Hi, I’m installing nixos in a vm using disko. The installation finishes without errors, but when booting into the system, it drops into emergency mode because /dev/disk/by-partlabel/ROOT cannot be found.

I’ve verified that /dev/disk/by-partlabel/ROOT does exist and can be mounted manually from the iso.

This is my disko config: https://github.com/god464/flake/blob/master/hosts/server/disk.nix

Is there anything I’m missing?

Hope someone can help: Have tiny home server/router with two USB SSDs forming a ZFS mirror. Also each disk has swap and ESP partition. One disk seems to die now (dmesg says usb 3-1: device not accepting address). Even though ZFS should give redundancy, the system becomes unresponsive. Boot loader is on the dying disk. Adding the mountpoint on the second disk does not have effect after rebuild and reboot:

          ESP = {
            size = "512M";
            type = "EF00";
            content = {
              type = "filesystem";
              format = "vfat";
              mountpoint = "/boot-fallback";         # added
              mountOptions = [ "umask=0077" ]; # added
            };
          };

Do I need to do something extra after changing the disko.nix file (adding the two lines above)?
I want to get redundancy for the bootloader. Do I need grub for this (used systemd-boot so far)?

Hope someone can help: Have tiny home server/router with two USB SSDs forming a ZFS mirror. Also each disk has swap and ESP partition. One disk seems to die now (dmesg says usb 3-1: device not accepting address). Even though ZFS should give redundancy, the system becomes unresponsive. Boot loader is on the dying disk. Adding the mountpoint on the second disk does not have effect after rebuild and reboot:

          ESP = {
            size = "512M";
            type = "EF00";
            content = {
              type = "filesystem";
              format = "vfat";
              mountpoint = "/boot-fallback";   # added
              mountOptions = [ "umask=0077" ]; # added
            };
          };

Do I need to do something extra after changing the disko.nix file (adding the two lines above)?
I want to get redundancy for the bootloader. Do I need grub for this (used systemd-boot so far)?

Couple of questions about NixOS live USBs:

I want to partition my 64 GB USB flash drive into two partitions (FAT32 live USB + ext4 storage), so I used the following disko config:

let
  usb = "/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB_SanDisk_3.2Gen1_0401a943ae4197a38a6f9070194e9ea2b3fb8dbb7997e05ed1b197c0e28946be4b8f000000000000000000001cf4be6800926418a955810751ab6336-0:0";
in {
  disko.devices = {
    disk = {
      live = {
        type = "disk";
        device = usb;
        content = {
          type = "gpt";
          partitions = {
            ESP = {
              type = "EF00";
              device = "${usb}-part1";
              priority = 0;
              size = "8192M";
              content = {
                type = "filesystem";
                format = "vfat";
              };
            };
            storage = {
              device = "${usb}-part2";
              priority = 1;
              size = "100%";
              content = {
                type = "filesystem";
                format = "ext4";
              };
            };
          };
        };
      };
    };
  };
}

I then copied over the files from the (minimal, non-graphical) NixOS live ISO into partition 1, hoping that the instructions on the Arch wiki would generalize to NixOS, but then my live ISO gets stuck with the following error message:

[...]
Timed out waiting for device /dev/root, trying to mount anyway
mounting /dev/root on /iso...
mount: mounting /dev/root on /mnt-root/iso failed: No such file or directory

An error occurred [...]

How can I use my USB flash drive as both a live USB and as a storage device? I found this relevant Discourse link but there was no resolution to the problem there.

I realize this might not be the best place to ask this, but I figured that folks here would have expertise configuring boot partitions correctly.

Couple of questions about NixOS live USBs:

I want to partition my 64 GB USB flash drive into two partitions (FAT32 live USB + ext4 storage), so I used the following disko config:

let
  usb = "/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB_SanDisk_3.2Gen1_0401a943ae4197a38a6f9070194e9ea2b3fb8dbb7997e05ed1b197c0e28946be4b8f000000000000000000001cf4be6800926418a955810751ab6336-0:0";
in {
  disko.devices = {
    disk = {
      live = {
        type = "disk";
        device = usb;
        content = {
          type = "gpt";
          partitions = {
            ESP = {
              type = "EF00";
              device = "${usb}-part1";
              priority = 0;
              size = "8192M";
              content = {
                type = "filesystem";
                format = "vfat";
              };
            };
            storage = {
              device = "${usb}-part2";
              priority = 1;
              size = "100%";
              content = {
                type = "filesystem";
                format = "ext4";
              };
            };
          };
        };
      };
    };
  };
}

I then copied over the files from the (minimal, non-graphical) NixOS live ISO into partition 1, hoping that the instructions on the Arch wiki would generalize to NixOS, but then my live ISO gets stuck with the following error message:

[...]
Timed out waiting for device /dev/root, trying to mount anyway
mounting /dev/root on /iso...
mount: mounting /dev/root on /mnt-root/iso failed: No such file or directory

An error occurred [...]

How can I use my USB flash drive as both a live USB and as a storage device? I found this relevant Discourse link but there was no resolution to the problem there.

I realize this might not be the best place to ask this, but I figured that folks here would have expertise configuring boot partitions correctly.

For reference, the NixOS manual says I should dd the ISO to the disk directly: sudo dd if=<path-to-image> of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync

In reply to @tim92:matrix.org
I don't think that this will work since you need to unmount the live USB to format it as storage device

Soooo,
I have decided to just try it.
After debugging some syntax issues, I have encountered this bug:

error:
       … while evaluating the attribute 'diskoScript'

         at /nix/store/3mlzsgflq3z4wsk2arffhd999h1hj17g-disko/share/disko/lib/default.nix:418:15:

          417|
          418|               diskoScript = (diskoLib.writeCheckedBash { inherit pkgs checked; }) "disko" ''
             |               ^
          419|                 export PATH=${lib.makeBinPath ((cfg.config._packages pkgs) ++ [ pkgs.bash ])}:$PATH

       … in the condition of the assert statement

         at /nix/store/y11h0vfmjaf8j1796x0n2454hqldnbbr-0vyi8f8l8cya10dmgfrj0df2iqxlhiyi-source/pkgs/build-support/writers/scripts.nix:32:5:

           31|     assert (types.path.check nameOrPath) || (builtins.match "([0-9A-Za-z._])[0-9A-Za-z._-]*" nameOrPath != null);
           32|     assert (types.path.check content) || (types.str.check content);
             |     ^
           33|     let

       (stack trace truncated; use '--show-trace' to show the full trace)

       error: The option `disko.devices.disk.lvm_vg.root_vg' does not exist. Definition values:
       - In `<unknown-file>':
           {
             lvs = {
               games = {
                 content = {
                   extraArgs = [
           ...

Does anybody have any idea how I can fix this?

Here's my disko.nix:

{
disko.devices = {
	disk = {
		disk0 = {
			type = "disk";
			device = "/dev/nvme1n1";
			content = {
				type = "gpt";
				partitions = {
					esp = {
						name = "ESP";
						size = "500M";
						type = "EF00";
						content = {
							type = "filesystem";
							format = "vfat";
							mountpoint = "/boot";
						};
					};

					root = {
						name = "root0";
						size = "100%";
						content = {
							type = "lvm_pv";
							vg = "root_vg";
						};
					};
				};
			};
		};
		disk1 = {
			type = "disk";
			device = "/dev/nvme0n1";
			content = {
				type = "gpt";
				partitions = {
					root = {
						name = "root1";
						size = "100%";
						content = {
							type = "lvm_pv";
							vg = "root_vg";
						};
					};
				};
			};
		};

		lvm_vg = {
			root_vg = {
				type = "lvm_vg";
				lvs = {
					root = {
						size = "25%FREE";
						content = {
							type = "btrfs";
							extraArgs = ["-f"];
							subvolumes = {
								"/root" = {
							 	 mountpoint = "/";
								};

								"/persist" = {
								mountOptions = ["subvol=persist" "noatime"];
								mountpoint = "/persist";
								};

								"/nix" = {
								mountOptions = ["subvol=nix" "noatime"];
								mountpoint = "/nix";
								};
							};
						};
					};

					games = {
						size = "100%FREE";
						content = {
							type = "btrfs";
							extraArgs = ["-f"];
							subvolumes = {
								"/games" = {
								mountOptions = ["subvol=games" "noatime"];
								mountpoint = "/games";
								};
							};
						};
					};
				};
			};
		};
	};
};
}