Re: Installing Guix System on an external hard drive

[Marius Bakke]

Jan <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 15 Nov 2019 15:49:23 +0100
> Marius Bakke <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Did you get the same error when you mounted at /boot/efi?
> Yes.
>
>> If you want the USB drive to be 'portable', i.e. not tied to a single
>> system, you can not use 'grub-efi-bootloader'.  The reason is that
>> grub-efi relies on updating UEFI firmware variables *on the running
>> system*, to make the newly installed bootloader show up in the UEFI
>> boot menu.
>> 
>> For the same reason, it is not possible to use it on a non-UEFI
>> system.
>> 
>> It would be good to have a 'grub-standalone-bootloader' procedure that
>> would write a self-contained UEFI firmware executable to a standard
>> location, similar to what Guix does for disk images:
>> 
>> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/build/vm.scm?id=4dcf32b56b824efcdb181c9f4cc7ee6c8a0ba125#n399
>> 
>> Would you like to try implementing it?
>
> Well, I could try as a Scheme learning exercise, but it would take me
> some time, because I'm a fresh Guile coder and the only thing I know
> about UEFI is that it has a buggy implementation on my motherboard and
> GRUB goes to hell :)
> Any hint where could I start?

I would start by copying an existing bootloader from
gnu/bootloader/grub.scm and make it run 'grub-mkstandalone' as in the
above URL.

Hope this helps!
Marius

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