Grub Installation Issues

Message

StevenC21 · Post by **StevenC21** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:34 pm

Hey, its me again, this time having a critical issue installing grub. I'm on amd64, and when I run

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot

The system returns

Code: Select all

grub-install: error: /boot doesn't look like an EFI Partition.

Any help?

In addition, /boot is formatted as ext2. Is this the issue? If so, how can I fix it?

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:52 pm

The EFI System partition must be formatted FAT because EFI does not understand EXT2.

StevenC21 · Post by **StevenC21** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:04 pm

Crud. Well, what steps will I need to redo? Besides using fdisk to format it of course.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:15 pm

I don't know what you have on your /boot right now, but you need an EFI system partition formatted FAT. How do you have your disk partitioned at the moment?

On my EFI machines, I don't have way too much sensitive stuff so GRUB is installed on the EFI system partition. So it might be as simple as converting that EXT2 partition to FAT by copying everything off, mkfs.fat that partition, and copying everything back.

Note that long file names and attributes may be lost, so this might not be good for you...

Post by Hu » Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:41 pm

You say that /boot is formatted as ext2. Is it correct to say that you made a separate partition just for /boot, and that is the partition formatted as ext2? If so, then the fix is easy, because you will have very little that needs to be moved.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 11:09 pm

For people following along, the related thread has more information - specifically, we're trying to install on a virtual machine, of which the virtual machine may actually be running MBR boot though the host may use EFI. Need clarification before the proper solution can be found...

olger901 · Post by **olger901** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 7:19 am

Can you show us your partition layout using cfdisk or a print from parted, then we'd be able to provide you with steps to undertake to resolve the issue. The point is that a GPT partition always needs a partition to be a FAT32 formatted partition and needs to be at least 128MB in size. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition for more details.