Manjaro Minimal Defaulted to MBR on 2.5" SATA SSD. Do I need to reformat?

The title is pretty much the whole question.

I installed Manjaro Minimal on my Raspberry Pi 4’s bootable 2.5" 500GB SSD, and I just got the sensors package installed to check the status of the drive.

Apparently, it defaulted to MBR, instead of GPT.

is there any reason I should reformat the thing as GPT? I didn’t even see an option for that in the installer. IIRC, it didn’t ask me anything about partitioning, actually.

@Strit ?

what are you talking about?
it’s an image, copied exactly as it should be. there are no options.

The Raspberry Pi’s (atleast the 3’s) do not seem to support GPT.

We tried it in the 21.06 images, but they did not boot, so we changed it back to MBR in 21.07 images.

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Oh! That makes sense. It’s been a while since I did this, and the last few Linux installs I’ve done have all been X86. I’m used to having to go through a whole partition setup ritual, and always select GPT when given the option.

@kerry_s , the first boot setup when flashing the minimal image onto a Pi is, in fact, interactive. There are many options.

flashing the image has no setup, no choices.
booting the image yes, standard setup name, location, etc…

According to this, at least rpi 4 with a recent firmware should be able to boot on gpt

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281678

But if we have a single image for rpi3 and rpi 4, then mbr is most likely the way to go.

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@kerry_s , I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at. I got to the setup process and completed setup, so I didn’t have any issues with flashing the Manjaro Minimal image to the SATA SSD I’m using as my boot drive.

My question concerns what happens during the setup process, while configuring options to complete the install. @Strit had an answer for this one, so I marked his post as the solution.

@grau I’m not using a > 2 TB boot drive, so I think the biggest reason to switch to GPT doesn’t apply. My understanding is GPT can also recover more easily from, e.g., corrupted boot information, but I’m backing up everything, so even if there was a way to switch to GPT, I probably wouldn’t do it just for that, just because I don’t have a lot of free time right now to redo everything I’ve already done.

I was most concerned with the OS itself being less stable somehow because it’s running on top of an MBR partition table, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. :slight_smile:

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