BIOS not recognizing the Arch SSD as bootable.

[split badger]

I tried installing Arch by following this tutorial https://youtu.be/68z11VAYMS8?si=pjWgiICiUzNcQfp4, and following the Arch Wiki installation guide alongside it in case it omitted anything, I believe I did everything right.

For some reason, the EFI/boot partition does not get recognized by UEFI. I tried going into CSM mode, in which case it did identify the SSD, but when I tried booting into it I got the error "Reboot and select proper boot device". Grub did not show up.

Is it anything I could've possibly done wrong? How can I fix this? Thank you!

[steady prawn]

CSM won't work because that's non-EFI

your EFI partition needs to be set up very specifically. It needs to be partitioned FAT32 and have a certain structure and also marked as an EFI partition in fdisk or whatever partition utility you're using

can you boot into a known good OS and run fdisk on the drive? Are all your partitions there?

[split badger]

Give me one second

[split badger]

i used the same usb I used to try install Arch. I cannot provide a screenshot, sorry.

Also, I did format it to FAT by following the Arch Wiki installation guide (mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/nvme1n1p1)

[steady prawn]

OK - if you mount /dev/nvme1n1p1, what does the folder look like and what kind of filesystem is it?

[split badger]

The folder is empty. Is there supposed to be something in it?

[steady prawn]

OK so that would be the problem. What boot loader are you using?

[split badger]

I tried using grub

[steady prawn]

OK. You may not have installed it correctly

Are you in the live installer?

[split badger]

Yes

[steady prawn]

OK so you will probably have to mount your root partition and then chroot into it in order to install grub

[split badger]

Yes, I just did that. What I previously did was simply run grub-install /dev/nvme1n1, then grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

[steady prawn]

yeah you need a bit more unfortunately

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --boot-directory=/boot is probably what you need

and then grub-mkconfig after again just in case

this is assuming your EFI partition is mounted to /efi and you have a /boot directory

100 MB EFI is too small to hold the Linux kernel so you need to tell Grub to split up the kernel and the EFI stuff

the EFI loader will mount your root filesystem and look at the /boot directory to load the Linux kernel

OK that's probably better

[split badger]

Alright, I will try that

[steady prawn]

you'll need to run mkinitcpio again

[split badger]

Alright, I will repartition it with the efi partition at 2gb

How large should I make swap then

[steady prawn]

A good EFI structure looks roughly like this :

.
└── EFI
    └── BOOT
        └── BOOTX64.EFI

You can have other files but the /efi/boot/bootx64.efi should definitely be there

also that means if you mounted EFI to /efi the path will be /efi/efi/boot/bootx64.efi

(also case doesn't matter because fat32)

[split badger]

@steady prawn sorry for taking so long; I repartitioned it with the efi having 2gb and the rest to the root

[split badger]

Do I run this now,

[split badger]

or this?

[steady prawn]

Where did you mount EFI?

[split badger]

/mnt/efi

[steady prawn]

ok so in that case since you're not splitting boot and EFI I would just do grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/mnt/efi

when you did mkinitcpio are you outputting that to efi or is that still /boot?

[split badger]

Should I have done it differently? That's how it's in the manual

[steady prawn]

no that's fine, just wanted to make sure

doesn't really matter where it's mounted tbh as long as it's where you tell grub it's going. You may also want to mount it as /boot then too if you aren't doing a separate /boot

[split badger]

Here it says it's not required, so I didn't do it

[steady prawn]

can you show me ls -al / ?

[steady prawn]

OK so it looks like you still have a separate /boot. It's fine tbh it just means you'll have to run grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/mnt/efi --boot-dir=/boot

I'd worry first about making sure the OS boots. Then you can deal with combining boot and efi if you want to

[split badger]

when I ran that, it said it failed to get canonical path of /mnt/efi. I'm guessing that's because I'm chrooted into it

[steady prawn]

(omg I just read your status text - yum!)

[split badger]

Do i simply do --efi-directory=/efi

[steady prawn]

what does the output of mount say?

[steady prawn]

yes

you can remount it

and then tell grub to install everything to /boot

[split badger]

I decided to mount it to /boot/efi, but I don't think that should be an issue. I ran grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi

and then grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

can I try to reboot and see if it works now?

[steady prawn]

so /boot/efi is actually a mount point and not a subfolder, yeah?

[split badger]

seems so to me

[steady prawn]

ah OK

that should work yeah. If you do a tree /boot/efi (hopefully tree is installed? idk) what's the structure of your EFI partition?

[split badger]

it's not..

I can just pacman -S tree though, right?

[steady prawn]

yeah sure

it's mostly just to confirm the structure follows the EFI standard. You can also manually confirm but this is a bit easier

[split badger]

is this alright?

[steady prawn]

it might work but the EFI standard says it should be /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi

I'd just copy it over there just in case

it may not matter but I've never had it elsewhere

[split badger]

Alright. Also, as a note, this is still empty

[steady prawn]

that doesn't make sense because you just showed it was mounted as /boot/efi and there was stuff in it?

[split badger]

yeah,,

[steady prawn]

note that the device file /dev/nvme1n1p1 by itself doesn't do anything. You need to mount it somewhere to see what's inside. So if you're just trying to CD into /dev/nvme1n1p1 it won't work

you may know this already but I just wanted to make sure

[split badger]

I don't, I'm a complete newbie, I've only ever used Windows before. Everything I know is essentially what I read on the wiki

[steady prawn]

ah OK

[split badger]

I did ls nvme1n1p1

[split badger]

So, everything should be alright then?

[steady prawn]

yeah so the files in /dev aren't really files. Think of the folder as a list of devices (hardware) attached to your system. Software and the kernel does stuff with the files listed there but it's not something you can tap into directly (usually)

yeah I think so. Give it a go. You may have to select your boot partition from your BIOS if it doesn't immediately boot but I think it should work

[split badger]

I'm in bios now. The only things I can boot from are the windows SSD and the USB I installed Arch from :(

[steady prawn]

Is that Windows hard disk a different hard disk or is it the same drive you reformatted?

[split badger]

It's a different one

I was basically here before too, as the title suggests. It doesn't recognize the SSD with Arch as bootable

[steady prawn]

Can you force it to try booting off of a device? Sometimes an EFI system doesn't scan your drives for bootables until it tries

in theory it sounds like the EFI folder was set up properly so it should for sure be bootable

[split badger]

doesn't seem like I can

I followed what you said and what's on the wiki so I really don't know what the issue is

[steady prawn]

hm. Hard to say what the issue is. It could be something neither of us realized or it could be your BIOS being annoying. Can you try and unplug your HDD and see if it will boot off the Arch one?

like just let the BIOS do its thing once the Windows drive is unplugged. It might work

[split badger]

It's actually an m.2 SSD, so I'd have to remove the shield

[steady prawn]

mmm

[split badger]

I could try doing that, but it's really late and I have to wake up early. I will try to fix the issue tomorrow.

[steady prawn]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

See 4.3.1?

[split badger]

If anyone realizes that I potentially did wrong please tell me

[steady prawn]

you may need to force the firmware to recognize the drive

[split badger]

sorry, I will do this tomorrow. Will you be able to respond if I'll ping you?

[steady prawn]

yeah I'll try. You're in HU right? It's late xD

[split badger]

about 1 PM UTC. also no, I just really like kurtoskalacs :3c

Thank you a lot for the help so far

[steady prawn]

ah OK! I just assumed lol

yeah no problem - have a good one

[high bay]

is this problem fixed? Im currently having a similar one.

i have a separate post, but its basically the same as theirs

atleast from what ive read (dont want to clog their help channel, just wanted to see if they tried all possible solutions) tl:dr wanted to see if i should give up on the partition

[steady prawn]

if you partitioned it properly you should take a look at the UEFI article I linked above, section 4.3.1

[split badger]

I'm so sorry for wasting your time. I didn't do anything wrong during the installation, and everything you told me was right also; it was a hardware thing.

I got mad at windows and installed Arch there; I could do it from memory. Everything went well.

Still, thank you for teaching me a few things