Hi, I am sorry to hear that your FreedomBox went down. Let's get it back up.
New Images not working ----------------------Regarding new images not booting on apu2 and apu1d4, please note that the newer images for amd64 require UEFI for booting. I don't know if the APUs support UEFI booting. They likely do. Reach the BIOS of the machine (connect to a monitor and keyboard, start the machine, and press the BIOS key which is F1, F8, F10, F12 or DEL keys usually), then find the booting options and enable UEFI booting. In case APUs don't support UEFI booting, you can still run FreedomBox on them by using the Debian installer and choosing the FreedomBox Home Server Blend during installation in the final task selection step (this is new with Trixie). It will ask some questions by just leave everything to default.
Recovering Grub boot failure ----------------------------It is likely that the distribution upgrade process was interrupted leading to the grub boot failure.
To recover, please connect the failed disk to another machine (using USB, or SD card reader) and run the following commands (roughly):
# lsblk (to note the disks and partitions on the effected drive) # mount <root_partition_device> /mnt # mount <boot_partition_device> /mnt/boot (usually not need in x86/amd64) # mount <efi_parition_device> /mnt/boot/efi (only on newer EFI disk images) # mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc # mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys # mount -o bind /dev/ /mnt/dev # mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts # chroot /mnt # dpkg --configure -a # apt -f install # apt full-upgrade # upgrade-grub # grub-install <disk_device> # exit # umount /mnt/dev/pts # umount /mnt/dev/ # umount /mnt/sys # umount /mnt/proc # umount /mnt/boot/efi # umount /mnt/boot # umount /mnt Now, eject the disk and try to boot with it. Restoring/downloading backup from remote ----------------------------------------Typically, on a new installation, one can setup a remote backup location in FreedomBox -> System -> Backup and Restore. After the location is you can list all the archives in the backup location. You can restore or download those archives as you choose.
Network connection restoration ------------------------------If you have placed files into /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections and boot your FreedomBox image, then those connections will be used until FreedomBox starts. Then it sets up its own connections and actives them. Sorry, I see there is scope of a lot of improvement in this situation. One way to overcome this is to create /etc/network/interfaces file and do all your configuration there (in Debian style) in that case Network Manager will not touch those interfaces despite FreedomBox's attempts to configure them.
Proxy Error -----------The proxy error you are seeing happens when the backup application is not running or failed to start (in this case it is likely the FreedomBox service). You can check it's status and get the logs:
# systemctl status plinth.service # journalctl -u plinth.service Further Help ------------I am available on IRC and Matrix channels should you require urgent assistance. Feel free to reach out to me.
-- Sunil On 9/10/25 18:09, A. F. Cano via Freedombox-discuss wrote:
The dist-upgrade of a few days ago made the FreedomBox totally inaceessible. Just tried to boot it on an old laptop and I get: Grub loading... Welcome to GRUB1 error symbol 'grub_disk_native_sectors' not found. grub rescue> What do I need to enter there? I can mount it on my desktop under /media, but what can I do to recover the bootable status? This was the latest attempt. Before that I tried an old testing FreedomBox from about a year ago. It booted but needed massive upgrades. I replaced testing with trixie in /etc/apt/sources.list, did the modernization that was called for and kept upgrading, but the upgrades kept using up more and more memory, freezing it, making it inaccessible. I kept cockpit running to keep an eye on what was going on and upgrading via ssh. After many tries, it seemed that I was in the final round and the upgrade removed network manager and everything froze. Since then I haven't been able to access that FreedomBox image. Then I installed a brand new image on a brand new SD card. Neither the trixie imeage nor the testing image even appeared to boot. I tried them on a spare FreedomBox (apu2) from a computer with the interface manually configured to appear as 10.42.0.3 since I read that a newly-installed FreedomBox can be reached from a browser at 10.42.0.1. Then I mounted it and manually copied the files I had saved a long time ago into /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections: FreedomBox WAN FreedomBox LAN enp2s0 FreedomBox LAN enp3s0 This sets the IP addresses for the internal networks. In the past, this pre-configuration has allowed me to access a new FreedomBox from the existing internal networks (192.168.200.x and 192.168.224.x), but I'm not quite sure how those are interpreted on first boot. In any case, it appears that all these newly created FreedomBox images don't boot, not on the apu1d4 (the all-important main FreedomBox), not on the apu2 with the testing computer at 10.42.0.3, and not on the laptop. Even though the boot subsystem on the latter recognizes a USB HD, if I select it, it boots the OS on the HD, and the mouse doesn't work. While it booted and was accessible, I tried many times to do a restore of my user data. I all cases it failed at the very end (the tar file was about 3.6GN) and there was no file left to restore. Maybe this was caused by old versions of software, so I kept upgrading until the last attempt bricked the whole thing by deleting network manager and somehow making it unbootable. This is the error: (when the upload failed) Proxy Error The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request Reason: Error reading from remote server Apache/2.4.58 (Debian) Server at fbx Port 443 This happened both with and without privoxy, so the proxy is at least misleading. As a side note, it would really be helpful if the documentation (at the FreedomBox itself) specified the steps one must take at the host where the remote backups are kept. I had to install borg backup and then run the commands (from a post I found) $ borg list /path/to/backup and then copy/paste the last backup into $ borg export-tar /path/to/backup::"<name of backup>" Even better would be if the FreedomBox did an ssh remote command of the first one, presented the user with the output and allowed the selection of a backup, that would then be put as part of the second command that would also be remotely executed. I then wiped the old testing FreedomBox and put brand new images on that SD card (256 GB, the other 2 are 128). Neither the stable nor testing images seemed to boot. arp-scan never detected any, in either the main network (192.168.200.x) or the test network (10.42.0.x) So, tried 2 separate SD cards one brand new and one that used to boot and neither seems to now. Tried testing and stable images on both networks and neither are visible to arp-scan and of course are not accessible by either IP or freedombox.local, as the manual says it should be. For completeness, this is how I burned the images, just like the web page says: xz -d freedombox-trixie-amd64.img.xz sudo dd bs=1M if=freedombox-trixie-amd64.img of=/dev/sdf conv=fdatasync status=progress sudo ifconfig enp3s 10.42.0.3 (setting of the interface on the test computer) What am I doing wrong? Why does nothing show on arp-scan? Why does nothing appear to boot? Why do the browsers keep saying "Unable to connect? Even when typing 10.42.0.1 or http://10.42.0.1 they all insist on https. This is quite urgent, my whole network is out of commission. Can anyone suggest something to try or how to fix any of these issues? Once I get the FreedomBox to its working state with all the data backed up, I intend to keep an SD card plugged into my main computer and regularly do a unison sync between the live, running FreedomBox and this backup, so the backup is ready to go if the main one fails. This was an absolute disaster. Thanks for reading this far. I eagerly await any suggestion. Augustine _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
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