I'm following the installation guide from arch's website. I created a 513MiB partition to store the grub, a 6GiB swap, and a 100GiB ext4 for linux. I installed linux with pacstrap in the third partition and then installed grub into the first partition, which was mounted as /boot in my 3rd partition in which I was chrooted. I also generated the grub configuration file and then rebooted. I see only the grub command line when it reboots.

Ps: while creating the first partition, I selected the EFI type and then when I tried to format it with

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdxY


It just outputs:

mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)


What is this?

Also, GRUB says that when I do


parted /dev/sda1 print

I should see:

For GPT, you are looking for "Partition Table: gpt". For EFI, you are looking for a small (512 MiB or less) partition with a vfat/fat32 file system and the boot flag enabled

But I see partition table: loop and no flags.

What's happening?

ps: as you can see, I tried to install grub even though the table as loop and it had no boot flag, but it booted grub at least. Why?

Hmmm - Arch requires to to read the doco, and be careful. Also you need to apply some common sense.
This is where the common sense comes in - this is common documentation for an unknown (to the wiki author) partition where you want to install to. You need to use /dev/sda1This is where being careful comes in - read the grub page again; it should be "parted /dev/sda print"

Hi, I know, I did type the right sda, which was sda1 in my case. I'm posting this in my smartphone because I can't boot my system so I didn't read well what I typed. Do you have an explabation for the output of mkfs.fat?

That is the correct output of mkfs.vfat, see example here

fdisk -l should look something like this

I suspect that you have missed something in setting up Grub (been there, got the t-shirt haha)

boot again from the Arch install, remount your drives including /boot connect to the internet then arch-chroot

The reinstall grub, I'm assuming you used /boot as your mount point but change as needed

pacman -S grub efibootmgr

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

just in case rebuild you initframs
mkinitcpio -p linux

then write the Grub config
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

then reboot

If you still have issues check out the grub wiki page here

Thanks, I'm gonna try it today. Meanwhile, I've found a tutorial specific for macbook. The only difference is that it uses different directories for the grub installation, do you think this is the problem? http://www.frankshin.com/installing-...book-air-2013/

Do I have to use /boot/efi for example or something like that?

What is the output of: parted /dev/sda print. also the efi partition should be mounted on /boot/efi, if you have it mounted on /boot that will not work.

If that's how you have it set up then change accordingly

I've always just mounted it at /boot, never had an issue with it. But if that's the correct way then cool

I had problems mounting efi partition to /boot vs /boot/efi the last time I tried it that way, but that was a few years ago. so maybe now it will work your way.

I did it again with /boot/efi and it didn't even boot at grub this time, it just says that there's no disk to boot. However the vmlinuz image appeared at rhe boot directory, something that didn't even showed before. When I do fdisk -l with the live image, I see 3 partitions, one of them bootable and esp, the other is the swap, and the other is the root file system. However, when I use the hardware diagnostic tool I see that the disk has onlt one partition, which is the root one, and it's not bootable.

See here: https://imgur.com/a/BBYzb

Also, the /boot partition has vmlinuz, grub and efi folders as expected, and the / partition, which is the root one, has the entire linux tree installed to it, jusy as it should be

Try it with just /boot as the path rather than /boot/efi please

Then reinstall grub with "efi-directory=/boot/efi" or maybe "/boot/efi/efi"

I tried again with /boot and /boot/efi also, but none of them will work. Both /boot/efi and /boot tries were made on a newly partitioned disk but it gets painful to redo everything just to install the grub again, I tried to do rm -rf /boot or /boot/efi just to do everything again but it Didn't work, so I'm installing on top of the already done installation like this: https://imgur.com/a/3Z4Is

But now I don't even boot to the grub screen anymore, just to the 'no bootable disk' warning. I don't know what to try anymore, seems like I tried every possible way.

When I did boot to grub at least, it seemed that there were no vmlinuz to boot to, but I'm not sure

Hi. I installed Ubuntu Budgie because I needed my computer for a while, but I didn't give up. Please see how it did with my partitions:

https://imgur.com/a/aASal

why it created /boot AND /boot/efi? What's Map|? Why the /boot is ext4?

I'm gonna try to install Arch on a pen drive right now so I don't mess this new installation.

Thank you!

Did you select to install /boot to separate partiion during installation?
The efi/esp fat32 formated partition is required for uefi systems as a place to store the boot loaders versus the MBR of older systems which could only store one boot loader. Most distros mount the esp partition at /boot/efi, where as some distros like arch mount the esp partition at /boot. This link explains it some: https://askubuntu.com/questions/9281...tition-at-boot