Manjaro Installation on UEFI [guide]

I'm going to put this here because for those of you like me that may not want to jump straight into arch, but want the arch experience, may need a little help installing Manjaro on a UEFI machine. I installed it on my laptop as well (a BIOS machine) and I'll leave that out because even the graphical installer can get the job done, there is no need for a guide on that.

I've spent the last few days scouring for answers to a few minor annoyances that make Manjaro uninstallable (without having to do some manual tweaking) if you have a UEFI machine. In order to save some of you some time if you want to try it out I figured I'd put this together.

First download your Manjaro distribution. I'll recommend using the 3 main ones (XFCE, Openbox, KDE, etc, because I had more headaches with the community ones).

  1. Burn the .iso to a usb/cd: If you're on linux, just use the "dd" command. If you're on windows I haven't found a reliable way to burn the .iso with UEFI boot other than using Rufus (google it) or installing Cygwin and using "dd" as well.
  2. Insert flash drive into computer and boot into your UEFI. For ease of use make sure that secure boot is disabled and that UEFI/Legacy or some option thereof is enabled. Now go to your boot options and pick the "UEFI: usb" or your Live CD.
  3. Once you're booted in, you'll have to use the CLI installer that comes with Manjaro. As of right now its the only one that will allow you to do an EFI install.
  4. Select "Testing Installer" so that you can do a EFI install
  5. Go through the install process, its pretty straight forward, and if you can't follow it I'd advise leaving now because fixing the minor problems is more in-depth than the simple installation.
  6. Now when you get to the "Install Bootloader" option. Make sure that you change to the correct CPU configuration that you have. I run a x86_64 system so I used that option.
  7. Choose GRUB(2) as the bootloader. [I tried EFIstub instead but had no luck getting it to boot correctly, maybe I'll figure that out later and update this then]
  8. Don't worry if you get errors, you'll get them every time because the installer doesn't do everything that it should be doing, that's what we're going to have to fix. We do this just so that the correct file system is set in place to make the next steps easier.
  9. Now go to this web page. There are a few corrections that need to be made to this procedure though, so don't start it yet.
  10. Do the mounting of your partitions just as it says. When you get to the mounting in order to change your root directory, you need to add: mount --bind /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /mnt/sys/firmware/efi/efivars before you chroot in. This is one of the issues that will cause issues when installing Manjaro, the directories that are needed to boot EFI don't get loaded during the install (even though its an EFI installer).
  11. Now chroot into the actual install.
  12. Before you do any of the "Restoring the bootloader" steps, run: "pacman -S efibootmgr grub dosfstools". You'll be asked to first update the package list (I believe, I kind of didn't pay attention) just say yes, wait for that to be done and run the command again. This is done to make sure that everything that is needed, for these last few steps, is up to date.
  13. Now follow the "For UEFI" instructions under restoring the bootloader. This should successfully fix the issues that grub has when being installed with the installer and you should be able to exit chroot, exit su, and then reboot the machine.
  14. Hopefully this is the part where you boot into Grub, choose Manjaro, and start to have your Arch experience.

Since these are really only small corrections to an already existing Manjaro wiki page I'm going to see if I can get these added to the install guide, or the restoring grub guide itself. These EFI problems happen with more than just grub as well, so I might just submit a bug report or something to the Manjaro team to see if they can get those few mounting/binding issues sorted out.

Hopefully that was clear enough to follow. If there are questions I'll try to answer them but I'm new to this as well. I just figured I should share my experience for those who may have issues like I did, and not have to spend days searching the internet to find this stuff.

Links to the webpages that made my install possible:

can you use gummiboot?

 

That was one of the things I was going to try with EFIstub. There's an option for gummiboot which fails to install. You can probably chroot into the install the same way and install gummiboot instead of restoring grub. I'm not sure though since I haven't tried it.

Wow, that is by far the most complicated way to do it, congrats for your patience and perseverance. I would definitely have taken the simple way, also because it leaves secure boot on, which (only on linux) is a nice security feature.

What's the simpler way? This is pretty much the "official" way according to the manjaro wiki. It would be nice to know how to do it more efficiently. I mean it was a fantastic learning experience for me, but now that I've gone through that it'd be cool to learn a simpler way.

At that point, is it really any simpler than installing Arch vanilla?

Good guide, though - I installed Manjaro on a couple UEFI machines and never had any issues, but I suppose the recent images changed the installation a bit.