good afternoon all
i bought an Dell Precision 7720 a huge upgrade from my 2008 HP Pavilion dv7,that still works well.
but i wonted to do other things vm's, video editing ....

it came with a 2tb ssd, so i shrunk win 10 and created a partition for /.
so i install arcolinux openbox iso . everything went fine calamares finished without any problems, reboot and it went right into win 10.
i looked at the /dev/sda and nothing pertaining to Linux had been added.

now arch wiki states it wont's to have a 300 mb boot partition.

so i pulled the 2tb ssd and install a 60 gb ssd.
booted in to bios and this new ssd did not show up, well i forgot this device had been wiped.
so i booted my usb and formatted my ssd with gparted.

set the partition table to gpt

/dev/sda1 boot flag 300 mb
/dev/sda2 swap 16 gb
/dev/sda3 ext4 (rest of the drive)

install went fine , rebooted it says it can't find any boot media.
i messed with all the setting in the bios. still isn't working.
parted /dev/sda disk_set pmbr_boot on (tried that no.)

so i though i had messed up fooling with the bios, i switched the 2tb ssd back in laptop and wala i didn't have to do anything booted right into windows.

i did not like a 2tb hard drive so i ordered 2x 512gb m.2 pcie 2280 cards
i'm hopping i can put win 10 on one and linux on the other? maybe


any ideas ?

Did you disable Secure Boot?

IME this is the only setting that will prevent booting on most boxes. Reset everything to factory default, disable Secure Boot, try again.

Did you disable Secure Boot? yes
i did it 4 times all ready, i think i'm going to wait till i get the m.2 pcie 2280.
thank you goumba

even after reboot and reinstall the 60 gb ssd did not show up in bios.

If windows will boot from the same drive type as is failing to boot Linux (you say SSD, I'm guessing you mean SATA), the m2 is not going to fix your problem. I'd be inclined to think there was something wrong with the 60GB, but you say you tried on the original 2TB as well.

The /boot partition really isn't necessary unless you're using a filesystem for / that grub doesn't like. My /boot is on the same btrfs fileystem as /. That's not the problem.

As far as the partition table or files installed?

How did you create the partition for Linux? Better to just use windows Disk Management to shrink the windows partition to crate free, unallocated space on the drive. You need to create a Linux filesystem and you can't do that with windows but probably have gparted or another partition manager on the install media.

Did you install your Linux in UEFI mode? Do you have an entry in the EFI partition for your Linux OS?


After the install of Linux, did you access the BIOS and change the boot priority? Do you have an entry in the BIOS for your Linux? How did you look at the drive to see if there was anything related to Linux? Reboot the install media? You won't see anything from windows. During the install of Linux, did you set the boot and esp flags for the EFI partition? Do you have an EFI partition or just a boot partition?

good evening

ok little better explanation:
Dell Precision 7720
one sata = ssd 2tb
in the bios it is marked windows boot manager
secure boot off
turned fast boot off in windows
used gparted to shrink win 10 and create new partition
booted usb ventoy installed arcolinux openbox
after reboot it went right into windows
so i booted usb into arcolinux
mounted /de/sda1 and there was no linux files at all

arcolinux is actually arch . arch wiki states it wont's a 300mb /boot partition
so instead of messing up any further. i had a 60gb ssd so i swapped the 60gb for the 2tb.

and after setting up gpt on the 60gb drive. i created ?
/dev/sda1 300mb /boot
/dev/sda2 16gb swap
/dev/sda3 the rest of the drive ext4
parted /dev/sda disk_set pmbr_boot on (tried that no.)
still doesn't show up in the bios.

If I'm reading this right this partition needs to be formatted fat32 flagged as esp and mounted to /boot/efi.

ok i mounted the 60gb ssd in a usb dock.
mounted /dev/sda1 and it was empty.
so i used gparted, reworked the drive. now as it stands:
/dev/sda1 fat32 boot,esp 300mb
/dev/sda2 swap 16gb
/dev/sda3 ext4 (rest of the drive)

i did not see anything about esp boot flag in the calamares partition set up only bios_grub and boot.

i'm going to switch ssd in the morning, and reinstall arco

colorpurple21859
now it is formatted fat32 and gparted shows boot,esp or should it just be esp. in gparted when you set the boot flag it also sets the esp flag.

yancek
i used gparted to shrink win 10 and create the partition i dislike windows.

goumba
yes it is an ssd sata

Gparted sets the boot flag along with the esp flag, esp flag is the main requirement. Select /boot/efi as the mount point for sda1 during the partitioning stage.

good afternoon all

ok so i have it working on the 60gb ssd sata drive.

thank you all for the advice and help.

as colorpurple21859 i was not mounting the /boot/efi it is in the installer a pull down box. beside it, it is label mount point

this is only the second time i have created a efi partition. windows makes everything harder!