I am a newbie, and I want to create a bootable USB flash drive with Manjaro that is compatible with both older BIOS systems and newer UEFI systems. This must be possible because bootable media comes this way for maximum compatibility.
I have an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard that supports both BIOS and UEFI boot. So I use this system for testing.
I have already created a Manjaro bootable USB flash drive with GPT partition scheme. The system currently boots in legacy BIOS mode, and I’d like to add UEFI boot to this existing system, if possible. My partition scheme is as follows.
- 537 MB, FAT 32, mounted at /boot
- 43 GB, XFS, mounted at Filesystem Root
- 64 GB, XFS, mounted at /home
- 4.3 GB, Linux Swap
There is approximately 7.3 GB of free space at the end.
I had thought that I need to create an EFI System partition. So I created a 5th partition:
- 537 MB, FAT 32, EFI System mounted at /boot/efi.
I have the following packages installed: efibootmgr, dosfstools, grub. I entered the following commands at the terminal.
sudo mkdir /boot/efi
sudo mount /dev/sde5 /boot/efi
sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=manjaro --recheck
Output is:
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
EFI variables are not supported on this system.
EFI variables are not supported on this system.
grub-install: error: efibootmgr failed to register the boot entry: No such file or directory.
I then tried:
sudo modprobe efivarfs
sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=manjaro --recheck
But the output was the same.
Is this the correct method to accomplish what I want? If so, what do I need to do differently? If not, how can I create a “mixed mode” bootable USB flash drive? If you can give step-by-step instructions explaining what each command does, that would help me learn.
Thanks for any help!