I’m currently reinstalling my system. I got stuck at a few points because Calamares wasn’t behaving consistently.
I divided the NVMe drive into 5 partitions (using GParted):
EFI exFAT 4GB WRONG: use fat32 instead
notfall btrfs 40GB
manjaro25 btrfs 900GB
manjaro26 btrfs remaining GB
Swap 50GB
1. Installation “notfall”
Installed with the “Replace Partition” option. Everything went smoothly.
Intermediate step:
Copied EFI stubs /Manjaro/grubx64.efi to /Notfall/grubx64.efi
2. Installation “Manjaro25”
Installed with the “Replace Partition” option.
When Calamares displayed its summary,
a different partition was listed (graphically selected was nvme0n1p3=manjaro25, but the text summary showed nvme0n1p2).
Because of the warning that the partition would be reformatted, I didn’t want to risk it. It may be just a textual error. I didn’t dare continue. In the worst case, I would have had to reformat an hour’s work.
I checked again, and the correct partition was marked for modification in the graphic. But I didn’t dare proceed.
2. Installation “manjaro25” (next try)
Installed with manual partitioning (less can go wrong that way, right?).
After assigning the mount points for / and /boot/efi, I wanted to install the system. Then two warning messages appear:
warning in German (that the file system of the EFI partition must not be exFAT but absolutely must be FAT32)
Then a 2nd warning in English (that the installation can be carried out, but the system will not boot because the file system for EFI must be FAT32)
This only happens with manual partitioning. The partitions have been the same as during the initial installation, where no warning was issued. Despite the warnings, I continued, and the system boots perfectly fine, of course. But some tools in linux do not work properly !
For the 3.rd installation of manjaro26, I know what to expect.
And yes - FAT32 has 4GiB limit on individual files - which exFAT has not.
Theoretically you can format the EFI partition using any of the available FAT file systems - personally I think the reason Calamares rejects anything but FAT32 may be due to most firmware will only load if the file system is FAT32.
Manual partitioning triggers a warning about exFAT, but overwriting a partition doesn’t trigger a check or warning.
So either there’s a problem, in which case all branches should issue warnings, or there isn’t.
Furthermore, it’s odd that two different warnings appear consecutively in two different languages, essentially saying the same thing, but one text isn’t a translation of the other.
Not if you want to store a rescue-system as EFI-stub there
In the “notfall” installation, the GUI automatically offered hibernation, and I tried it. It works perfectly (although I tried it unsuccessfully years ago).
And yes, at the moment it’s 16GB (DDR4) (my old computer still has the 32GB (DDR4)). Eventually, it will be swaped. At some time all of it may go into the new one, and then it will be 48GB. 50GB swap space is just right then.
That was only because I always automatically used exFAT when formatting FAT systems.
I once researched the reliability of different FAT-systems and have been doing it that way ever since. I’ve never had any problems with exFAT (even in the camera…).
Because you likely need an efifs driver for exfat – in much the same way that Refind has an efifs driver for ext4, btrfs and several others… with those in place, much is possible.
WRONG: use fat32 instead
It may be just a textual error. I didn’t dare continue. In the worst case, I would have had to reformat an hour’s work.
I did install them now
