I’m typing this on my phone, cause upgrading to 23.11 bricked my system.
Grub just displays 452 pointer out of range and I can’t even boot older generations, cause they all give the same error.
My system is a BIOS install, capable of UEFI. As I search this error, it seems there is a GRUB bug involved.
My root is also LUKS’ed, so I’m not really sure how I can boot from another GRUB, but is this the way forward for me?
Can you link the grub bug you’ve found? We should track this somehow.
Using LUKS won’t really matter for my suggestion, which is to boot the installer and rollback from there. You can boot the installer, mount all your file systems under /mnt, and run nixos-enter --root /mnt to enter a shell environment where you can do things like rollback the system and nixos-rebuild boot --install-bootloader --rollback (note boot not switch). This command will reconfigure the boot loader using the generation you’ve rolled back to.
I haven’t found an official GRUB bug, but searching for “452 grub” yields quite a few reports.
Do we have some more formal instructions for entering chroot with NixOS?
I found the wiki entry, but it just refers to the manual.
I mean, that’s pretty much the instructions. Mount your filesystems at /mnt and then run nixos-enter.
When you say filesystems in plural, I assume I don’t mount root on /mnt.
In the golden days of LFS, I had to mount /proc, /sys, /dev/pts, etc.
You boot the installer. Then you mount your system’s root file system on /mnt, and any file systems that live beneath it in the corresponding locations, e.g. /boot goes to /mnt/boot. This is as if you were installing for the first time. You don’t need to mount /mnt/proc and all those sorts of things yourself, because nixos-enter will do that for you. You just need to mount the physical storage to /mnt as if you were setting up to install the system for the first time. Then nixos-enter puts you in a chroot shell with all the other necessary stuff done for you. Now you can do things like nixos-rebuild boot --rollback --install-bootloader to rollback and reconfigure the boot loader.
ok, great, I’ll try that, but if I just rollback, then we can’t troubleshoot the bug? I can’t find any reference to it on this forum, so I’m the only one with this bug?
Let’s focus on getting a working system first 
But if you have any ideas on how to troubleshoot the bug, I’d love to narrow it down
I was playing around with booting other drives on my station and decided to give it another try and now it booted. I’m not really sure if it’s a random thing or if I somehow disabled something in BIOS. I dare not boot again, at least before building something. I see that I run GRUB-2.12-rc1, but in unstable, there is GRUB-2.12.
Is that maybe the path forward, for now?
How can I get that version?
EDIT: Is it even likely that GRUB-2.12 works? Here’s the diff and it doesn’t seem that there’s anything related.