Proxmox VE 5.3 installer overwriting existing EFI boot variables

[geppi]

I decided that it would be a good idea to install Proxmox VE 5.3 to a USB thumb drive just as a rescue system which would enable me to independently mount my zfs rpool from the SSD mirror.

So I plugged in a USB thumb dive with the Proxmox installer and another thumbdrive to install to.
Everything worked fine until I wanted to boot back into the Proxmox system on the SSDs.
Ooops, the boot entries to do this in the EFI BIOS were gone.

Luckily it was a piece of cake to fix this with efibootmgr from the system that I had just installed onto the USB thumb drive.

Is it intended behaviour that the Proxmox installer does overwrite existing EFI boot viariables ?

Maybe it did this to confirm what a good idea it was to have Proxmox also installed onto a USB thumb drive for emergency cases ?

 

[dcsapak]

yes, we call grub-install with a bootloader-id of 'proxmox' which of course gets overwritten

 

[geppi]

This I understand, but it also wiped out the boot variable for 'proxmox-2', which was the entry to boot from the second SDD of the rpool mirror.

Apart from that it would be a nice feature if one could define the name of the bootloader in the installer, which could default to 'proxmox'.

 

[Rob Loan]

perhaps do a grub-install --removable on both and control the boot order in bios.

 

[geppi]

not sure how that should help to prevent the Proxmox installer from wiping out the existing boot variables in the EFI NVRAM

 

[Rob Loan]

It wouldn't, but by using the fallback boot loader (efi/boot/BOOTx64.EFI), the bios will automatically make a bootable entry in bios, and you can ignore the proxmox variable and select whatever disk you want to boot from the list of automatically created fallback boot loaders.