qubes 4.1.0 with a strictly UEFI bios configuration (no csm).

1 Like
2

Hi,
probably Iā€™ve misunderstanded, butā€¦ have You tried to check your bios boot manager and see if UEFI entry of qubes-os isnā€™t there?
Cheers,
M.

3

Yes it does show up, but that is what iā€™m trying to avoid. Entering the BIOS boot menu is really inconvenient and makes a super loud beep. I would like to boot qubes through my gentoo install, and the grub that sits on the /boot partition of that drive, if that makes sense

4

In this case, have You tried something as:

menuentry "Boot from second disk" {
   chainloader (hd1)+1
}

or: GRUB - ArchWiki
?

Cheers,
M.

1 Like
5

Yep iā€™ve using tried that and os-prober, and both try to launch dom0 without xen or something along those lines. It also has to load with special .efi files found in /boot. Iā€™m not sure how to configure this without wrecking my other boot entries. Iā€™ll do some testing when I get home later and see what works and what doesnā€™t.

6

Did you install Qubes with a boot partition? If so, could you try this:

When GRUB loads you normal menu, press ā€˜cā€™ and type:

configfile (hdX,gptY)/efi/qubes/grub.cfg

? - If you donā€™t know X and Y, you should be able to press tab and get a list of known partitions ā€“ look for ā€œFilesystem type fatā€. If this works, I think you can do something like:

Iā€™ve not tested it, but looks like you should be able to add something like:

menuentry "Give me QUBES" {
   insmod xfs
   search --set=root --label OS1 --hint hdX,gptY
   configfile /efi/qubes/grub.cfg
}

to your normal GRUB configuration.

2 Likes
7

Thank you so much! that did it. I just had to copy /efi/qubes over to the other /efi folder and add your custom entry. Itā€™s definitely not pretty, since it loads grub again before booting, but functionality is perfect and I still have access to all of the recovery options.