Hi, I’m trying to do a manual install of EndeavourOS Mercury NEO on a computer with no EFI/UEFI bios system, it only has the old BIOS/CSM bios system. I want to do a manual partitioning during install so I can specify the size of the Swap file to be bigger than 8GB. Whenever I do the partitioning however and after rebooting I get the ‘No bootable device’ error despite me having done the partitioning seemingly correctly:
I created a new partition table for the whole SSD as ‘GPT’. Then did the partitions like this in the following order:
8MiB unformatted, flagged as bios_grub.
512MiB fat32, flagged as boot. (Mount point = /boot)
Around 200GB ext4, flagged as root. (Mount point = / )
12GB swap as linux-swap.
When I reboot I get the same boot error. And when I boot into the live environment Gparted shows the 8MiB partition instead has been flagged as ext4 instead of unformatted and thus marked as ‘unknown’.
I’m quite at a loss here after spending hours trying to fix this myself. Any advice on what I should do is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Some BIOS implementations cannot use GPT disks, even if you properly create the the small, unformatted, bios_grub partition. I have a couple old Dell laptops that just refuse to work with any GPT disks. Use the old standard MBR partition table. What other choice is there?
I manually installed Rhino Linux (a version of Ubuntu) that used the GPT filesystem and that worked fine. It just for whatever reason struggles with EndeavourOS, so any lack of GPT support is sadly not the issue here.
If you are using BIOS, this /boot partition is not needed. A fat32 partition is used to hold the EFI stub file and not necessary on a non-EFI system. The partition where you put / should be marked as the bootable partition.
The purpose of the bios_grub partition is more or less a space holder so that grub has some room to write the bootloader on a GPT disk. That partition is not mounted at any point in the install process. I have used bios_grub partitions to do exactly what you want to do, use the GPT partition layout on a disk in a legacy bios setting. I am not sure what is happening with your hardware and/or process of partitioning and formatting the drive for installation.
I’m sorry, could you explain exactly how I’m supposed to ‘use the GPT partition layout on a disk in a legacy bios setting’? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. Do you mean that I should change the flag of the root partition from ‘boot’ to ‘legacy-boot’?
Ah! Hang on, if it was previously formatted to ext4 and you select do not format, it will still be ext4. Have you tried deleting and recreating the partition?
It worked! I followed your instructions and it worked! Thank you so so much.
However, I was forced to use the Offline install of Calamares as when I tried to install the system via Online mode I would get an error related to pacman doing something with the arch keyring, resulting in the installer program closing completely.
That means I couldn’t choose my desktop environment and got the default KDE Plasma desktop, which is a bit unfortunate since I would like to use XFCE rather than KDE since XFCE is more lightweight, but right now its working which is all that matters. I’m sure I can change the desktop environment somehow later should I want to through the terminal.
I am glad you got it sorted. You can change the desktop later, but it’s a hassle to get that done. KDE is not much heavier than Xfce. If you turn off file searching and disable the animations, KDE is quite light and efficient.
The pacman-keyring package updated since the ISO was released, so maybe that caused a problem? I think the EOS Welcome program has an option to refresh the keyring, you could try that before starting the installer. Since this is brand new, you loose nothing by trying again.
In case of online install we have a script that check keyring stuff, but in rare cases it happens keyring servers have issues, or user have general network problems that makes it fail, as we do online very close to Arch it would not use any images to create system, it’s done from scratch basically, only small portion is installed like using pacstrap. So the thing that would help is there with rank mirror options
I have XFCE as my desktop now haha