Bluescreens

Sorry for the late reply, had to work through a few iterations... But it works now ^^.

Turns out the issue was not really in the grub and or initrd/vmlinuz...

I worked through your LiveCD guide, but did not en up with a working iso in the end :(. However, it did remind me of this guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MakeALiveCD/DVD/BootableFl... on which distroshare is based. Running through the original guide resulted in a bootable iso. After checking, none of my previous homegrown isos were ever bootable on their own :O!. Apparently the level of black-magic in Unetbootin was greater then I had anticipated.

Best part of all, that iso is created on a non-EFI machine, and boots in EFI-mode just fine due to the grub-install --target=x86_64-efi on the bootstick. Everything else is just loaded over the original EFI-modules apparently. So no need to completely revamp all of my old code, just need to take a looksy into the iso generation part (used mkisofs instead of grub-mkrescue in my old scripts because of >4GB fat32 issues).

Thanks for all the help and interest man. It really kept me (mostly) sane ;)!

Sounds reasonable and looks interesting ^^. Will take a look at it first thing tomorrow ;).

I'm... not following a 100%. But getting there. Its frustrating to feel like your 98% there, and just missing the one thing :/.

My setup right now _is_: (hd0,gpt1): ESP

    - /boot/grub/grub.cfg
    - /boot/{i386-pc,locale,x86_64-efi}
    - /EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI

(hd0,gpt2): ext4

    - ubuntu-16.04.bla.iso
    - custom.iso

I don't see the difference in grub.cfg(appart from 14/16, that was mb, I tried both 14/16 standard isos :D), and indeed its location doesn't matter as this works for the default live cd/it does seem to find the things inside the custom.iso/casper.

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And I totally agree with the part regarding the Casper scripts ;). I tried the following:

    - mount default 16.04 iso
    - take out its vmlinux.efi & initrd.lz
    - put it in the casper/ folder of the custom.iso

This booted! :). And then it hang on the 'not enough loop devices' error from the post below. :(

So I tried grabbing either the vmlinuz-LATEST_VERSION and the vmlinuz-LATEST_VERSION.efi.signed for the vmlinuz.efi in the casper/ (with corresponding initrd.lz), but those crashed even earlier. Just "error: no suitable video mode found. booting in blind mode", which is not the actual critical error, as the default 16.04 proclaims this as well, and then proceeds to boot properly in blind mode. Can't really seem to figure out how far the custom version got...

You happen to know of a listing of sorts regarding the required Casper files? I just get some general stuff. It really seems to indeed hinge around those vmlinuz.efi and initrd.lz files. The naming convention with the .efi and .lz shouldn't even matter that much, as long as the grub entry matches it. But those _are_ the images the host OS is booting from. Do they have some internal pathing/referencing I'm missing?

Something that keeps staring at me though is the /grub and /EFI inside the .iso. The iso basically has:

    - boot/grub
    - casper
    - EFI/BOOT/{BOOTx64.EFI,grubx64.efi}

But I'm not too trusting of the grub.cfg inside the iso...

    menuentry "Boot custom iso" {
	    set gfxpayload=keep
	    linux	/casper/vmlinuz.efi  boot=casper quiet splash --
	    initrd	/casper/initrd.lz
    }

I do think I need it, but does it need more references than this? Should it also have the (hd0,2)etc. prepending? Or is this OK as it is a selfreference within the iso?

Thanks for the help so far, its already comforting to know that someone else suspects the same area for the issues :). I swear this is going to drive me properly mad one of these days.

Correct. Surprisingly all the grub2 parts seem to be in working order. The issue seems to lie somewhere with the vmlinuz.efi/initrd.lz... I can follow the grub entry to my custom.iso, but the system hangs with "error: no suitable video mode found. booting in blind mode" if I use the vmlinuz-version-generic and/or vmlinuz-version-generic.efi.signed from the host OS. (the regular ubuntu-16.iso also displays the same message, but then proceeds to but correctly. So that shouldn't be the issue here). But it does load when I copy over the /EFI and casper/{vmlinuz.efi,initrd.lz}. However it again eventually stalls with: BusyBox v1.22.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.22.0-15ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

    (initramfs) losetup: could not find any free loop devicet go on FAT32 partitions.

[I somehow can´t seem to get the formatting to stick with this next part, sorry :S] After: Begin: Loading essential drivers ... done. Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ... done. Begin: Mounting root file system ... Begin: Running /scripts/nfs-top ... done. Begin: Running /scripts/nfs-premount ... done. Begin: Running /scripts/casper-premount ... [ 10.177576] random: nonblocing pool is initialized [10.473862] SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, no debug enabled [10.479729] JFS: nTxBlock = 8192, nTxLock = 65536 [10.627678] EXT4-fs (sda3): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) [10.776705] FAT-fs (sdb1): error, fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 1) [10.776720] FAT-fs (sdb1): Filesystem has been set read-only [11.029557] EXT4-fs (sdb3): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) done. Begin: ...waiting for devs... ... done. touch: /dev/.initramfs/lupin-waited-for-devs: No such file or directory stdin: Not a typewriter mount: mounting /dev/sdb1 on /isodevice failed: Input/output error warning: Cannot mount /dev/sdb1 on /isodevice stdin: Not a typewriter [11.689807] FAT-fs (sdc1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fschk. [11.740150] EXT4-fs (sdc2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) done. ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or adress [12.524128] EXT4-fs (loop0): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address stdin: Not a typewriter [13.247442] FAT-fs (loop0): error, fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 1) [13.870988] EXT4-fs (loop1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address stdin: Not a typewriter ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address unable to open '/dev/sdc' ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address [18.328866] EXT4-fs (loop1): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem [18.329151] EXT4-fs (loop1): write access will be enable during recovery [18.356624] EXT4-fs (loop1): recovery complete [18.367799] EXT4-fs (loop1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address /init: line7: can't open /dev/sr0: No medium found /dev/sr0: No medium found stdin: Not a typewriter ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: No such device or address [27.398618] hidraw: raw HID events driver (C) Jiri Kosina [27.401012] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid [27.401366] usbhid: USB HID core driver

    BusyBox v1.22.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.22.0-15ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
    Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

    (initramfs) losetup: could not find any free loop devicet go on FAT32 partitions.

/dev/sdc is the location of my usb stick when I'm running my regular, hdd booted OS. The errors seem just... weird... It's not even technically out of loops for as far as I know, because those could go all the way up to device loop7.

menuentry '[loopback]ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64' { set isofile='/ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso' loopback loop (hd0,2)$isofile linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz.efi boot=casper iso-scan/filename=$isofile locale=en_US.UTF-8 initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz }

This works.

Took a looksy, doesn't seem to be doing the job :(. It's a Windows tool, I'm running Ubuntus so that's not making it more reliable I guess..

Did peak into the source-code of the UEFI-beta version. Seems they are also using grub2 the way I am generally. (basically the grub-install --target=x86_64-efi type /boot & /EFI folders).

That's the part that _is_ working for me. It seems that my casper/filesystem.squashfs is missing a few mystery 'things'. You have any cluess regarding that?

Yup, skipped out on that info. Mb.

Basically what I did previously was use Distroshare to create an iso, which could then be burned to USB using Unetbootin. Unetbootin did its own magic, but it worked. Now I have a two partition USB-stick, one with /boot & /EFI, the other holding the e.g. ubuntu-16 iso. The default one from Canonical boots just fine, but not my custom version.

I did it that way because I thought it'd be handy. If you could give pointers on how to create a live USB image, I'd greatly appreciate it ;). Also, it's all Ubuntu (16.04 & 14.04).