Re-adding Pop!_OS Recovery entry in the boot menu

Steps to re-add the Recovery partition to the boot menu of Pop_OS! 22.04

What is this guide about

I’ve been running Pop_OS! as my daily driver for months now. I do have a customised installation with a dual boot (Windows 11 and Pop_OS!), and Pop_OS! is installed on BTRFS.

A few days ago, I started getting some I/O errors while I was working and I thought I had some filesystem corruption going on. I tried rebooting into the recovery partition to check the filesystem, but I sadly discovered the entry for the recovery partition was gone from my boot menu.

The Recovery Partition is a full copy of the Pop!_OS installation disk. It can be used exactly the same as if a live disk copy of Pop!_OS was booted from a USB drive. The existing operating system can be repaired or reinstalled from the recovery mode. You can perform a refresh install, which allows you to reinstall without losing any user data or data in your home directory. Recovery can also perform a clean install, which resets all OS data. (See:Recovery Partition - System76 Support)

I am writing this short article mainly as a reminder for my own use, in case it happens again, and I hope someone else will find it useful. Need to create your Pop!_OS recovery partition from scratch? Check out this other article: Creating a Recovery Partition in Pop!_OS

Assumptions

This procedures assumes that Pop_OS! was installed using the default installation w/ encryption (efi partition (fat32), recovery partition (fat32), luks+lvm+ext4 (well, BTRFS in my case) for /, swap).

Here I’m assuming your disk is /dev/sda. Just run lsblk or fdisk -l to check your partitions if you are not sure what your disk is.

On my machine, lsblk returns the following

NAME            MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
loop0             7:0    0  27.1M  1 loop  /snap/chromium-ffmpeg/28
loop1             7:1    0  18.4M  1 loop  /snap/chromium-ffmpeg/30
loop2             7:2    0  55.5M  1 loop  /snap/core18/2409
loop3             7:3    0  55.6M  1 loop  /snap/core18/2538
loop4             7:4    0    62M  1 loop  /snap/core20/1587
loop5             7:5    0    62M  1 loop  /snap/core20/1611
loop6             7:6    0   103M  1 loop  /snap/lxd/23339
loop7             7:7    0   103M  1 loop  /snap/lxd/23367
loop8             7:8    0    47M  1 loop  /snap/snapd/16010
loop9             7:9    0    47M  1 loop  /snap/snapd/16292
sda               8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk  
├─sda1            8:1    0   498M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─sda2            8:2    0     4G  0 part  /recovery
└─sda3            8:3    0 461.3G  0 part  
  └─cryptdata   253:0    0 461.3G  0 crypt 
    ├─data-root 253:1    0 441.3G  0 lvm   /run/timeshift/backup
    │                                      /var/lib/docker/btrfs
    │                                      /home
    │                                      /
    └─data-swap 253:2    0    16G  0 lvm   [SWAP]
sdb               8:16   0 476.9G  0 disk  
├─sdb1            8:17   0   260M  0 part  
├─sdb2            8:18   0   128M  0 part  
├─sdb3            8:19   0   475G  0 part  
├─sdb7            8:23   0   525M  0 part  
└─sdb8            8:24   0     1G  0 part  

sdb is the disk where I have Windows 11, sda is the SDD with Pop_OS!, and /dev/sda2 is the Pop_OS! recovery partition.

Ignoring sdb, I assume you have Pop_OS! installed on sda, if that’s not the case, you will need to tweak the commands accordingly.

Checking the status of the boot menu entries

Pop_OS! uses systemd-boot, not Grub (don’t ask me since which version, I don’t remember). The configurations on the entries are in /boot/efi/loader/entries

open a terminal and run

sudo -i

to enter the interactive mode (root), and check what configs are there for the boot menu:

$ cd /boot/efi/loader/entries
$ ls -l 
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Aug 16 16:35 ./
drwx------ 3 root root 4.0K Aug 16 16:48 ../
-rwx------ 1 root root  348 Aug 12 22:25 Pop_OS-current.conf*
-rwx------ 1 root root  366 Aug 12 22:25 Pop_OS-oldkern.conf*

Ok, so there’s no file with the configuration to boot into the recovery partition. Let’s re-create it.

default Pop_OS-current
timeout 2

Recreating the boot menu entry

You will need both the UUID and the partition UUID of your recovery partition. They can be retrieved with the following command:

$ blkid /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2: UUID="7D44-37D9" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="recovery" PARTUUID="581b8482-5689-49b6-bc0a-52ab82a514d7"

Your PARTUUID and UUID numbers will be, obviously, different.

We will need to create a new file in /boot/efi/loader/entries, I named it Recovery.conf.

The template file is the following:

title Pop!_OS recovery
linux /EFI/Recovery-{{ UUID }}/vmlinuz.efi
initrd /EFI/Recovery-{{ UUID }}/initrd.gz
options boot=casper hostname=recovery userfullname=Recovery username=recovery live-media-path=/casper-{{ UUID }} live-media=/dev/disk/by-partuuid/{{ PARTITION UUID }} noprompt

so, in my case, I created the file as following:

title Pop!_OS recovery
linux /EFI/Recovery-7D44-37D9/vmlinuz.efi
initrd /EFI/Recovery-7D44-37D9/initrd.gz
options boot=casper hostname=recovery userfullname=Recovery username=recovery live-media-path=/casper-7D44-37D9 live-media=/dev/disk/by-partuuid/581b8482-5689-49b6-bc0a-52ab82a514d7 noprompt

That’s it.

Save the file, Issue a sync (just to be sure), and you can reboot your system and test the recovery partition.