I had some memory failures in my old system so instead of replacing the memory, I’m replacing the entire hardware (newer laptop). The old laptop used Legacy BIOS method for booting, and the new hardware uses UEFI (Secure Boot disabled).
I don’t have 2 2TB drives, so I’m attempting to use my old drive in the new system, but surprise, it won’t boot.
I have the AHCI selected in the BIOS so when I boot to the USB Installer (nonfree) I do see the drive and when I select it it does prompt me to re-install start9 or factory reset.
When I choose re-install Start9 it looked like it was going to work but then gave this error:
RPC ERROR: Grub Error installing for x86_64-efi platform. grub-install: error cannot find EFI directory.
I don’t want to lose my install of my lightning node (I have backups, but I know it will close all channels if I do that).
What can I do to get grub to install the efi boot version?
BTW, I’m technical.
If there are a lot of sats on the line, I think it’d be more economically viable to just buy a new drive and some transfer adapter. We have a pretty straight forward recovery guide here: Start9 | Transfer Data to a New Drive
Fun project though. There are definitely risks involved and we don’t actively encourage any of this hahaha, but if it were me I’d (using any bootable linux distro) add an efi partition on your existing drive (500mb or less), format whatever it’s called, then mount and install grub to that.
Do you have space for that? Would the cost of closing the channels really be worth the risks?
Oh yes, it’s 100% more economical to buy a new drive, but that’s part of the reason why I put this with the how-to tag. I think it would be beneficial for anyone to have this thread with an instruction set on how to actually do it, so that you don’t need to buy another drive. If this instruction set existed, it would be a 1-time migration because with linux you can take the SSD and move it to a new computer and start it up and it will work - unlike Windows which has driver issues and licencing issues if you were to do that.
Of course there are risks involved (that’s why I have backups - to remove that risk or rather minimize the risk as they would close the channels), but while I’m adept at computers, converting to UEFI from BIOS has always escaped me. With Windows, you can use diskpart to convert the drive to gpt, but the manipulation of the partition for the EFI is what I struggle with even on Windows.
Hopefully someone has done some of this before and can shed some light on the commands they used. I’d be looking up the manpages of them before running them obviously, but in the end I’d like to create a how-to guide for anyone else in this predicament.
As it sits now, I had an exact spare model of laptop so I just swapped the drive into the new hardware and it’s now rebuilding the blockchain, but when it’s done, I’d still like to migrate it to UEFI and newer hardware.