File system or partition error, can't boot Manjaro

When I boot my laptop, I am met with this:

“Error attempting to read or write outside of partition.

press any key to continue”

Then, pressing a key brings me to the Grub menu (which isn’t looking like the Manjaro customized one, but did at the first couple boots before this problem occurred).
Manjaro is the first boot option, Windows is the seond.

Windows boots fine, but when I select Mnj I get this screen:

/dev/sda1 is the partition that Manjaro resides on.

So I did run fsck /dev/sda1 manually, it found a bunch of file system problems (I forget the exact text) and asked for each one whether ot not to fix. After I had confirmed to fix ~ a dozen, it offered a for "yes to all", which I did, and it kept finding and fixing more problems. I left the machine alone for a while, an when I came back, it was doing this:

Sorry about the poor quality. The numbers are counting up, with a ( in front of each one, and it kept doing this all night long. As it still wasn’t done in the morning and didn’t react to any input, I powered it down and rebooted - same show again.

A little information on my system:
The first disk /dev/sdb is a 250 GB SSD and has a Windows installation.
Second disk /dev/sda is a 1 TB hybrid HDD (8GB of SSD), with a 100GB partition with Manjaro on it, the rest of that disk is an NTFS partition for use with windows.

  1. I installed Windows on the SSD, which didn’t make any changes to the state of the HDD.
  2. I installed Manjaro on the 100GB ext4 partition, placing the bootloader on the SSD’s MBR.
  3. This laptop’s BIOS doesn’t allow for disabling Secure Boot in UEFI mode, so I’m booting in Legacy mode
  4. I want the bootloader to boot Windows by default, be hidden, and only show when pressing a key at the Splashscreen if you want to boot Manjaro.
  5. Windows is booting fine from the SSD. This problem only occurs when trying to boot Manjaro.

This is a fresh install of Manjaro, and nothing else on the NTFS partition, except for some symlinks I created in Windows to point the user folders to the second harddrive. So I’m wondering if this could be fixed just wiping the disk, by setting up a whole new partition table and installing Manjaro from scratch.
It would probably mean I’d have to redo all the symlinking from Windows, and boy does Windows punish people for not getting everything right the first time…

EDIT: redoing it, fsck only fixes one inode - then it goes on to say:

pass 5: Checking group summary information
Block bitmap differences:

And then on goes the list of numbers counting up forever…

Since I’m somewhat pressed for time, I did the above:

Trouble is, I can’t seem to figure out the correct way to partition this.

Please, advise:

  • Where do the boot partitions go?
  • This system’s bios doesn’t allow disabling Secure Boot. In UEFI boot mode, I can’t boot from USB

This is a real Problem. I suggest to search the forum, arch wiki and manjaro wiki for “secure boot”

Boot from USB:

REISUB:

Dual Boot:

Provide Information:

1 Like

Assuming the SSD has GPT, you need for CSM at least:

  1. One unformated 8MB partition flagged with bios_grub
  2. One ext2/3/4 partition for /boot at about 1GB for grub and the kernel images.
  3. The root partition can go to another Disk.
  4. Then you write the MBR to the SSD, which will point the boot partition.
1 Like

Hello

Just a silly question → Did you try and set admin password for the BIOS i.e. making your self admin of the system and then try to disable secure boot ??

I have ASUS laptop from 2015 and it came with windows 10 by default. It was with GPT. So in order to disable secure boot and install manjaro on it I had to set admin password for the BIOS and I also disabled fast boot. I use this laptop only for testing now :slight_smile:

2 Likes

It’s a good question - I did not. I saw there was no password set, and assumed if a password is not set, I already am admin, and things it won’t let me do in BIOS nonetheless is just typical OEM dumbf***ery.

I did everything from scratch in legacy boot mode, and the Manjaro installer seemed to find a way to partition it correctly.

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