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Topic: Old BIOS version stopped other distros on multiboot ssd from booting (Read 243 times) previous topic - next topic
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Old BIOS version stopped other distros on multiboot ssd from booting

A while ago I swapped the motherboard on my M4500. It all seemed to boot and work fine, using Artix on the main partition. But then I tried to boot the alternate distros on other partitions on the drive, and they wouldn't start, giving errors after the Grub screen:

Arch Linux:
error: no such device: (valid uuid of partition)
error: unknown filesystem
error: you need to load the kernel first

Press any key to continue...


5.8 Devuan Liquorix kernel:
error: invalid magic number.
error: you need to load the kernel first.

Press any key to continue...


5.2.0-18.1-liquorix-amd64 (it gave even more messages besides these)
VFS: Cannot open root device "actually the correct UUID" or unknown-block(0,0): error -6
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

But the oldest 4.19.0-0.bpo.5-amd64 kernel on the Devuan Beowulf partition did boot to the desktop.

I was using a BIOS boot gpt scheme, with the main Grub being the Artix one. I reinstalled Grub, ran update-grub, chrooted into Arch and ran mkinitcpio -P and grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg there, and tried downgrading Grub but nothing helped. It turned out that the replacement mobo was running an old A06 version BIOS. So I updated it, on this older Dell laptop I had to dd a 1.3 freedos USB image to a usb, mount the partition from the resulting image, and copy the .exe BIOS upgrade from the Dell website onto the partition (it has a bit of free space inside the image to allow this) then run the update. When I tried with the latest A15 update it initially refused and said I had to update from A06 to A08 first, which I did. After finally getting it updated to the latest A15 everything works normally again and I can boot into any of the 3 distros from the Grub menu. So it's all resolved and not really an Artix problem, however I thought it was an unusual situation and could be useful to know that the BIOS version can cause this, because sometimes people on here do seem to encounter baffling boot failures, it's something else to check.

Re: Old BIOS version stopped other distros on multiboot ssd from booting

Reply #1 –
Thank you for posting those details, could be very helpful to know one day  :)