I’m relatively new in the Linux universe but I have tried quite a few of them and even dual booted with my Windows setup.
But when I’m trying to install EndeavourOS with secured boot turned off and systemd-boot, I’m getting this error near the end of the installation when it’s trying to add the bootloader.
Here’s the report it generated:
Actually I wanted to use sbctl to create and sign bootloader so that I can dual boot with Windows without turning off Secure Boot.
I found a couple of sbctl video instruction on YouTube and it seems all of them were using systemd-boot, not Grub. So I thought maybe sbctl doesn’t work well with grub. Since I’m a newbie I wouldn’t know how to make it work with grub. Archwiki instruction for this seems complicated to my newbie mind.
Mine is a UEFI BIOS, GPT partition. Can you explain why I’m getting that error and a possible solution for this? I haven’t tried grub yet on my system.
Should I install with grub? Will I be able to use sbctl to sign bootloader?
Edit: BTW, I have tried both online and offline installer. The log above is from the offline installer I think.
That error typically means there is something wrong with your EFI partition.
If you are re-using an existing partition, scan it for errors and repair any problems. If you are creating a new partition using manual partitioning, make sure that you selected the check box to format it.
Hi! I have Windows 11 installed on my system and trying to install EndeavourOS in another partition with a dual boot setup. I have installed openSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora before and both worked fine. Fedora auto created a separate 1 GB partition for EFI while Tumbleweed used the Windows one. I even have Tumbleweed installed at the moment. So, I guess the EFI partition itself is alright?
I just checked and everything is fine. Besides, I never liked fast startup on Windows so that was already turned off and I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed after I failed to install EndeavourOS, so writing access is probably not an issue.
Is there anything else you can suggest?
Normal, nothing special. KDE with systemd-boot, BTRFS filesystem on an empty unallocated partition. Though in the offline installer the UI showed ext4 even when btfrs was selected. btrfs was shown correctly for the online installer. I don’t know if this particular behavior is normal.
Replace a partition then clicked on the free space in the UI below which showed that EndeavousOS will be installed on that free space, and it also showed that it auto detected the existing EFI partition. I checked a couple of YouTube videos where they did dual boot so I followed the same installation method.
An update on this issue. Turns out EndeavourOS installer just cannot auto detect my Windows’s EFI partition no matter what I try. For whatever reason it can only detect my ventoy usb drive’s EFI partition. That’s why it was failing. It has not happened with any other distro so I didn’t notice at first.
I tried Arco Linux after this which also uses Calamares installer, but it can auto detect Windows’s EFI partition with no issue. So, I think the EndeavourOS team should look into their installer configuration to see if they can find a way to fix this.
Like EndeavourOS, Arco Linux’s Calamares also only select ext4, no matter what file system you choose. This is probably a Calamares bug. The solution is to select a partition that is not empty and then select the free partition where you want to install. That makes it detect btrfs or anything else that is chosen. Of course, if someone don’t have such pre-made partition then this is not going to work.
I know I can manually choose the Windows partition instead of relying on EndeavourOS to auto detect it, but I didn’t do that since I see that many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, Arco auto create subvolumes for btrfs which I’m not comfortable to do manually just yet.
Anyway, I hope the team looks into the issue of it failing to auto detect windows efi partition.
Thanks, good point. I learned my lesson when I installed Arco. 100 MB windows partition wasn’t enough. But thankfully I was able to increase the size of the partition. I increased it to 300 MB which was more than enough. I would use grub if it was guaranteed to work with arch secure boot after signing with sbctl. It initially worked when I tried but broke after a kernel update was installed. Maybe there was still some items left to be signed or I did something wrong. With systemd-boot + sbctl everything works perfectly but I won’t be able to use btrfs snapshot.