UEFI - Install Guide

Introduction

UEFI is the commonly agreed on name for both the EFI & UEFI 
standards which merged. It does not include the old EFI v1, 
or Apple's own non-standard version of EFI.

Target computer

The following guide aims to install Manjaro on a machine with UEFI enabled, Secure boot disabled, and using GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk(s).

For multi-boot, the EFI system partition which is already present (or will be created), can usually be shared amongst multiple Linux installs.

The steps

Common

• 1. Download your preferred Manjaro version (XFCE, Openbox, Cinnamon, KDE, ...), must be 64-bits.

• 2. Burn the .iso to USB or DVD. See Burn_an_ISO_File for more details.

• 3. Check your BIOS, UEFI must be ON and Secure boot OFF.

• 4. Boot with your USB or DVD & use the rEFInd - Main Menu... to choose which GPU drivers you want to have installed, the open-source or proprietary:

* Boot Manjaro Linux ... (default) - 
  This chooses the open-source - free GPU drivers.
* Boot Manjaro Linux ... (nonfree) - 
  This option chooses the proprietary GPU drivers
  from Nvidia or ATI.

Graphical Installer

tip

---

Since Manjaro-0.8.9, UEFI support is also provided in the Graphical Installer, so one can simply try the Graphical installer and skip the instructions given below for the CLI installer.

To use the Graphical Installer select the Install Manjaro option from the Manjaro Welcome screen or from the desktop.

For the ESP (EFI system partition) which will store the EFI Grub binary, a 512mb partition of type fat32 can be created in the partitioning step, and mounted to /boot/efi

If you are dual booting then an EFI partition from a previous install can also be used.

CLI installer

• 5-b. Open terminal & enter:

$ sudo setup

• 6. Now, we are in the CLI Installer.

• 7. Choose 1. Set date and time - an easy intuitive configuration.

Disk preparation

tip

---

If your hard disk is already partitioned the way you want, then this step can be skipped.

* When you click 2. Partition Hard Drives, 
  you get a dialog saying "Do you want to use GUID
  Partition Table (GPT)", choose Yes.
* Partition your disk(s) as you want (Instructions on
  manually partitioning are beyond the scope of this
  guide, some deatils are available here).
* Important Step: Create a 50~250MB EFI Partition,
  mine is 100MB (code: ef00)

Setting filesystem mount points

* After the partitioning is done, go to 4. Set Filesystem
  Mountpoints.
* Important Step: Format the EFI Partition you
  created as VFAT and mount on /boot/efi

note

---

If you are re-using your EFI partition (that was created by Windows previously (or any other OS), then there is no need to format. Formatting will wipe the previous bootloader. Only mounting the EFI partition as /boot/efi is required in that case.

Installation

• 9. Choose 3. Install system and wait...

• 10. Now, go to 4. Configure System and configure it the way you like (username, password, mirrorlist, system-name, ...).

• 11. When you are done, go to 5. Install bootloader. Choose EFI_x86_64 > GRUB (2) UEFI x86_64, DON'T select BIOS GRUB.

• 11.1 It will ask to format the EFI Partition you created earlier as FAT32, yes can be chosen.

note

---

Formatting not required if reusing previous EFI partition.

• 12. If it gives a error in the final stages saying "efivars kernel module was not properly loaded", don't worry, the system will work fine!

• 13. If the installer asks you about copying grub/efi files to another folder in order to maintain compatibility in some systems, choose Yes.

• 14. Click 6. Quit

• 15. Shutdown, remove the DVD or USB, and boot. Your system should appear now!

Switching from BIOS to UEFI

1) You need to create an ESP (EFI System Partition).

It is a FAT32 partition which has the .efi files for booting, which you can create using gparted or gdisk. (Size at least 200-300 MiB.) Ensure the flags `boot` and `esp` are set on this partition.

You should also install/check whether following packages are present-

1. efibootmgr
2. dosfstools
3. grub

(How to install packages)

2) Create the /boot/efi directory

sudo mkdir /boot/efi

3.) Mount the EFI partition as /boot/efi

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /boot/efi

X = Alphabet of the drive = a,b,c ... Y = Partition number of the EFI partition = 1,2,3,4...

Example - /dev/sda4

4.) Install Grub according to UEFI

sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=manjaro --recheck

5.) Update Grub configuration file.

sudo update-grub

Note- If you get an error like

path '/boot/grub' is not readable by Grub on boot. Installation is impossible. Aborting

Then you will need to chroot as described here, and then perform Step 5 again.

If you get the following error :

EFI variables are not supported on this system.

then you could load the efivarfs module :

sudo modprobe efivarfs

See also

Restore the GRUB Bootloader

[1]

Dual booting with Windows

tip

---

Some manufactures EFI implementations cause GRUB not to be showed in the Boot Menu, or even if its there it can't be made default.

In such cases rEFInd can be used.

There are two ways to install rEFInd-

1.Install rEFInd from its website [2] (detailed) or install using pacman(preferred)-

sudo pacman -S refind

Files will be present in /usr/share/refind .

2.Or using the instructions on the rEFInd website: [3]

Instructions

The refind-install command can be used to automatically install rEFInd (the EFI partition may need to be mounted for this to work). See the Arch wiki for more details.

Manual install

Inside the refind folder (/usr/share/refind), copy the files and folders to-

/boot/efi/EFI/Boot/

Note-

My ESP (EFI System Partition) is mounted at /boot/efi.

You need to copy these files to the Boot folder on your EFI partition, and the Boot folder itself will be present inside the EFI folder on the EFI Partition, so take note of it.

You can check which partition is your ESP using Gparted; find which partition is formatted as fat32 and has size around 200mb-1gb.

Can mount it as /boot/efi by

sudo mount /dev/sdXN /boot/efi

X=a,b,c... N=1,2,3... These depend on which partition your ESP is present which can be obtained via Gparted as mentioned earlier.

Now inside the /boot/efi/EFI/Boot/ folder, there should already be a file present-

bootx64.efi

You can rename it as windows.bootx64.efi Then you can rename refind_x64.efi to bootx64.efi

The bootx64.efi files boot by default, hence rEFInd should now boot by default, and detect grubx64.efi(linux-manjaro) and efibootmgfw.efi (windows) automatically.

Note-

A folder Manjaro (name could be some other also) containing the file grubx64.efi should also be present in /boot/efi/EFI/ folder, which should contain the grubx64.efi file which will be used by rEFInd to boot Grub.

So it could be like-

/boot/efi/EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi

rEFInd would use this file for booting Manjaro.

If you do not have this file or folder, try-

sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=Manjaro --recheck

to create /boot/efi/EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi

See also- http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#naming

An alternative: chainloading via GRUB

An entry can be added to /etc/grub.d/40_custom

menuentry 'Windows8 (UEFI)' {
insmod ntfs
set root=(hd0,gpt4)
chainloader (${root})/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
boot
}

In this case (hd0,4) or /dev/sda4 is the EFI System partition where the Windows bootloader is present.

After adding the above entry, running sudo update-grub updates the GRUB configuration file so that an entry named Windows8 (UEFI) is added to the GRUB boot menu.

Related Forum thread: [4]

The chainloading will fail on some hardware (Lenovo Ideapad 110) with the "invalid signature" message - the Refind method will still work.

Extras

Using Rufus on Windows to create installation media

Rufus users can use the following settings:

* Click on the DVD icon and load your .iso
* In the menu left of the DVD icon, select DD Image
* Device: "choose your USB" (Attention: choose correctly,
  the device selected here will be formatted!!!)
* Partition scheme: GPT partition scheme for UEFI computer
* File system: FAT32
* Cluster size: "Don't modify"
* Volume label: "Don't modify"
* Click Start, and you are done (takes 2~5 min to complete).

Feedback

Questions, suggestions, critics? Please post here: [5]

External Links

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36tDZIXn3-k