[SOLVED] Newbie Arch Installation Problems from USB

Background
Samsung Chronos 7 Windows 7 machine had kali linux installed and overwritten the windows installation. Since having the laptop I've decided to remove this and install Arch.

Issues
During the installation initial I had numerous issues with the GRUB section with errors relating to: "the GPT partition label contains no BIOS boot partition".

After googling and finding some references to installation an addition partition of +1M on the drive and configured (fdisk t option) to format the drive which appeared to allow me to continue with the process but the laptop is unable to boot to restart cycle.

The laptop has a SSD (7G) used initialy for the windows boot, not used for kali/arch should could this be used.

It's quite possible that the BIOS is still going to this small drive rather than your main one. Three possible things to try:

1) Have you looked inside the BIOS set-up program to see what device it boots from by default and whether you can change it?

2) Is there a key you can press to get a boot menu? F9 and F12 are common ones used for this purpose.

3) Could you install GRUB on this small SSD rather than on your main drive? You will still need that BIOS boot partition (and don't make a filesystem on it btw) but once GRUB is running, it should be able to find the kernel and initramfs image on your main drive.

Originally Posted by seekeri After googling

i don't understand how you could attempt to install Arch Linux and ignore the glorious arch wiki, esp. the Installation Guide?

The message you are reporting is common to users trying to do a Legacy install of a system to a GPT partitioned disk. This requires an "unformatted" bios_grub partition of 1MB+. Doing an online search for "legacy install linux on gpt disk" should find you numerous sites explaining this.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB

Thanks all for your responses,

Hazel.1 can’t access :c
Hazel.2 boot menu shows kali and Apps menu is blank
Hazel.3 will give it a go thanks
Yancek.1 is that not the +1M partition I referenced as it may be something I miss understand

Thanks.

Hello seekeri,

1) I second ondoho's recommendation to consult the Arch wiki and follow the Installation Guide. The Arch Wiki is of excellent quality and well maintained.

2) a hint: if you're trying to make things easy on yourself and want to remove *everything* from the computer and just install Arch, an option would be to recreate the GPT partition table and then repartition using a live ISO of GParted on a USB drive ... You would then have to make sure you create a UEFI install media from the current Arch ISO and install Arch (UEFI mode) using that. Should be easy going after that.

3) The "easy-going" comment in my above point assumes you know what you are getting into with respect to Arch. It is far from being the most difficult version of linux to install and use but equally far from being the easiest. For example, after a complete and successful installation, you will have a fully-functional command-line only Arch linux system with no X-server, Wayland, GUI or applications installed. In a sense, this is part of the beauty of Arch - you make what you want of it and customize it to your tastes. This requires a certain degree of pre-existing general IT and linux knowledge, or the curiosity and willingness to learn along the way.

Cheers - let us know if this helped and don't hesitate to return for more guidance.

Morning all,

I have been using the arch wiki but googled when the installation wasn't going to plan.

I've installed Grub on the SSD partition but not joy.

I'd fdisk the drive to set-up the partitions in preparation for the install, I appriciate the difficulty of Arch and diven into the deep end but I have tried to install different distro openSUSE with the same issue (completed the OS installation and unable to boot).

I'm hoping that I can have an old machine and will pull the hard drive and see if putting it into the old desktop and see if it will boot.

Thanks

The laptop has a SSD (7G) used initialy for the windows boot, not used for kali/arch should could this be used.

Does this mean you have two drives? If so have you tried to changed the boot order in the the bios. Is this an uefi machine?
Create a 300mb partition, formatted fat32, flagged as esp. Arch recommends to mount to /boot, but most distros mount to /boot/efi.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...stem_partition as already mentioned if booting in legacy mode need a 1mb partition flagged as bios boot/bios grub.
Here is the how to install grub in either efi or legacy mode: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB

A default install of windows 7 would be a Legacy/CSM install? Is that what you had? When you overwrote this with the installation of Kali, did you install Kali in Legacy mode? Did you install Kali on the second drive? Did you install Grub from Kali to the MBR of the second drive? Did you have the second drive set to first boot priority? During the install of Arch, did you create the bios-grub partition on the second drive on which you were trying to install Arch. Or was it created on the other drive (SSD)? You didn't format this partition did you as it is required to NOT be formatted? And as asked, which drive is set to first boot priority?

Thank you everyone.

I took the advise around Arch and went with openSUSE, I did have to pull the hard drive from the laptop and install onto a new machine and run a fresh installation from there.

Thanks
Craig.