How to Install to boot both UEFI & BIOS?

Goal : To install Manjaro from scratch to boot on BIOS and UEFI systems
What I’m Using :

  • Manjaro 21.1.0 XFCE,
  • A Panasonic Toughbook with UEFI but optional BIOS mode
  • an 8 GB USB for install media, a 64 GB USB for target disk.

What I’ve tried :

  • Seen this (forum.manjaro. org/t/hybrid-bootable-usb-flash-drive-uefi-legacy-bios/56101/3) post in the Manjaro Forums but not quite understood it.
  • Also long ago gone through this (github. com/a-p-jo/Portable-Linux) instructional made for Ubuntu, of which I have two doubts : 1) Will it break on updates and 2) Does it work on Arch-based distros too even though it’s designed for Debian-based ones ?

What I’d request : Step-wise instructions assuming a medium-level of competence with Linux in general. I’m not new to *nixes nor to linux, but am in no way a power user.


Just out of curiosity, can I ask you why do you want to do that or what do you want to achieve?

Sure. What I need is a reasonably portable Linux install on a USB that I can take along with me so I can productively use a lot of other people’s computers.

In the mounting (forum.manjaro. org/t/root-tip-manjaro-to-go-lxde-with-persistance/12596#mounting-22) section,

Mount the grub boot partition
mount /dev/sdy4 /mnt/boot

Says :

mount : /mnt/boot: unkown filesystem type 'crypto_LUKS'.

The boot partiion is not encrypted - so you made a mistake somewhere.

have you check this ?

I don’t understand it …

The guide has been tested and battle tested - so I am fairly certain the steps are correct.

Tomorror when the weather is better aan I am enjouing morning sun - I will retcheck. But I have been doing ths so many times I have it on muscle memory.

Okay, I managed to solve this . I initially tried for the better part of the day to implement linux-aarhus’s proposed solution, but I couldn’t get it to work.

Additionally , it was essentially a full arch-style CLI install, and if I wanted to do that why would I use Manjaro ? I also found it too manual/cumbersome , errror prone and not actually correct - I noticed errors in quite the few places, some of which are not linux-aarhus’s fault.To his credit though, he does take care of a lot of the details that are important. If he requires, I can maybe compile these perceived errors into a list and post them here, but it will take a while.

Meanwhile , defeated by getting grub rescue prompts and wasting the whole day, I decided to revisit the original guide I had found, github.com/a-p-jo/Portable-Linux, and almost everything worked flawlessly and in < 20 minutes I had a functional BIOS/UEFI booting Manjaro install ready. That’s my own repo by the way, so I’ll be making changes to it to better format it, include improvements and ideas from linux-aarhu’s guide and mention Manjaro support.

EDIT : Updated github.com/a-p-jo/Portable-Linux to work for this issue.

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