After update over 2014.2, OMV LX 3.0 installation refuses to activate swap and do not allow for dual boot

Support
1

The problems are that dual boot is no longer possible since grub does not exhibit the Windows boot option anymore and, as can be seen in recovery mode, SWAP is not activated. The old OMV 2014.2 (and before) did not have these problems. This computer has not secure boot activated. This was a fresh install via OMV LX 3.0 live mode button.

I’ve updated OMV 2014.2 to 3.0 at a computer with a SSD (120 GB) and a HDD(3TB) originally configured as

SSD partition 1 - MBR+Windows
SSD partition 2 - Linux root /

HDD partition 1 - 400 GB Windows data
HDD partition 2 - 10 GB SWAP + partition 3 - 2.59TB /home

During installation, I’ve followed the recomendation to create a partition /boot/efi as to avoid initialization problems. I did it resizing the SWAP partition to 8GB and used the freed 2GB for the /boot/efi (marked as “esp”). I also formatted the SSD partition 2 as a f2fs file system.

2

So far, no luck. The error wiith activation of the swap area suggests to issue the command,

$ systemctl status “dev-disk-by\x2duuid-08d8342d\x2dce2f\x2d4e95\x2d97df\x2d2fd965885690.swap”

for more details. here is its output:

● dev-disk-by\x2duuid-08d8342d\x2dce2f\x2d4e95\x2d97df\x2d2fd965885690.swap - /dev/disk/by-uuid/08d83
Loaded: loaded (/etc/fstab; generated; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2016-12-15 18:08:50 BRST; 3h 17min ago
What: /dev/disk/by-uuid/08d8342d-ce2f-4e95-97df-2fd965885690
Docs: man:fstab(5)
man:systemd-fstab-generator(8)

Warning: Journal has been rotated since unit was started. Log output is incomplete or unavailable.

That is, the system is running without the swap. So far, hopeless.

Would a reinstallation help?

3

I’m pretty sure a fresh install of Lx 3.0 would work better than an upgrade of a 2014.x system.
From the Release Notes:

"Upgrading to OpenMandriva Lx 3.0

Currently for 3.0 a fresh install is recommended. There is an update script in development. Sorry for any inconvenience."

https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/3.0/Release_Notes

You might even consider using a Lx 3.01 .iso as there will be much fewer packages updates after install. Lx 3.01 is just a Lx 3.0 respin with updated packages. 3.01 is Alpha still in testing but works just fine here.

https://abf.openmandriva.org/platforms/3.0/products/38/product_build_lists/695

4

I did a fresh install of OMV LX 3.0. My english is poor, I thought update over 2014.2 meant I did it.

If I need to reinstall I will try Lx 3.01.

But for now,
I’ve noticed /etc/fstab has no line for Windows’ partitions and then a simple grub2-mkconfig wouldn’t help to optionally boot windows.

Have no clue of what caused Swap not being activated.

Since systemd seems not to work as expected, I guess I should look for systemd errors.

5

To fix multi-boot issue:

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

and reboot. For some reason the grub2 script in installer does not pick up Windows systems. This is a bug and should be reported.

To activate swap:

# swapon -a

to check swap:

# swapon -s
6

ben79

Thanks but no luck yet,

The command grub2-mkconfig went OK but it has not changed anything. I think it would work if /etc/fstab had windows entries. For some reason it has nothing about windows partitions C and D, although both are mounted according to OMCC managing of disks.

The command swapon -a returns
swapon: /dev/sdb2: swapon failed: Invalid argument

I guess there is something wrong with systemd since other problems related to it are also present.

The command systemctl --failed returns just reference to the swap activation

UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION
● dev-disk-by\x2duuid-08d8342d\x2dce2f\x2d4e95\x2d97df\x2d2fd965885690.swap loaded failed failed /dev

LOAD = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.

1 loaded units listed. Pass --all to see loaded but inactive units, too.
To show all installed unit files use ‘systemctl list-unit-files’.

7

On the SWAP side of the problem I’ve found something that changed things:

from there I tried (hope translations to english are fine):

$ mkswap /dev/sdb2
mkswap: /dev/sdb2: Warning: erasing old swap signatures.
Configuring swap space version 1, size = 8 GiB (8589930496 bytes)
no label, UUID=688f211b-ee80-4dd4-bd0e-3a2ec00ad108

$ swapon -a
swapon: It was not possible to find the device for UUID=08d8342d-ce2f-4e95-97df-2fd965885690

Then, alternatively,

$ swapon -v /dev/sdb2
swapon: /dev/sdb2: found signature [page size=4096, signature=swap]
swapon: /dev/sdb2: pagesize=4096, swapsize=8589934592, devsize=8589934592
swapon /dev/sdb2

and checking,

$ swapon -s
File name Type size Used Priority
/dev/sdb2 partition 8388604 0 -1

However, it does not activate on boot. Now, boot takes about two or three minutes in a SSD device that used to boot in just few seconds. About 1:30 min are spent in a kind a verification of a device that I guess is the swap partition and then it fails to activate it.

It can be activated as it was done before with swapon -v /dev/sdb2. Still considering a reinstallation with the new iso.

8

Just noticed that UUIDs don’t match:

from mkswap,

" … Configuring swap space version 1, size = 8 GiB (8589930496 bytes)
no label, UUID=688f211b-ee80-4dd4-bd0e-3a2ec00ad108 "

and from swapon -a

" …It was not possible to find the device for UUID=08d8342d-ce2f-4e95-97df-2fd965885690"

the former is what blkid returns for the swap partition and the later is what is written in /etc/fstab?

Is it expected?

9

To fix this I suggest to go back to your original post. Something you did while installing is likely the problem.

Is your system UEFI or Legacy BIOS? Is partition table GPT or MBR?

Is this the first time you created a /boot/efi partition? Did you have one for 2014?

/boot/efi is only needed for UEFI systems. /boot/efi partitions don’t carry much, the recommenced size is 512MB but they are often smaller I have one on a notebook that is 100MB that works just fine. But I’m thinking that you probably don’t need one at all. If you didn’t have it for 2014 then you don’t need it for Lx 3. I have no idea why your swap isn’t working. I almost never see swap used because of increases in RAM and settings in ‘/proc/sys/vm/swappiness’. You can open KSysGuard sometime and follow swap usage and you’ll see. That being said I have a 5GB swap partition myself.

So I would suggest a reinstall where you go back to what you have done previously that worked. Go back to what works unless and until there is a reason to change. I would suggest to use ext4 file system also until the other issues are resolved. I have an SSD and have tried f2fs and btrfs but did not see any advantage or improvement that I could notice.

10

The command mkswap did the change of UUID’s. For compatibility, I changed /etc/fstab accordingly.

11

I checked BIOS and it has a BOOT EFI assigned. I’ll check if this is a GPT but almost sure it is because it allowed for more than 2 partitions in a single drive.

Yes, I did not have any /boot/efi in the 2014.2 installation, but the 3.0 installer “told me” " …that otherwise the system could not boot ".

After mkswap command and changing /etc/fstab, swap is being activated on boot.

Don’t have idea of what means those 1:30 minutes during boot, it is said something like,

“A starting job is running for device …” and then,

Timed out waiting for device dev-disk-by\x2duuid-08d8342d\x2dce2f\x2d4e95\x2d97df\x2d2fd965885690.device.

Finally, mouse and keyboard only returns to their steady state after I unplug and re-plug them.

Maybe I don’t wait on the new iso…

12

About partitions:

SSD is a MSDOS type of partion
HDD is a GPT type of patition

and it was like this with 2014.2 too.

13

Reinstale:
It dosn’t have the option to put GRUB on MBR, does it?

14

As far a booting I don’t know this is over my head now. Not familiar with different drives on same machine having different partition table types. That seems wrong but I don’t really know. I’d want to know answer to that before filing a bug report. Otherwise it is probably bug report time.

The mkswap was a good one on your part. I learned something there.

There are commands to find out what is taking time on booting but since you have 1:30 I’d write down the whole message. It looks like its looking for a partition that isn’t there. Is the uuid in the error the uuid for the old swap? Do you have 2 swap entries in /etc/fstab?

15

I’ve reinstall OMV LX 3.0 and, after some corrections, everything seems fine now!

Thus, it follows a summary of what I did, what happened, and so on. It is a kind of a long report but I don’t want to skip some points.

My desktop has a SDD (MBR boot, MSDOS partitions) with Window 8 (ntfs) and OMV 3.0 (f2fs), and a HDD (no boot, GPT partitions) with Windows 8 (ntfs data), Linux Swap, and /home.

This disks configurations were probably chosen because it had Windows 7 which was not EFI boot compatible (??). I just kept this after updating to Windows 8.

I guess this is correct although unusual today.

In the first attempt to fresh install OMV 3.0, the installer “told me” that I should have a /boot/efi partition otherwise the computer could not boot. Thus I had created one resizing the swap partition. In this fresh reinstallation I just remove that /boot/efi partition and ignored the advice of non booting installation.

Step by Step:

1-In live mode, reinstalled OMV 3.0 with no /boot/efi and marking SWAP partition to format. This is probably necessary because I resized it back to 10 Gb. I had not formatted SWAP in the first installation and this was probably the cause for SWAP not being activated. [quote=“ben79, post:14, topic:850”]
The mkswap was a good one on your part
[/quote]
Mkswap probably did what formatting woud have done at first place.

Upon rebooting, as expected, the computer did not boot.

2 - MBR repair using the Window 8 installation disk. Details of this step are, I guess, out of the scope of this forum. It is really simple to do it as can be seen at,

3 - GRUB2 installation at MBR - This was tricky since I don’t know much of everything after all. For references on this see,

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=201380

Using OMV 3.0 in live mode, I opened a konsole and type,

$ mount /dev/sdaX /mnt

where /dev/sdaX is the device with my OMV LX 3.0 installation. This step was necessary to avoid problems in “path of overlay” to grub2-install command. Next, I typed,

$ grub2-install --target=i386-pc --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

and grub2 was finally installed at MBR without errors about any EFI booting partitions! Why didn’t OMV installation disk do it?

Now, GRUB2 was in MBR but not configured yet. I did not succeed to configure it using commands like

$ grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg

in live mode, as suggested in the arch-linux support reference above, and decided to reboot any way.

I got a grub prompt and the idea was to boot the OMV 3.0 installation I already had to finally configure grub2. I followed this reference,

First I did,

grub > ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)

to confirm,

grub> ls (hd0,msdos2)

and got information about OMV Lx 3.0.

then I did (with X=2 in my case),

grub> set root=(hd0,X)
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-4.6.5-desktop-1omv root=/dev/sdaX
grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img-4.6.5-desktop-1omv
grub> boot

The Tab completion is on in this environment so, I simply typed vmlinuz and tab+completion did the rest.
And finally booted OMV LX 3.0, and in a konsole,

$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Done.

16

Hope the new OMV LX 3.0.1 installation iso can help people like me to install grub2 at MBR disk if no /boot/efi is available. At last, the 2014.0 installer did it without any problem.

17

Well done.

Question: When I install I boot from flash drive (usb stick) and in my BIOS am offered two options to boot in to the .iso. One is labeled UEFI and the other isn’t. I know that if you have a UEFI system you must boot the UEFI entry in BIOS or it will not work. I’m wonder if the reverse is true for Legacy/MBR systems. Which way did you boot?

18

Not sure what is the proper answer. I don’t think I really understand the question. Let me try to answer,

I’m talking about my desktop, where I had the problems that motivated these posts.
The first thing we see when pressing F2(to Bios) is that the boot option is UEFI (or EFI? I’ll check later). I use a DVD to install the system. The partitions with Linux and Windows system files are of MSDOS type located at a SDD with MBR boot.
I can look for more information to properly answer later on today. Please, let me know if and what to look for.