Ok, so I repeated yesterday’s steps with a different USB stick and freshly burned ISO. Same result as yesterday and Manjaro still didn’t boot. I wiped the drive clean for a blank slate.
Then I booted Gparted and created only an EFI partition and shut down. For the next Manjaro installion I manually created the ext4 root partition like before, made sure flags and mounts were good, and Manjaro is booting from the grub menu and shows up in UEFI.
Using manual partitioning during installation, something seems to be amiss with how the installer formats FAT32.
Have a look at the ‘user guide’. Start at pg 74. Half way down you’ll find “Create the EFI partition”. Make sure you have followed all the steps especially pg 76.
Thanks, I’ll look it over after some shut-eye. I’m fairly certain I started out with a GPT partition table both times and Manjaro’s partitioner said so too. I could still be missing something so I’m real curious what it is.
Edit:
There’s one thing I haven’t been doing according to the user guide. I’ve been flagging EFI as boot but not esp. However, I don’t remember esp being an option and I think that would have stood out if I had seen it. I think the only options were grub-boot and boot during installation.
I’m just trying to understand a few things before laying out a couple permanent installations. For instance, with two Linux installations I’m trying to avoid the obstacle of how Arch based distros load microcode. In my experience Fedora has a problem with this but other distros don’t.
And even with two Linux installations I probably don’t need an EFI partition larger than 300 Mb, or do I? I’ve seen /boot partitions fill up but never /boot/efi.
Linux boot folders need only a few kilobytes (My Manjaro folder in EFI is 152KiB). Usually is Windows what you have to be aware. My Windows folder in EFI uses 26MiB.
Interesting. So with partitions that small do you format them as FAT16 or FAT12 (smaller clusters being more efficient)?
I’ve always been confused about EFI sizes. /boot is usually where unused kernels are stored, right? Fedora doesn’t make it any less confusing since its default is a 600 Mb EFI and 1 Gb ext4 /boot partition.
I think the norm is to use FAT32 (at least on hard disks). This filesystem is used only a moment, so FAT type doesn’t matter.
I don’t know about other distros, but in Manjaro your kernels are stored in /boot folder, that usually lies in the root partitionm and the ESP (EFI partition) is mounted as /boot/efi and it only contains the boot loader (necessary files to boot the kernel)
Your EFI sizing is an eye opener. It never occurred to me that EFI can be so tiny but it makes perfect sense if it never grows in size. Sounds like I need to stop wasting my time enlarging them.
Fedora uses a separate ext4 partition for /boot and its new default has been Btrfs for / and /home etc. I can appreciate /boot and /home partitions going the way of the Dodo. Although I suppose with Btrfs systems a separate ext4 /boot might come in handy in dual boot situations.
Yes – and in the thread above, you’ll notice that we got our Manjaro installation(s) working by doing basically that. The mystery we’re trying to solve now is why the Manjaro installer doesn’t seem to properly create the EFI filesystem when using manual partitioning.
The guide is probably right about older releases and newer ones don’t require an esp flag anymore.
Although I got around the problem with Gparted, I bet KDE’s partition manager using live media would have worked too since it’s the same thing. I just wanted to bypass the live media entirely for extra measure.
So, since my actual issue is fixed (couldn’t get UEFI to work, eventually fixed it by using auto partitioning and then reinstalling), I’m going to mark that as the solution. But the issue of the manual installer not creating the EFI partition with the correct flags still persists.
I went to the Manjaro Development section to try to file a bug report, but I’m unable to open new topics. What’s the process for getting access?
