On Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 11:28:50AM +0200, Thomas Danckaert wrote: > Hello Florian, > > thank you for your help. I managed to chroot into my system, and re-run > 'guix system reconfigure' (very useful mailing list discussion on chrooting, > I also vote for including it in documentation :) ).
I’m glad it helped so far, although I don’t know all the details about chroot nor EFI. (For example which directories from the live system should be mounted in the chroot and why.) So I won’t attempt to write documentation. > In one of the final > steps, where guix tries to install the bootloader, I get the error: > > /gnu/store/.../grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please specify > --target or --directory. This is strange. When you reconfigure, Guix should print the grub-install command that was used, which should include both --target and --directory. However, perhaps the chroot is at fault: Before chrooting to, let’s say, /mnt with chroot /mnt, you need to have mounted the /dev/sdXy file system with EFI on it (that which is declared in your config.scm) to /mnt/boot/efi. What I write below you will probably not need; you can ignore it if the above works: > Indeed my system uses grub-efi. Could that be related? Can you point me to > some specific instructions on how to check/solve efivar issues? If you have made available efivar (by installing it or by `guix environment --ad-hoc efivar` or similar), and if you have booted from an EFI bootloader, then you can run `efivar -l` to see all variables stored on your motherboard/mainboard. The motherboard NVRAM can become full. However I’m not sure how to delete such variables; I think the program efibootmgr can do it. Hopefully and likely it will not be necessary. > Not sure if I need grub-efi, or if it might also work using grub-pc. Until > now I've always used grub-efi. Some systems need EFI (and others don’t work with EFI). It is probably better to stick with EFI. > (Another thing I noticed (maybe a side effect of chroot?): when I re-run > 'guix system reconfigure' it tries to rebuild derivations that are already > there in the store from last time, I think.) Maybe they just have the same package name but are different versions, so a rebuild is necessary. But maybe also the running guix-daemon is the one from the live USB and not from the installed system. guix-daemon stores information about what is installed in a sqlite database. Now I wonder if the chroot can make changes to the wrong database and interfere with the already installed guix-daemon, making the store inconsistent. Anyway, this should not cause trouble with reconfiguring and if some inconsistency in the installed system causes trouble later on, guix gc --verify can fix it. It is not important now. Hope it helps. Regards, Florian
