I have a Microsoft Surface Go 3 and I need windows for school at the moment, but want to install Manjaro to possibly attempt to replace it. I put the /boot/efi on the main HDD, and /, /home, and a swap partition on the card. The windows partition can see all the files, but when I launch into Manjaro I get Grub Rescue, and it cannot see hd1.
Grub pic:
Windows pic:
Hi @naginipython and welcome to the forum!
I have no direct experience with the Surface, but I’ve done what you’re trying on Lenovo and Asus laptops and a Tanix Windows box, so I’m pretty sure I can suggest ways to proceed.
First, during boot your SD is probably not mounted early enough. I’ve put a /boot/efi on the SD card itself, and then the task is to convince the UEFI or BIOS to boot from it. This is usually done with either a “magic key” (F2, F12, and Del are common) or a UEFI Settings menu during bootup. You put your SD as highest priority device and Manjaro as the highest OS in boot order.
More complete discussion is here:
Second, SD cards are a bad place for swap. Better to put that on your HDD by shrinking Windows first to leave a few GB unallocated. If you have more than 4GB memory, consider going without swap, or putting swap in ZRAM after you can boot Manjaro. See:
Third, we prefer that you post text to the forum, not screen shots. So, at least after you have Manjaro running, please enclose a copy of text output in three backticks (```) before and after.
Good luck, it’s doable!