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matthuszagh

Member

Registered: 2018-12-25

Posts: 3

Unable to mount boot partition - Dell XPS 13 l322x

I'm trying to setup a fresh Arch installation on my old Dell XPS and am running into trouble when trying to mount my boot partition. I'm getting the error "mount: /mnt/boot: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error."

I used GNU parted to setup my partitions:
# parted /dev/sda
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary fat32 1MiB 551MiB
(parted) set 1 esp on
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 551MiB 100%
(parted) quit

This seemed to work fine. I used cryptsetup to encrypt the root filesystem (but not the boot partition). Then I mounted the partitions with:
# cryptsetup open /dev/sda2 cryptroot
# mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
# mkdir -p /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

That last step is what generates an error. If I run fsck on it, the output says there's a bad magic number in super-block and that "/dev/sda1 contains `DOS/MBR boot sector". It also suggests running e2fsck with -b 8193 or -b 32768. I tried both and neither worked.

I've performed these exact steps on a newer System 76 laptop and that worked fine. Any idea what I'm doing wrong here? Is this make not compatible with UEFI? Thanks.

Last edited by matthuszagh (2019-02-19 05:37:25)

Lone_Wolf

Member

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,919

Re: Unable to mount boot partition - Dell XPS 13 l322x

The Dell XPS 13 l322x appears to be a model from 2013, so may very well not support uefi .

Boot the install iso and verify, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … _boot_mode

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2019-02-19 09:19:30)

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matthuszagh

Member

Registered: 2018-12-25

Posts: 3

Re: Unable to mount boot partition - Dell XPS 13 l322x

Thanks for the link - that was the issue. Although the xps firmware didn't come configured to support uefi, I was able to configure it to be following the directions here: https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops- … -p/5143400

After that the other step I needed to take was

# mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda1

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,424

Website

Re: Unable to mount boot partition - Dell XPS 13 l322x

Please remember to mark your thread as [Solved] by editing your first post and prepending it to the title.

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