cannot boot into qubes: drive not detected as boot device (EFI)

[Francesco Rmp]

Hello everyone,
thanks in advance for your support.

I'm new tu qubes but not to linux un general and i'm having a bad issue with my qubes installation.

I have a qubes 3.2 installation on an external USB drive (because $reasons) and it's not willing to boot, my system doesn't even detect it as a bootable device, for reasons i really don't know.

The partition layout is as follows:

32MB unallocated space (i think for GPT alignment reasons
192MB FAT16 EFI System partition
512MB ext4 /boot partition
my LUKS root partition
other 60MB inallocated (again i think for alignment reasons but meh, anyway who cares)

in the EFI FAT16 partition i have the following files

EFI/qubes/
initramfs-4.4.14-1.pvops.qubes.x86_64.img
vmlinuz-4.4.14-1.pvops.qubes.x86_64
xen-4.6.1.efi
xen.cfg
xen.efi

while in the /boot partition i have all the usual grub related files and kernel images.

i've tried booting into rescue mode from the installation media in an attempt to restore the grub bootloader, what i generally do in a traditional linux distro is chrooting into my installation and then manually restore grub, but in my / i can't find anything grub or grub2 related that i can use to reinstall the bootloader, so i'm a bit stuck.

any advice on how to rescue my qubes installation so that i can boot into it again?

Thanks

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Some EFI BIOSes handle external drives differently in looking for
what to boot... Try this:
1. Copy EFI/qubes/ to EFI/BOOT/
2. Rename EFI/BOOT/xen.efi to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi
3. Rename EFI/BOOT/xen.cfg to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.cfg

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[Francesco Rmp]

Hi Marek,
thank you very much for your support, you were right, i've followed your instructions and i was able to boot back into my qubes :)

now from time to time what happens is that, if i'm not booting from a completely shut down system (cold boot) i receive an error about buffer being too small and xen doesn't boot.
but that's a minor issue, as long as it boots up in the end.

again, thank you very much