I have been trying for days to boot from a usb drive containing the rEFIND bootloader. I had a hard drive with Ubuntu 22.04 on it and cloned it onto an NVME SSD mounted in a PCIEx16 slot.
With the hard drive power removed, when I boot off the USB, it seems to go well but eventually goes into emergency mode with errors:
no caching mode page found
assuming drive cache write through
I have set up grub as per:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-fix-minimal-bash-like-line-editing-is-supported-grub-error-in-linux/
and I even ran fsck on my SSD partition 1 (EFI) and 6 (Ubuntu).
I cannot decipher the voluminous log from journalctl -xb.
My fdisk -l output is:
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 534527 532480 260M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 534528 567295 32768 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/nvme0n1p3 567296 1003449731 1002882436 478.2G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p4 1926793216 1928800255 2007040 980M Windows recovery environment
/dev/nvme0n1p5 1928800256 1953511423 24711168 11.8G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p6 1003450368 1926793215 923342848 440.3G Linux filesystem
Disk /dev/sdf: 3.82 GiB, 4103937024 bytes, 8015502 sectors
/dev/sdf1 2048 14878 12831 6.3M EFI System
Gparted has a warning about the USB drive:
1007.50 KiB of unallocated space within the partition.
To grow the file system to fill the partition, select the partition and choose the menu item:
Partition --> Check.
When I did the partition check it failed with error message:
Check and repair file system (fat16) on /dev/sdf1 00:00:01 ( ERROR )
calibrate /dev/sdf1 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS )
path: /dev/sdf1 (partition)
start: 2048
end: 14878
size: 12831 (6.27 MiB)
check file system on /dev/sdf1 for errors and (if possible) fix them 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS )
fsck.fat -a -w -v '/dev/sdf1' 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS )
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
Boot sector contents:
System ID "mkfs.fat"
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
512 bytes per logical sector
2048 bytes per cluster
4 reserved sectors
First FAT starts at byte 2048 (sector 4)
2 FATs, 12 bit entries
4096 bytes per FAT (= 8 sectors)
Root directory starts at byte 10240 (sector 20)
512 root directory entries
Data area starts at byte 26624 (sector 52)
2691 data clusters (5511168 bytes)
32 sectors/track, 2 heads
0 hidden sectors
10816 sectors total
Reclaiming unconnected clusters.
/dev/sdf1: 121 files, 2332/2691 clusters
grow file system to fill the partition 00:00:01 ( ERROR )
using libparted
libparted messages ( ERROR )
Could not detect file system.
