I’m new to archlabs, and wanted to install the distro on an empty hardrive via a usb with the live image on it. I made my partitions in gparted (an ext4 partition for root, and one linux-swap for swap). I followed the directions of the installer, and installed the bootloader on my harddrive, but when I go to reboot my computer, there is no grub menu, and my computer can’t detect the operating system. (I’m writing this from the live usb disk lol). I’ve tried installing twice already and have gotten the same results. Any help would be nice, Thanks.
Hello @theUndertaker and welcome to the forum.
Please verify if you need/want to create an efi partition , that is if your BIOS is set up to boot in UEFI modality.
The second suggestion would be to install the “testing” iso you can find here.
Please read this post for more chances of a successful installation.
No need to worry because the release is rock solid, i have been using it since the beginning with no issues at all
If you don’t have an EFI system partition then try selecting CSM or Legacy mode from your firmware (“BIOS”) options to let your machine boot in non-UEFI mode.
You probably have GRUB installed in non-UEFI mode, this can be confirmed from the live environment by using a hex editor to read the MBR:
dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 | xxd
There should be a “GRUB .Geom.Hard Disk.Read.Error” message in the output.
If you want to switch to a UEFI system then remount /boot to an EFI system partition (and change /etc/fstab) then re-install the kernel and install the bootloader in UEFI mode:
Hi, after several hours of tinkering, I’ve finally got this thing to work, although its not optimal. I installed the testing version, but I got the same problem. The same is true for trying everything else suggested in this post. The only thing that allowed me to use this distro was installing some other flavor of linux (i just did fedora because of its easy and reliable installing process), and then installed archlabs alongside of fedora. I’m really not sure what else to do, and I want to completely remove fedora in the future, Thanks anyways.
Hi there,
I tried installing the testing version, but the same problem occurred. The only solution that worked was installing another linux distro, and dual booting with archlabs, allowing me to at least see the Grub menu. Thanks anyways
Hi @theUndertaker , I don’t know what to suggest to solve your problem as for the few info I have it could be anything.
I am sure someone will came up soon with the right idea.
Thank you for keep trying, Archlabs is great to use and is also fun to learn how to make it work the way you like it.
I did not try those two things, I don’t really know what that means or what to do with it (I’m very new to linux). However, the output of that command is “EFI variables are not supported on this system.”
Just tried this, and it worked! Thanks a lot! For future reference, is there a way to install grub on this distro if i’m on the live version on a usb stick? If I’m ever in this scenario again, I don’t want to have to install fedora to use Archlabs.
