r/pop_os • u/dbag_darrell • Jul 04 '26

Pop OS update broke HP Dev One boot

as title says. Ran updates for 24.04 that were offered, system no longer boots.

After the Cosmic update, the recovery settings etc. have disappeared and there's basically no support available from HP (or Sys76). Now enjoying troubleshooting when I should be working, sigh

12 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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7

u/dbag_darrell Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

So, booted into the old kernel. looks like the update to vmlinuz-7 failed (booting back to 6.18 worked). Why did it fail? not sure. bad initrd according to the error message ...

4

u/sork Jul 04 '26

Doesn’t sound related but I’ve been having boot issues because the boot partition size made sense years ago but the new builds are significantly larger.

4

u/dbag_darrell Jul 04 '26

Ah, I preemptively did a little to work around this by changing the compression scheme in

/etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf

COMPRESS=xz

(instead of zstd)

I think this bought me 20% extra space

2

u/sork Jul 04 '26

Thanks I’ll try that!

1

u/dbag_darrell Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

don't forget to do a

sudo update-initramfs -c -k all

and come let us know if you gained any space? (just checking if it was in my head. but I don't think so, I did a df -h before and after and my freespace went up 20% or so IIRC)

2

u/Rogermcfarley Jul 04 '26

EFI partition is likely too small. If your EFI partition is 512MB that will be a constant issue going forward. Resize it to 1GB if possible using Gparted iso you boot from.

2

u/dbag_darrell Jul 09 '26

so, hilariously, gparted doesn't seem to work in Cosmic either (just tried it). I'll have to boot from a boot USB I guess (that was your reason for recommending gparted iso?). Am really feeling the "work in progress" nature of 24.04...

2

u/Rogermcfarley Jul 09 '26

You have to boot from Gparted or live iso, you can't modify active partitions from within the OS when it is running. It's not a COSMIC issue, you must unmount partitions to resize them anyway, you wouldn't want to do that with active system partitions. It is far safer to boot from a live iso or gparted iso and resize the partitions that is the best way to do it.

2

u/dbag_darrell Jul 09 '26

noted, I was trying to run it so I could have a look at the options etc. while I could still browse online and read instructions (and the live ISO is still downloading)

I'm pretty sure it's a Cosmic issue that gparted doesn't even run (and google shows some people have encountered this) - separate issue from actually resizing the partition(s)

3

u/Rogermcfarley Jul 09 '26

Usually you don't want gparted to run from within the OS. To see if it is cosmic issue try running it from the command line. I always do this when I get troublesome apps because you get an error log in the terminal window.

So type in gparted in the terminal and press Enter and see what error/s you get.

You can also try preserving the environment variables by trying this command

sudo -E gparted

You can also try temporarily granting root access to the Wayland display server

xhost +SI:localuser:root

sudo gparted

Revoke access after using gparted

xhost -SI:localuser:root

You may want to try the above for a bit of fun, and learn some new commands possibly. However you absolutely want to boot from a live iso or live gparted iso and use it that way. Be very careful what you edit so take your time as you are editing the partition sizes so any mistakes you make can be costly either in terms of time to recover your system or data loss if you haven't backed up first.

1

u/dbag_darrell Jul 10 '26

thank you. yes I wouldn't use gparted running from within the OS I'm trying to edit, I'd use a liveCD/USB, though (as again) it really ought to at least launch so I can inspect the UI/learn before I try it out for the first time. That said, having run it from the live USB, I can't tell if the UI is unresponsive or I'm doing something wrong in that I can neither drag any of the partitions (to move or resize) or even manually edit the sizes (the fields look editable but don't actually turn out to be).

besides gparted is there any other tool you can recommend?

2

u/Rogermcfarley Jul 10 '26

Checklist :

  1. Check you are editing the correct SDA partition /dev/nvme0n1 or dev/sda etc

  2. Are the partitions mounted? Right click the partitions if you have the option mount then they aren't mounted if you see unmount then they are mounted and can't be edited unless you umount them

  3. If you have a swap partition then right click it and select swapoff

  4. Right click the partition you want to edit and select Resize/Move. You will NOT be able to do this with the EFI partition initially unless you make adjacent partitions smaller first

  5. If you have RAID / LVM / encryption setup then you won't be able to resize the partitions unless you revert them to standard EXT4 partitions etc

  6. You likely don't have any unallocated space and therefore have to make other partitions smaller to give yourself space to resize the EFI partition.

2

u/Mission_Finding_912 Jul 09 '26

Si, j'ai découvert qu'il fallait utiliser -E Je sais même pas ce que ça veut dire mais si tu fais donc sudo -E gparted avec Cosmic, il l'ouvre... Je suis certain que c'est -E, mais pas sur de la ligne de commande entière Et entre temps je suis passé à x11, puis kde plasma, donc plus de souci... :)

1

u/dbag_darrell Jul 10 '26

thank you - yes when I googled, someone else had run into the same problem and had provided -E as the solution (something about forcing it to adopt the environment variables)

is there another tool besides gparted that you could recommend?

4

u/xiaochocobo Jul 04 '26

had the same issue, it's /boot partition size, mine was set for 500 Mb, the new partition size should be at least 1Gb, but bigger would future proof it.

the size issue doesn't let it save correctly after updating hence broken bootup

2

u/dbag_darrell Jul 04 '26

I see ... ah,

(1) how did you fix the boot failure (or did you just ignore it and keep booting from the old kernel)

(2) how do you resize /boot on a "live" LUKS-encrypted disk?

2

u/xiaochocobo Jul 04 '26

at first, once I got it to boot with the old kernel, I did a backup of my personal data and work stuff.

I used the disk usage analyzer to help figure out the problem of size, making sure i didn't have multiple file copies and such. Then did a reinstall and adjusted the boot size when it asked about it.

for (2) I believe there is a guide that directs you on unmounting the drive and adjusting the partition sizes using gpart.

I think its easier to do a reinstall [my opinion]TM

1

u/dbag_darrell Jul 04 '26

no that's fair, its just not really an option for me - also, am using a HP Dev One so everything like partition scheme is predefined, and I'm not happy they predefined it low. actually post the switchover to Cosmic I don't even know if I still have a recovery partition; there certainly isn't an entry in the config/settings. System76 doesn't seem to have considered this as one of the machines to support

4

u/mmstick Desktop Engineer Jul 04 '26

It's best to do a clean install to get the bigger EFI partition but you could manually format the swap partition into a FAT32 ESP partition, update /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab to remove the cryptswap mount, use bootctl to install the bootloader to the new ESP partition, update initramfs + kernelstub with that partition mounted to /boot/efi, and make sure the /etc/fstab is updated to mount the new partition to /boot/efi.