Can't install any distro with Calamares, other installers work fine

I’d love to continue using Manjaro on my new Lenovo Ideapad5 laptop (Intel 11th gen, which might be causing problems with hardware recognition, probably separate from the issue of this thread). But i’m not able to install any distro that uses Calamares as the installer. Manjaro gives this error on trying to boot after “installation”:

ERROR: device ‘UUID=[where root is, i checked]’ not found. Skipping fs ck. mount: /new_root: can’t find ‘UUID=[where root is]’. You are now being dropped into an emergency shell. sh: can’t access tty; job control turned off.

(Note that this seems similar to the following threads, but due to the research i’ve done to narrow it down to the installer – see below – my issue seemed worth a separate thread.

New Manjaro install (dual boot) gives "can't find UUID" error - #4 by LinuxEnthousiast )

The issue has persisted across a few versions of the Manjaro KDE download, all checksum tested.

I tried 2 distros based on Manjaro. I get the identical error with Mabox, and Garuda stalls almost immediately on the first splash screen, so that could be the same issue.

Other distros using Calamares give other problems, various failures to install at all, boot at all, etc. One distro couldn’t even see the unallocated space to install to…

Meanwhile i’ve had no problem installing every distro i tried that didn’t use Calamares, such as Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora. (I’m a fan of Anaconda, BTW :slight_smile: I’m thinking of trying Artix (not sure if their community editions use Calamares or not) and Rebornos, but TBH after living off a liveusb for too long i’ve installed Kubuntu to have a metal linux to work from, so i’m past the stage of installing distros so lightly…

I performed all these installations the same way: dual booting with Win10 by editing the Win10 boot partition to include the boot/efi/ mount point with boot flag, and creating from unallocated space a single ext4 partition as root for the linux distro with root flag. And i tried other things along the way such as an additional linux boot partition, telling Calamares what to do in different orders, etc, nothing worked. I’ve looked at forums and watched videos, checked my UEFI settings after various people’s advice, nothing relevant (legacy mode, secure boot, fast boot, RAID, LVM, etc etc). It just seemed to come down to whether i’m using Calamares or not.

Humble note: I’m not very willing to do tons of CLI work on this, like presumably installing via Architect. I’ve been a linux end-user for years and i hit the forums and substacks and do CLI as needed if the system is overall worth staying with, but ultimately i just want to use my system and not make a hobby of learning the guts of it – i assume Manjaro folks understand :wink: IOW i’d go to another distro that just works rather than make a huge project of this. Manjaro is my fave these days and i’m trying to make it work, but it is what it is…

Any help would be much appreciated (and would presumably help some other people, my setup and goal seem common enough…) – rescue me from my nose-holding fallback of Kubuntu!! :wink:

Seriously, thx for the distro, and the community, and any help :pray: :smiley: