Stormux CommunitiesBoot into NVMe drives from USB
submitted by peregus
Hi all, I've installed Debian in 2 (mdadm RAID 1 formtted with Btrfs) NVMe drives installed into 2 PCIe adapters. The motherboard doesn't support booting from those drives, so I've installed Debian into a USB stick (and it works) and I wanted to add into grub the RAID NVMe drives.
os-prober doesn't see the other Debian installation.
fdisk -l shows the 2 nvme drives, but it doesn't see md0:
```
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 238.47 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Disk model: SAMSUNG MZVLQ256HBJD-00BH1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 16384 bytes / 131072 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xab581c58
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 500118191 500116144 238.5G fd Linux raid autodetect
Disk /dev/nvme1n1: 238.47 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors Disk model: SAMSUNG MZVLQ256HBJD-00BH1 Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 16384 bytes / 131072 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x863fc92a
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/nvme1n1p1 2048 500118191 500116144 238.5G fd Linux raid autodetect
Disk /dev/sda: 14.32 GiB, 15376000000 bytes, 30031250 sectors Disk model: Ultra Fit Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x1d46a293
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 28028927 28026880 13.4G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 28030974 30029823 1998850 976M 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 28030976 30029823 1998848 976M 82 Linux swap / Solaris
``
mdadm --detail --scan` doesn't output anything. How do I solve this problem?
I do this, except with Ubuntu and a btrfs volume for root.
My motherboard supports UEFI, so it doesn't care where the EFI partition is. It's on a USB stick.
The way I did it was by installing to a SATA SSD and then moving the EFI partition to the usb stick and then substituting the SATA SSD with the NVMe SSD using btrfs.
I think I also needed to use reEFInd temporarily to give me an UEFI shell to do some debugging.
Oh! I also setup systemd-boot so I could trivially boot the kernel directly from UEFI, stored on the EFI partition and avoided grub altogether.
I'm sure there would be a way to do this with Debian, but I have to confess I don't know it. I have successfully done this in the past with Clover Bootloader. You have to enable an NVMe driver, but once that's done you should see an option to boot from your NVMe device. After you've booted from it once, Clover should remember and boot from that device automatically going forward. I used this method for years in a home theatre PC with an old motherboard and an NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter.
Cool, I've never hear about it, I'll test it first thing on Monday, thanks!