UEFI USB options - currently unable to flash bootloader

Hey All - After unsuccessfully trying to dist-upgrade my Atomic Pi from a Lubuntu build with expiring support, and because I saw on reddit that others were able to do it, I decided it was time to jump to my favorite distro: DietPi.

I’m running my AtomicPi headless, and the internal eMMC died a few years back (which is what the redditor relied on for the DietPi installer), so I was just running the machine off a USB drive. That means I need a live UEFI image on the USB for the system to run. Unfortunately, DietPi doesn’t seem to have this option, so I went with the plan to install running UEFI Debian on the USB, then run the DietPi install script.

I used FAI (I’m limited to 2 links, so Google FAI project, if interested) to build a live Debian image, capable of UEFI with SSH on by default, and successfully booted and ssh’d into the machine.

I then ran the diet-pi installer and received the following error:

[ INFO ] DietPi-Installer | Selected hardware model ID: 21
[FAILED] DietPi-Installer | Unable to flash the bootloader: The boot drive does not contain a partition table. Aborting…

The closet thread I could find on this is regarding running the install script on a NanoPi with an NVMe drive. I didn’t see a clear resolution, so I’m turning here with the hope that someone can help.

I will also share the output from the requests @MichaIng made in the other thread:

df /boot
findmnt -T /boot

Filesystem          1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/live-rw   6296468 5161776   1054088  84% /
TARGET SOURCE              FSTYPE OPTIONS
/      /dev/mapper/live-rw ext4   rw,relatime
findmnt -Ufnro SOURCE -T /boot
/dev/mapper/live-rw
cat /etc/fstab
# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM
tmpfs     /tmp tmpfs     nodev,nosuid,size=50%,mode=1777   0    0
/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0

I am happy to try another base OS, if you have one that works for the UEFI & headless (so ssh needed) constraints. I’d also happily beta test a DietPi UEFI x86_64 write image, if you have one.

Thanks!

Indeed our installer does not support device mapper root/boot mounts currently. In such cases, installing GRUB the regular way would surely fail, as it would need to know where and which bootloader is actually located, and I guess the kernel is not present in /boot either. This setup looks more like a R/O image with a limited writable overlay.

Coincidentally, I created a non-installer UEFI image just yesterday, for testing. See the NativePC UEFI image here: Index of /downloads/images/testing

If this does not work, you could attach 2 USB drives, flash the installer image to one of them, and install it to the other one from there.

Wow. Quite the coincidence.

I will try that image right now. I’m on a Mac, so I was going to use Balena, but if you have a preferred way to write it (e.g. dd), lmk.

Thank you!

Installed and working. Thank you!

Let me know if you need me to test anything or give you any logs.

Sidenote: I thought the DE was automatically installed on first boot when I specified a DE in dietpi.txt without listing it separately as software to install, just like OpenSSH. It wasn’t. Not sure if I’m just not remembering previous installs or if this was a change in behavior since my last install.