How to format disk and install manjaro (or other linux) without pendrive?

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How to format disk and install manjaro (or other linux) without pendrive?

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Hi @L1KE, and welcome!

AFAIK you won’t be able to do it. Except if you use a DVD, but somehow I doubt this is what you mean.

Edit:
It might be possible to use a removable HDD instead of a pen drive, in which case the instructions would be the same. Just make sure there is nothing important on it, first.

1 Like
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Its passible to just download and install linux without pendrive?

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I heared about tool like UNetbootin

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No. Not as far as I’m aware. And neither for any other operating system. Because, you still need something to install from.

Except, I guess, if you boot from a network device and do a net-install. But with that, I have absolutely 0 experience and won’t e able to help you.

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I’ve never used it, so I’m not :100: about this, only 99%. It still requires a USB flash drive. From their website:

UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions without burning a CD.

The key being live USB.

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Where would you like to get the data of the Distro?

Possible:

  • Pendrive/Flashdrive/USB Drive
  • PXE Network Boot
  • Boot the ISO with grub from an existing installation.

So, somewhere you need to get the data for the first start.

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Option 2 and 3 sounds interesting, can you send time like to guide how to do that?

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Point 2: Not easy. You need to configure a Server and there is no straight tutorial because needs are different. But have look at this: Preboot Execution Environment - ArchWiki

Point 3: [HowTo] Booting manjaro iso directly with grub

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tysm man

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I have this error while booting manjaro (Point 3): ext4-fs (sda2) unable to read superblock

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Where, When, How?

I would say that there is problem (an error on) with your filesystem then. fsck it. fsck - ArchWiki

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  1. In booting debut.log
  2. While booting
  3. I too don’t know
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ok im going to do fsck

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This is possible (have done that) (Wikipedia PXE) but you will need:

  • an server who does give the boot-Details to the machine per (extended) DHCP
  • an server who does give the bootimage per TFTP
  • this is only possible in an local network because of DHCP

So this often is a way of booting thin clients.

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i cant do fsck: fsck from util-linux 2.34
e2fsck 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
/dev/sda5 is mounted.
e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting.

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If this drive is a root or home partition, then you have to do it on a live session, which have to be done a with a pendrive …

Otherwise it should ckeck the filesystem on every boot. At /etc/fstab there must be set 0 1 at the end of every mountpoint (line) to activate it.

   The fifth field (fs_freq).
       This field is used by dump(8) to determine which filesystems need to be dumped. Defaults to
       zero (don't dump) if not present.

   The sixth field (fs_passno).
       This field is used by fsck(8) to determine the order in which filesystem checks are done at
       boot time. The root filesystem should be specified with a fs_passno of 1. Other filesystems
       should have a fs_passno of 2. Filesystems within a drive will be checked sequentially, but
       filesystems on different drives will be checked at the same time to utilize parallelism
       available in the hardware. Defaults to zero (don't check the filesystem) if not present.
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There appears to be inconsistent information here.

vs

Which partition is the iso image that you want to boot on?
Which partition do you want or need to check?
sda2 or sda5
?

It appears to be on /dev/sda2.
Are you sure about that?
Why would you need to check /dev/sda5 ?

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If the iso is in any other file system other than FAT, you need to load that module in grub I think. Done by adding a line like insmod ext4 for ext4 partition.

It is mentioned in this thread but not included in the code snippet of the first post. I know ext2/3/4 is supposed to be supported by default but I only got it to work by adding the line.

fsck can only be done on an unmounted drive/partition. So, sudo umount /dev/sda5 before fsck. But don’t do it if it is a system/root partition!!!

My recommendation is…

  1. …to boot into the current system,
  2. …shrink an existing partition to form a small 4 ~ 8 GiB FAT32 partition, (GParted may need dosfstools to be installed.)
  3. …copy a Manjaro ISO to this partition.
  4. …create the custom menuentry (from the post that megavolt linked).
  5. …update grub and then reboot.

Now if all goes well, you’ll be able to boot into Manjaro Live, using the new option in your grub menu.

When booting into Manjaro live you can use the copytoram flag in order to format the entire disk, But be very careful because this is a one way trip as the live session lives and dies in the ram and once the disk is formatted the computer won’t boot if you fail to install an OS properly within that live session.

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I have this error while booting this manjaro: ext4-fs (sda2) unable to read superblock