Question regarding reinstall & EFI

Support
1

Need to reinstall Plasma to a friend laptop, / ext4, Swap, no /home,
my question is:
if I reinstall keeping the same EFI partition and formatting only the / ext4 will it be ok?
Or should I remove Manjaro from efibootmgr e do the reinstall?

2

When you say “no /home”, do you mean there are no home directories at all, or do you mean there is a /home, but not on a separate partition?

3

Or that it’s there, but you won’t be touching it?

4

no /home at all…

5

Then, that simplifies things greatly.

If there is no previous personal data (/home content) to save, then I would start with booting the Manjaro installer, and creating a new partition table – this effectively wipes everything – Reboot, and treat it like a fresh install.

In the Live environment, you could install GParted (after a reboot it will be gone as it’s only stored in RAM for the Live session). GParted does make it easier to create a new partition table, however, this can also be done via Calamares (the Manjaro installer) during install.

Using the manual partitioning method during install, I would likely use a layout similar to [below]; which allows plenty of space for root, enough swap space for a comfortable hibernation, and whatever is remaining is home. Naturally the partition sizes will vary depending on the capacity of the disk. Give these partition sizes ample consideration.

Partition Mountpoint Description
sdb1 ---- /boot/efi  # Default
sdb2 ---- /          # I typically use 100GB (possibly overkill)
sdb3 ---- /swap      # At least same as RAM (for hibernation)
sdb4 ---- /home      # As needed (whatever is remaining)

Note: Keeping /home on a separate partition makes reinstalling the system at a future time much easier, because you can do so without touching the /home folders. One only has to remember not to format it during a reinstall.

I hope this is useful. Cheers.

6

You will be ok keeping the grub on the efi in my opinion. At some point you can update and reconfigure.

Wiping the whole disk should also be ok, than the installer will recreate the esp. Provided there are no othe OSes or recovery tools if it is a laptop, because ESP is a shared partition.

7

thanks to all, now I will download the latest iso

8

i add about gparted , you may need mstools ( check pacman -Qi gparted )
on mountpoint /boot/efi install , not forget to add flags boot & esp ( or recheck after install with gparted :slight_smile: )

9

well, he has Win on a second ssd, Manjaro has no /home partition, so if reinstall only formatting the / with ext4, keeping EFI (that has mount as boot/efi with flags boot/esp) and keeping Swap, there will be problems with Win?

10

If dual-booting I usually use the existing ESP.
So windoze and manjaro would share the same ESP.
That means selecting it for use but not formatting.
You can choose to create a second one … but it will mean you have to use EFI to choose between them on boot (BIOS/EFI-quick-boot-menu > Select Grub or Windoze), rather than booting into grub and selecting windoze or manjaro.
Some people do prefer this to keep things extra separate.

In either case as long as you do not format or delete any existing partitions windoze uses then it wont hurt it.

1 Like
11

thanks, that’s what I was asking for

12

And yet, you didn’t ask for that at all.

This additional information would have been best given in the beginning, don’t you think? That could have changed the responses to factor in a multiboot scenario. Oh, well, next time, right? :slight_smile:

1 Like
13

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