Arch Linux

lizardonsprings

Member

Registered: 2023-03-30

Posts: 3

BIOS / UEFI not seeing EFI partition that grub was installed to

Hi guys,

I've been trying to set up a dual boot on my work laptop (is a fairly recent HP ProBook - 11th gen i7 if that helps) and followed this videos instructions (which worked fine on my desktop machine) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SnjJEuaMH8&t=65s

So far I have:

- disabled secure boot in BIOS

- installed Win10, leaving half the SSD ready for Arch (just one hard drive in the laptop)

- created EFI, swap and ext4 partitions, formatted, mounted the EFI to /boot, ext4 to /, etc, as per the video then installed arch to the correct partition

- installed fine using archinstall, rebooted, went into BIOS, can only see my Windows EFI partition.

Any ideas guys? Thinking I may have overlooked something simple in the BIOS that's stopping me from seeing it?

Also, I was watching the monitor when the archinstall script was running and watched it (seemingly) successfully install grub - I always watch that bit as I've had issues with it in the past.

Any help appreciated

Last edited by lizardonsprings (2023-06-06 22:19:45)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,248

Re: BIOS / UEFI not seeing EFI partition that grub was installed to

If this is the same disk you likely need to share the ESP with Windows. The UEFI spec only mandates a single ESP per bootable disk and whether any given firmware supports multiple is not specified, hence they'll most likely only support one.

I suggest you mount the Windows ESP to /efi or so in the chroot and install grub there and regenerate your config: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Installation and adjust your fstab so that the Windows partition is mounted to /efi on boot, should you need to reinstall/update GRUB.

Also general note, third party guides and videos are not supported here, if you run into any different issues, follow the official documentation or ask the video author for help.

Last edited by V1del (2023-06-07 08:16:47)

lizardonsprings

Member

Registered: 2023-03-30

Posts: 3

Re: BIOS / UEFI not seeing EFI partition that grub was installed to

Thanks for the reply

Yes it is on the same disk.

I see now, could I potentially wipe the partition that has arch installed on it, delete the 2nd EFI partition then re-run archinstall telling the install script to mount my windows EFI as /boot ?

I’m fairly nooby with Linux so this sounds a lot less scary than chrooting around!

I read through the official documentation as you mentioned and just wanted to make sure I had it correct! Thanks

Last edited by lizardonsprings (2023-06-07 11:18:45)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,248

Re: BIOS / UEFI not seeing EFI partition that grub was installed to

Should work. the "problem" with that is that the EFI partition Windows auto-creates is often on the smaller size and only sufficient to hold one kernel so you won't be able to have multiple kernels, but this shouldn't be inherently problematic for general usage.

As for chroot being scary, it really isn't: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot … t_location -- mount your root partition to /mnt and the Windows ESP to /mnt/efi and your dedicated ESP to /boot --> followed by https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot … rch-chroot

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: BIOS / UEFI not seeing EFI partition that grub was installed to

telling the install script to mount my windows EFI as /boot

If you're using GRUB it's probably best to mount the ESP under /efi/ or /boot/efi/, preferably with the x-systemd.automount option. That should help prevent ESP filesystem corruption in the event of sudden power loss.

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