Installed from iso without bootloader

Help
1

I didn’t install bootloader from installer because I wanted to use the already installed grub and update it from my other linux distro. The problem is that now nix doesn’t detected with grub update, ther is no /boot directory on nix’s partition and also there’s nothing inside /bin /sbin except a broken symlink so I cannot use chroot to try install grub and updated. What can I do now?

chroot: failed to run command ‘/bin/bash’: No such file or directory

2

You always want nix to manage it’s bootloader.

It’s not as static as other distros bootloaders are.

Nix changes and recreates the config with each rebuild to make previous system generations selectable.

For EFI systems I’d suggest to use systemd boot.

For legacy, you should prefer some chain loading in one or the other direction.

3

Can you please explain? I don’t have EFI system, so I cannot use systemd boot. Also seems that I cannot use “nodev” option either cause is for EFI only. I also tried from chroot to install grub but again I get error from the “device” line in nix configuration file:

nixos-rebuild boot
building Nix...
building the system configuration...
error: A definition for option `boot.loader.grub.devices' is not of type `list of string'. Definition values:
       - In `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix': /dev/sde
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
4

That’s indeed not a string, that’s a path.

And it also doesn’t seem to be a list.

So wrap it in a list and in quotes.

5

Yes I found it after some search, but I cannot rebuild because I have no internet access in chroot environment. I found instructions here about manual chroot:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Change_root
EDIT:
Sorry I was wrong about that. I can ping so I have, but the “nixos-rebuild boot” command fails with errors:

warning: error: unable to download 'https://cache.nixos.org/nix-cache-info': Couldn't resolve host name (6); retrying in 263 ms
warning: error: unable to download 'https://cache.nixos.org/nix-cache-info': Couldn't resolve host name (6); retrying in 622 ms
warning: error: unable to download 'https://cache.nixos.org/nix-cache-info': Couldn't resolve host name (6); retrying in 1319 ms
warning: error: unable to download 'https://cache.nixos.org/nix-cache-info': Couldn't resolve host name (6); retrying in 2460 ms
warning: unable to download 'https://cache.nixos.org/nix-cache-info': Couldn't resolve host name (6)
error: cannot pivot old root directory onto '/nix/store/r8nl00ckzfb9mdqqwcv92g4d43j71sqk-install-grub.pl.drv.chroot/real-root': Invalid argument
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)