Could a Useful Boot Drive Utility Be Developed?

[JusGellin]

It seems that sometimes when trying to make a drive connection in order to boot from a drive of any kind can be a difficult problem to resolve especially for a newcomer like myself.

Wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of standalone utility that could test possible drive connections in different ways that could make booting possible whether it is bios or efi. Perhaps it could give a report for what it sees as far as booting. It wouldn't even have to completely boot up and could list a report for what it saw. I was thinking about this with some problems I had in booting from a thumb drive. It turned out that the problem was that the attribute pdrv was set up to a partition label and instead required the UUID.

Has anyone ever developed something like this as a tester for what works to connect to drives to make them boot? I'm just wondering. I don't have the experience to do this but I think it would be so useful and could save a lot of time.

Thanks

[JusGellin]

That probably wouldn't work as easily as it sounds. If the utility were on a thumb drive, that would only look as what it takes to boot a thumb drive. I'm not sure that it could do any more than that.

[Geek3579]

I'm not sure exactly what you are after, but to test the booting of an HDD or USB I use QEMU (running in a frugal BookwormPUP64, FYI).

This will attempt to boot a drive of either EFI or BIOS configuration.
A simple script to boot a suspected EFI drive is:
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4G \
-smp 4 -bios /usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd -hda /dev/sdX \
-cpu host -vga std -usb -device usb-tablet -device AC97

Given that OVMF.fd is pre-installed from the PPM, and sdX could be sdc, sdd etc
For a non EFI boot, just have the following in the second line: -smp 4 -hda /dev/sdX \

[Clarity]

... something like this as a tester for what works to connect to drives to make them boot? ... I think it would be so useful and could save a lot of time.

GRUB2 already does this using commands such as those found in a Linux terminal.

The GRUB commands available at its prompt are listed here. ALSO at the GRUB prompt, you can type "help" for a list.

When at the GRUB2 menu of a forum distro, drop out to the GRUB prompt. There you can use commands like "ls" to see all the drives the PC has. Further you can make choices there to boot the PC as well. There is a whole-host of terminal commands at one's disposal at the prompt.

This is "why" I have advocated in the past that the default boot menu of forum distros should be GRUB2 for the benefit it affords to review and or change things to control beyond what a distro's boot menu does not show the user. It gives power and control to the admin/developer/user when needed.

Hope this info is useful.

[JusGellin]

Thanks @Geek3579 and @Clarity

This is what I needed. I want to get more familiar with understanding this part of it so I can troubleshoot better -> drive problems. I see on the forum even, there are numerous questions for why a person can't boot up.

Thanks also for directing me to those commands and as always I should start with help to find more.

[Clarity]

.. I see on the forum even, there are numerous questions for why a person can't boot up. ...

This is the very reason I have put together the effort to use Ventoy+SG2D. Most users, at various times, run into issues of extractions from ISOs and changes to system boot managers as well as initrd errors in some releases causes almost ALL of the 'numerous' you refer.

So, my efforts have been to reduce those issues to the singularity of what the developers deliver without ANY efforts of movement or boot-manager changes on PC in any effort to get to a forum distro's desktop.

So, it has been reduced to merely download a forum's ISO file and boot it directly: NO extractions, NO system boot-manager changes allowing the user to get to desktop without user changes of ISO/system contents changes. Thus, if there is a problem, it is NOT a user problem and is a problem directly attributed to the ISO built by the developer.

There is NO need to do extractions or system-level changes to operate a forum frugal behavior: This is achieved directly out of the ISO file booting.

Again, the intent has never been to change how things were done; rather the intent is to reduce/eliminate user errors that YOU refer.

In any event, my efforts offers a user a choice to not experience the numerous you refer.

ISO file booting is legitimate and proven over the years.

And can be simply achieved by any one of the 3 ISO File Launchers I have spoken to, over the years.