Boy did this bite me HARD right in the buttocks!
I nearly pulled out all of my hair installing Manjaro for a friend that has an Intel VMD drive, and after much stressing out and banging my head on the wall, did I discover that the vmd module is needed!
Nowhere during the Calamares setup did anything warn me about the drive selected for installation.
I absolutely believe the vmd module should be added if such a drive is detected.
In fact, a few extra defaults are dearly needed if such a drive is detected:
-
vmd added to MODULES in /etc/mkinicpio.conf
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nvme_load=YES added to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub
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Under /etc/mkinitcpio.conf HOOKS, block must come before autodetect. This is especially important for those using encryption.
After correcting the above three items, their system boots flawlessly now. (Prior to that, they could not boot no matter what we tried.)