Unable to move or install chroot on SD Card

[duck955]

Please paste the output of the following command here: sudo edit-chroot -all

chronos@localhost ~/Downloads $ sudo edit-chroot -all
No chroots found in /mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots

Please describe your issue:

I moved my chroot from my internal drive to my SD Card and the task completed successfully. When I run sudo startxfce4, I receive the same error as above "No chroots...."

When I attempt to update the chroot, I receive the error "Too many symbolic links". See output below

Also, when I follow this guide, How-To-Install-To-External-Drive, I receive the same error during a fresh installation for "Too many symbolic links"

sudo crouton -n kali-rolling -p /media/removable/SD\ Card -u
/media/removable/SD Card/chroots/kali-rolling already exists; updating it...
Preparing chroot environment...
Installing brightness into the chroot...
Installing croutonpowerd into the chroot...
Installing croutonversion into the chroot...
Installing host-dbus into the chroot...
Installing host-wayland into the chroot...
Installing volume into the chroot...
Installing pulseaudio-default.pa into the chroot...
Installing croutoncycle into the chroot...
Installing croutontriggerd into the chroot...
Installing croutonxinitrc-wrapper into the chroot...
Installing setres into the chroot...
Installing xinit into the chroot...
Installing xbindkeysrc.scm into the chroot...
Installing xorg-intel-sna.conf into the chroot...
Installing xserverrc into the chroot...
Installing xserverrc-xorg into the chroot...
Installing xserverrc-local.example into the chroot...
Installing startxfce4 into the host...
Installing crouton-noroot into the chroot...
Installing startxfce4 into the chroot...
cp: failed to access '/var/run/crouton/media/removable/SD Card/chroots/kali-rolling/usr/local/bin/startxfce4': Too many levels of symbolic links

[DennisLfromGA]

@duck955,

I moved my chroot from my internal drive to my SD Card and the task completed successfully.

If you are just having trouble launching your desktop from external media them take a look at this comment, it may help with your issue:

• sudo: startxfce4: command not found from SD CARD HP 11A G6 · Issue sudo: startxfce4: command not found from SD CARD HP 11A G6 #4358 · dnschneid/crouton

Hope this helps,
-DennisLfromGA

[duck955]

@DennisLfromGA thank you for the reply

I ran the start command based on the issue you linked and with the help menu for startxfce4. Below is my output.

chronos@localhost /media/removable/SD Card $ sudo startxfce4 -c /media/removable/SD\ Card/chroots
Entering /media/removable/SD Card/chroots/kali-rolling...
chroot: failed to run command 'su': Too many levels of symbolic `links`
WARNING: starting chroot system dbus daemon failed with code 126
chroot: failed to run command 'su': Too many levels of symbolic links
Unmounting /media/removable/SD Card/chroots/kali-rolling...

[duck955]

Additionally, when following the xfce4 wiki, the setup will not complete. It also fails with too many symlinks.

[ergpopler]

sudo enter-chroot /media/remove/sd card/chroot/chrootname?

[Ilazki]

I just ran into this same problem with a chroot on SD card. Spent far too long troubleshooting, but it looks like the problem (at least for me) is that the SD card is being mounted with the nosymfollow option:

# mount|grep 'SD Card'
/dev/mmcblk1p1 on /media/removable/SD Card type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,nosymfollow,dirsync,seclabel,data=ordered)

If I remove that with mount -o remount,symfollow /media/removable/SD\ Card/ everything works again. The nosymfollow option prevents following of symlinks, which triggers a confusing message with chroot. I was already remounting the SD card to remove the noexec flag so I just added this to my first-run-after-reboot ritual. Minor inconvenience now, but I wasted a lot of time hunting down the problem thanks to useless error messages.

This seems to have started for me after a recent ChromeOS update, so I guess Google started mounting the SD cards differently and broke everything? Not sure when this started but I'm currently on beta channel, running 88.0.

[Visual-mov]

This solution worked for me, thanks!