Need help for my specific arch installation situation.

[sterile grove]

I am running a macbook from 2017 (with a temporary wifi adapter for the installation) and I need to install arch while dual booting linux mint. I am using the archinstall command.
Right now I’m having issues with disk configuration because when the installer is confusing me. I know what partition I want to format and install arch on but it isn’t very straightforward as to how I do that. I want to format /dev/sda2 which is my previous MacOS partition that no longer works or boots properly. What do I do to install it there? I also need help to select a boot partition because it says it couldn’t detect it even though on /dev/sda1 it clearly has the boot flag.

[glossy pendant]

lsblk -f

Show output?

@sterile grove

[sterile grove]

okay so I have made some progress I believe. I am trying to manual install and right now I want to resize my sda2 to be smaller so I can make swap space

how would I do that easily

[ripe socket]

can you try using disk utility in MacOS recovery and just make it a swap partition and ext4 inside arch installation

[ripe socket]

if you're a beginner I would recommend you cfdisk

https://cfdisk.com/#:~:text=cfdisk is a partition management,or altering existing partition layouts.

[sterile grove]

honestly I don’t even know if I want to do swap anymore

seems like too much for me

[ripe socket]

swap helps when you're in low memory

[sterile grove]

8gb enough?

[ripe socket]

considering macbooks are mostly 4GB on airs

[ripe socket]

yeah

[ripe socket]

but a swap partition is optional

[sterile grove]

could I just skip it and be fine?

I don’t think I need it that bad

[ripe socket]

yeah

[sterile grove]

I won’t run too much on it and I didn’t need swap for mint

alright

I will come back when I have questions

[ripe socket]

@sterile grove may I ask if its a MBP or MBA?

or a MB

macbook pro/air/Just macbook

[sterile grove]

it’s an air and an older model

anyways I have a question

issue

whatever

I installed arch and when I enabled everything I rebooted expecting to go into grub but instead I went into grub normally except there was no option for arch

it was just linux mint

which was the regular one except I thought I was supposed to have an arch option

[ripe socket]

That happend to me

can't detect uefi boots

[sterile grove]

what?

so what do I do

I don’t understand

I will pick this back up tomorrow. Thanks for the help for now.

[ripe socket]

Try blessing the efi

You can do this in MacOS recovery but since you said you deleted it then you have to boot to internet recovery mode

You can achieve it by turning off first and turning it back on while holding Option + Command + R

after that, open terminal and execute the following:

diskutil mount disk0s1
``` this will mount efi, should show a message that Volume EFI is mounted

bless --folder /Volumes/EFI --file /Volumes/EFI/EFI/arch/grubx64.efi --setBoot

[sterile grove]

you’re sure there’s no way to do this in archiso?

I specifically remember saying that the grub config file couldn’t generate the os prober even though the disable was set to false

I also had an error when trying to install

but I assumed it was because grub was already installed

I ran a command to check and it said it was

[ripe socket]

Bless in arch iso

Well yeah

@sterile grove you online?

But for me I would recommend MACOS recovery

[sterile grove]

I don’t have access to my laptop as of now but I would like to know what I should do next. I could try go into linux mint and making its grub detect other operating systems installed instead of just linux mint with enabling the os prober since its off my default.