Thanks for that hint . . . might be a factor in the anti-social behaviors of those systems.
It took me years of sharing ESPs with OSX and linux to finally get that, there can be more than one ESP on a drive. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get the installer to “understand” that, e.g., sda1 isn’t where you want /boot/efi to be directed . . . . Sharing the esp with OSX would result in all of the linux location UUIDs being erased or changed.
From experience, our friends Deb+Ian can be quite the biatch, in that regard; even when using separate drives. Although there are ways to overcome it while still being amenable to each OS; albeit not as easily when using only a single drive.
There should only be one ESP on a drive. As mentioned, I’ve seen cases where additional vfat (fat32) partitions have been created on which to install additional bootloaders; but more than one fully qualified ESP should not exist on one drive. That’s the theory. I’m sure there are poorly-written tools in the wild that still enable the possibility.
/boot/efi is usually a symbollic link to the ESP, and might expand to something like /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/ or /boot/efi/EFI/GRUB/; it’s a mount point, not actually the EFI.
I’d never even attempt that; for a start, the underpinning format of a Mac ESP is HFS+ as opposed vfat; unless it’s a H’tosh, ofcourse, which is a topic for other forums. Again, using separate drives is the way to go (wherever possible).
It is a grey zone, entirely dependent on what the UEFI Manufacturer decided. Works in my case, may not work for everybody. Won’t recommend such experiments for everybody.
Are you certain? A qualified ESP should always have a hex code of ef00; if it doesn’t, then it’s a standard vfat partition. I’m uncertain how to verify that post-creation; but that would be handy to have.
The code is assigned when the partition is created and formatted, though I recall some [older] partitioning tools disguising this fact, and referring to the partition simply as vfat. Gdisk, is my tool of choice; with it, the appropriate code is specified manually for every partition created.
It seems like “everybody,” including OSX uses vFAT formatting for the ESP/efi, what-have-you, partition.
OSX just messes with everybody else if it “shares” the one partition; I thought that was a similar deal with mr Deb . . . ???
[teo@teo-lenovo-v15 ~]$ sudo gdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.9.1
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 500118192 sectors, 238.5 GiB
Model: SAMSUNG MZAL4256HBJD-00BL2
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): F97CC155-D2C5-4464-A673-BCEE4D2C19E2
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 500118158
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2669 sectors (1.3 MiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 534527 260.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition
2 534528 567295 16.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved ...
3 567296 191483903 91.0 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
4 496021504 500117503 2.0 GiB 2700 Basic data partition
6 217493504 496021503 132.8 GiB 8300 root
7 217083904 217493503 200.0 MiB EF00 Manjaro_efi
8 191483904 217083903 12.2 GiB 8200
Looks legit to me. Lenovo v15 g2, Insyde UEFI (latest)
@non_space there is a strict format requirement for ESP. Now that is not a grey zone at all but a concrete solid specification.
It does. What about the others you mentioned, on the same disk? (No need to post proof)
What do you mean, i did not understand?
When you wrote “It works for me”, weren’t you suggesting you had multiple ESPs on one disk?
As listed above - p1 and p7 are both ESPs. The “problem” is it is not strictly in the specification, so maybe other UEFI firmwares will not tolerate such a thing. Mine does.
Looks legit. Did you rename the ESP, later, to Manjaro_efi?
Yes, i did it on creation, i like labels (i know, only UIDs matter and labels are just for style, but it is easier for me).
p.s. Manjaro GRUB was initially installed on p1. P7 was manually created later as an experiment.
Certainly not the first time a specification has been broken; or rather; implementation.
On Topic (but probably unofficial):-
Taken from Multiple EFI System Partitions on a single disk:
“It might seem like the ESP is unique to a disk and there can be only one ESP for a disk based on the way the OS treats the ESP. Unlike MBR, on GPT, the ESP doesn’t have to be at the beginning of the disk and there can be many ESPs for a disks. This will allow you have multiple boot environments with different configurations for a single disk. You can have Debian EFI and Windows EFI on the same disk, isolated from each other, without having to chainload boot executables. You can even have another ESP with some other boot environment like Ventoy on the same disk, allowing you too boot linux live environments without an external storage ( I will write another article on this).”
I know how to disable os-prober on a given OS, but I have no idea how to remove grub from an OS. How?
Hello, everybody!
Thank you all for your valuable info and support!
Probably the same way that you would disable os-prober?? But, Manjaro has a nice GUI app for handling software install and removal . . . if an app is already installed next to it will be a red trash can icon . . . click on it and then I believe it asks to “apply??” and you click yes and it is removed. Since you want grub in Manjaro, then you want to remove it from the other two systems, openSUSE uses YaSt to do that GUI service, I don’t know anything about MX-linux . . . they probably have a “software” package service. In ubuntu we used to add “synaptic package manager” and synaptic would show packages that are installed and you can remove them that way.
It can of course be done via command line, based upon the system you choose.
You shouldn’t have to reinstall your three systems, if grub is booting them, then they “exist” . . . you just want to have Manjaro as the “master controller of grub” . . . it seems like grub is already installed in Manjaro . . . just clip it in the other two.
As far as multi-booting, yes, the joy of linux is the infinite number of OSs to play with; three is very “reasonable,” . . . . : - )
OK. Maybe I used barbaric means, but I removed grub from Debian and Tumbleweed by using
sudo apt-get purge grub-common and sudo zypper remove grub2. Manjaro is now the king of the hill (at least IMHO). Let’s see the consequences. )
I don’t consider this is barbaric by any means
Remember to run sudo update-grub in Manjaro after updating Debian or OpenSuse before booting updated OS
Congratulations.
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