Yet another issue with grub

[remote turtle]

which firmware are you using @thorn tree

please, please don't name any of the Linuxphobic firmwares

please

[thorn tree]

I installed the Linux-firmware, Linux and base with the package manager if that’s what you mean

[remote turtle]

im talking about the firmware of your device
(aka the UEFI you are using)

[thorn tree]

Oh, you mean like the manufacturer? Sorry I’m not sure I follow. The motherboard is by MSI

And it supports UEFI

[remote turtle]

okay I don't know MSI

and how it interacts with Linux

im sorry

[thorn tree]

Oh, but when I dual booted Ubuntu it worked

Both Ubuntu and windows were on the menu

So I know it’s capable of working

[sinful bane]

@thorn tree are you able to chroot?

[thorn tree]

Yes

[sinful bane]

run grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=grub

[thorn tree]

I’ve done that multiple times already

I’m doing the process exactly as documented

Everything is mounted properly

[sinful bane]

run this after it:

[thorn tree]

And that too, I’ve done

[sinful bane]

do you have a second computer?

just asking

[thorn tree]

Yes

[sinful bane]

alright cool, you want to install arch on the entire drive right?

dont type a whole ass paragraph

[thorn tree]

No, let me give you the full background. So the last couple days I’ve installed arch on my laptop, had some issues with grub on that too, also dual booting windows and arch, still don’t know how it fixed itself when the method didn’t change. I’m now trying to do the same dual boot of windows and arch on my main desktop PC. The windows boot manager is on my C drive, and all of that space is dedicated to windows. On my D drive, there is a large partition also for windows, however there’s ~200G free space I want to use for arch on the drive. The process I’ve done is to make 3 partitions with that free space, a swap, efi and filesystem. I’ve done the documented process on the wiki, and installed grub and set it up exactly like the wiki detailed and how you described, yet no entries appear.

[sinful bane]

can you reinstall windows?

[thorn tree]

Not easily, I’ve got quite a lot on there and I’d rather not have to reinstall everything

Not worth the effort

[sinful bane]

I mean it would be alot easier to do it that way

to format the drive and install arch and then reinstall windows on top of it

[thorn tree]

I’d rather not, arch isn’t that important to me

I really don’t see where I’ve gone wrong

[sinful bane]

me neither tbh

[thorn tree]

I’ll try start from scratch and hope it works, but grub has always been temperamental for me

@sinful bane just to double check, it’s okay to mount the windows efi and the arch efi to the same location right

[sinful bane]

why are you even messing with the windows partitions

[thorn tree]

I’m not, I’m just mounting the windows efi so that grub can detect it

[sinful bane]

I'd rather select them from the BIOS

[thorn tree]

How would you do that?

[sinful bane]

select from the boot menu?

[thorn tree]

From the grub menu? But the whole problem is there’s nothing there

Oh the bios boot menu

[sinful bane]

from the boot menu of your system

[sinful bane]

yeah

[thorn tree]

But you can’t add stuff to grub from the bios can you?

[sinful bane]

bruh just use the bios

it will make your work a lil easier

[thorn tree]

I’d rather not change the boot order every time I wanna switch os

[sinful bane]

you dont have to switch the boot order

just go to the boot menu and select the partition you want to boot in

[thorn tree]

I’d rather do it through grub though

[sinful bane]

alright good luck

[thorn tree]

Is this a concern when running mkinitcpio?

[sinful bane]

I think so yeah

(@hybrid wyvern)

[thorn tree]

Infact most my commands are saying this now, god what’s going on

I did it from scratch, no differently, this actually makes 0 sense

[hybrid wyvern]

df -h

[hybrid wyvern]

Your EFI partition is too small

I suggest you mount it as /boot/efi rather than /boot, unless you have special requirements such as full system encryptionp

[thorn tree]

Oh, I thought 500M would be enough, thanks

[sick mist]

Senatvs Popvlvsqve Romanvs received a thank you cookie!

[thorn tree]

Or are you on about the windows one? If so I can’t really resize that that easily

[hybrid wyvern]

If you cannot easily change the size of the ESP, the previous suggestion still applies.

[thorn tree]

👍

I’m not really sure what difference changing the directory makes, but you know more than me so I’ll take your word for it

[hybrid wyvern]

The initramfs, including the fallback, typically around 80 to 100 MiB, and vmlinuz, around 10 to 10 MiB, would be placed in /boot by default.

[thorn tree]

ahh I see

[hybrid wyvern]

They would definitely not be stored on the 100MiB ESP.

[thorn tree]

So is it the ~100MiB nvme efi partition that’s causing the issues right

Not the 500MiB sda one

[hybrid wyvern]

Grub has the ability to read common Linux file systems, so loading the kernel from ext4, xfs and btrfs is no problem for it.

[thorn tree]

I’m still getting this issue

[thorn tree]

I’m really confused as to why, what partition is out of space? I gave it 1GB for efi

Ignore all the extra lines, that was just so I could fit the picture on the monitor

This is so confusing

[hybrid wyvern]

What have you done?

[thorn tree]

I mounted the windows efi and the arch efi to /boot/efi like you said and still had problems with grub-install

Do I need to resize the windows efi, and if so, how?

[hybrid wyvern]

mounted the windows efi and the arch efi to /boot/efi
Do not mount multiple ESPs to the same mount point.

[hybrid wyvern]

findmnt /boot/efi

[thorn tree]

Oh, I see, so how should I conduct the grub-install if there’s 2 different mount points when the efi-directory only supplies one

[hybrid wyvern]

Only one ESP should be mounted as /boot/efi,

• run umount /boot/efi twice
• clean up the old vmlinuz and initramfs.
• reinstall grub with the new ESP path
• copy vmlinuz from /lib/modules to /boot in the target filesystem
• rebuild initramfs

[thorn tree]

So where should the other esp be mounted then?

[hybrid wyvern]

The other ESP shall not be mounted.

[thorn tree]

That’s what I did Initially, however it just didn’t detect windows at all when I did thst

[hybrid wyvern]

Mounting two different ESPs on the same mounting point would effectively shadow the first ESP mounted.

[thorn tree]

Oh right

I’ll give it another go and let you know, Ty

[thorn tree]

Okay so I’ve done the installation and I’m now at the grub menu, the grub menu displays arch ad expected, however no windows, how do I go about getting os prober to detect the windows efi? It is enabled

Should I now mount the windows efi somewhere else then use os prober?

That did it, thanks for all the help