Arch Linux

rpallen

Member

Registered: 2015-08-16

Posts: 24

after install reboot gives - no bootable media

I tried and successfully (I thought) installing Arch, but when I removed the live usb and rebooted, I got a window-no bootable media.

Here are some details:
I  was given an Acer Aspire ES 15 laptop whose original HD (with Windows 10) was replaced with a 240GB SSD. I don't know the history of this laptop.  I was a little surprised when I looked at the BIOS and saw that there's no GPT.  Here are the GPT entries in the BIOS:
GPT Partition Recovery: None/Save/Restore
Clear GPT Partition: [NONE]
GPT Partition Record: No Record

The last 2 entries are blacked out so they can't be selected.
In the GPT Partition Recovery, if I select either save or restore it asks "Do you want to save/restore GPT Partition Table?  If I chose yes, if I had selected save, the result is "Can't found boot image".  If I had selected restore, the result is"Write disk  error".
I don't know if this missing GPT is the problem for the no bootable media error.

I have the boot mode set as UEFI.

I burned archlinux-2018.04.01-x86_64.iso to a usb and booted from this.

In fdisk /dev/sda I first chose "g" to do a GPT and then I created 4 partitions:
sda1 300M as EFI
sda2 25G as linux
sda3 8G as swap
sda4 remaining size as linux

I then did:
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4
mkswap /dev/sda3
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/armazem
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/armazem
swapon /dev/sda3
wifi-menu (chose my wifi)
pacstrap -i  /mnt base
genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
arch-chroot /mnt
pacman -S grub efibootmgr dosfstools openssh os-prober mtools linux-headers linux-lts linux-lts-headers
nano /etc/locale.gen (uncommented br_FR UTF-8 UTF-8 and br_FR ISO-8859-1)
locale-gen
passwd (created root password)
mkdir /boot/EFI
mount /dev/sda1 /boot/EFI
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --bootloader-id=grub_uefi --recheck
cp /usr/share/locale/en\@quot/LC_MESSAGES/grub.mo /boot/grub/locale/en.mo
***NOTE: I thought the "en" in the above command was the locale, so I changed both of them to "br".  This gave me an error so I changed them back to "en" and I didn't get an erro.
***
exit (exit out of arch-chroot)
umount -a
I then removed the usb and rebooted.  That is when I got the no bootable media error.
What should I do.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,072

Re: after install reboot gives - no bootable media

Verify that you actually have an entry in your NVRAM with e.g. efibootmgr , that said Acer UEFIs usually are a bit finicky, and you might have to explicitly whitelist an allowed EFI executable. (see the notes on the last few models here)

Oh and please paste command output/history logs in [ code ] tags in the future

Last edited by V1del (2018-04-30 15:58:40)

rpallen

Member

Registered: 2015-08-16

Posts: 24

Re: after install reboot gives - no bootable media

Thanks, V1del.  I`m not sure how to to look for the NVRAM, but I`m a little bit familiar with efibootmgr, so I`ll see what I can figure out when I get home.

I apologize about the code.  I couldn`t see how to mark code.  Now I know.