I’m getting a second laptop and wanted to install Manjaro on it. I ordered a cheap SSD that I’m gonna put in it to replace the HDD. The SSD already arrived, but I don’t have the laptop yet. I figured I was gonna install the OS on the SSD today so I’ve got it ready to swap in once I get the laptop.
I connected the SSD to my main machine via USB3.0, and put the Manjaro USB in another port. I booted up and installed to the external drive. All went well.
Now my problem is as follows: I can’t get into my main Manjaro installation because it messed up my GRUB. I now need to have the external drive connected, boot to it, use the GRUB menu and boot into my main Manjaro installation. If I go into the boot menu by pressing F10 on startup, the ‘manjaro’ setting is gone.
My main machine consists of an m.2 which has Windows, and a SATA SSD which has a storage partition and my Manjaro partition.
I have never used Calamares for removable media - what you describe is a caveat when using Calamares to install to removable media.
If I was inadvertenly in your situation - my first thought would be to disconnect the USB - boot the primary system using a live USB then chroot into the system and then run
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
This topic describes how to do a manual installation to a removable device - the link takes you directly to the section on installing the bootloader
I have done this a few times, same as i would install to the hard drive, just by selecting the removable drive as the drive to install to. it creates a /boot/efi on the drive its installed to, so it shouldn’t have affected the other drive at all. I am wondering if they mounted their regular filesystem prior to installation to external. its got me a little bit confused.