Arch Linux

Iulian

Member

Registered: 2019-08-01

Posts: 27

What happened ?

Soo i had a previous manjaro install that broke and after i configured my arch on a vm in windows i decided to replace the manjaro partition with the arch one.

I boot up the install i go on to partition the drive (i am dual booting) and this is what i had

/dev/nvme0n1p1   ESP
/dev/nvme0n1p2   MSR
/dev/nvme0n1p3   WINpart
/dev/nvme0n1p4   another MS partition
/dev/nvme0n1p5   manjaro part
/dev/nvme0n1p6   manjaro swap

I wasn't sure if i should delete the ESP partition because i wasn't seeing any other windows boot partition (spoilers i shouldn't have) but i decided to delete it anyways and deal with it at the moment (i did this before i knew that you can repair it so it wasn't a big deal)

After deleting the ESP partition i was left with this

Free Space            100M (ESP)
/dev/nvme0n1p1   MSR
/dev/nvme0n1p2   WINpart
/dev/nvme0n1p3   another MS partition
Free Space            ~300GB

I found it weird that it did not merge the all the free space but i found it somewhat understandable and i have plenty of space anyways 100M is not a big deal

I partitioned the remaining 300GBs like this

Free Space            100M (ESP)
/dev/nvme0n1p1   MSR
/dev/nvme0n1p2   WINpart
/dev/nvme0n1p3   another MS partition
/dev/nvme0n1p5   arch part
/dev/nvme0n1p6   swap
/dev/nvme0n1p7   300mb ESP

I formated p5,6,7 as ext4,swap and fat32 (as the install guide says) and everything went fine untill i tried configuring GRUB.

I set up the folders in the new ESP part i installed it, and when i generated the configs os-prober did not detect my windows partition i continued the installation and rebooted to check that at least the GRUB config was fine and i did not scew up and it was.

I imediately knew that i fucked up and had to repair the boot partition of windows soo i booted up my laptop googled how to do it and made a windows usb drive and while that was happening i had the inspiration to go back into arch and remake the partition. I ran cfdisk and created that partition as ESP selected write and reboot so i can enter the windows repair tool and to my surprise the option to boot to windows was there

It makes sense since i did not format that partition at any point and it contained the earliest sectors from all partitions(idk if that has any effect on it) all the data was there.

But that begs the question what does cfdisk and the similar tools do ?

2ManyDogs

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 4,648

Re: What happened ?

Please edit your topic title to something that actually describes your problem.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Genera … ow_to_post

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,480

Website

Re: What happened ?

But that begs the question what does cfdisk and the similar tools do ?

That is your question??  It's pretty vague.  But ok:

cfdisk is a curses-based program for partitioning any block device ... cfdisk provides basic partitioning functionality with a user-friendly interface.

That's what it does.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,267

Re: What happened ?

If you "just" deleted the partition nothing bad will have happened yet, so if you remade the new partition at the exact space the ESP "used" to be then all data in there will still be intact. The actual data will only get overwritten once you format it again or write to the new free space.

Deleting a partition just "marks" that space as being free to write to, it does in and of itself not yet touch the data contained in that space.

Last edited by V1del (2022-07-14 14:47:28)