Hi Mathieu,

Mathieu <matf@disr.it> writes:

> Dear Guix users,
>
> For some reason, still to be understood, my EFI partition is no longer
> detected at boot and I cannot boot my existing Guix System. I could confirm
> that the Guix partition (encrypted) is fine, but my BIOS won't detect any
> bootable partition. Turns out my `/dev/nvme0n1p1` partition only contains a
> single file: `EFI/Guix/grubx64.efi`.

It could be broken 'nvram' of a motherboard. Because of that happened to
me on a single UEFI motherboard, personally I try not to use it at all,
but use all available disks instead.

With current Guix I'm not sure it is supported by the distribution. If
anyone would like to implement it in the upstream, here is my
configuration which I use [1] hopefully 'nvram' is not touched at all on
'guix system reconfigure' and survive a disk failure.

[…]

> This looks like a bug since I did everything the guide indicates. Can anyone
> reproduce it and confirm that chrooting into an existing Guix installation to
> reconfigure and rescue the system does not work? Is there something missing in
> the how-to to prevent the D-bus crash? Would there be another way to save my
> system, i.e., reinstalling Guix from scratch on another SSD and then `dd` the
> LUKS partition from the broken SSD onto the root partition of the new one?

I could recommend to delete everything not required for a boot from the
configuration file and try to reconfigure again (warning that you will
probably get permission errors after adding those services again which
will require to 'chown' their state directories).

Another way to recover is reinstalling Guix from scratch, but it's
possible to do this without reformating or using another drive. Just
move every directory in your '/' to '/old-system' and proced regular
installation.


[1]: guix 1f734a6
       repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
       branch: master
       commit: 1f734a6f0a7db5b0e12091a0c869c5c4810ac80e