Manjaro installation makes HDD unbootable

[plzak]

If you are seeing a problem in installing a specific distribution, you should probably report the problem in the distribution's bug tracker, first.

I've reported the problem on Manjaro forum in this post, and was told to report Calamares bug here.

Describe the bug
I have installed Manjaro from live USB to an external HDD, into extended partition. The drive contains more extended partitions with other Linux distributions. (Details on partitioning see below.) I had to choose manual installation, because in Replace partition mode the disk size was miscalculated, see Screenshot 1 (already reported by another user in this post).

Installation reported no error, but the drive was not bootable since then (neither Manjaro, nor the other OSes). At the same time, the partitions could be mounted and the files accessed from other working Linux. Reinstalling grub from live USB did not help.

Live USB was booted in BIOS mode. The external HDD booted in BIOS mode too (before the problem occurred). Machine is 64-bit (Intel Core i3).

Manajro version: 21.1.4 (downloaded from official pages)
Calamares version: 3.2.44-2

External HDD partitions (fdisk listing):

Disk /dev/sdb: 465,78 GiB, 500107861504 bytes, 976773167 sectors
Disk model: M3 Portable     
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000382ed

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1              64 507512824 507512761   242G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2       507514879 976766975 469252097 223,8G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5       507514880 508563455   1048576   512M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb6       508565504 572192767  63627264  30,3G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7  *    572194816 629909503  57714688  27,5G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb8       629911552 683313151  53401600  25,5G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb9       683315200 749049855  65734656  31,4G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb10      749051904 817709055  68657152  32,8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb11      817711104 952172543 134461440  64,1G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb12      952174592 976766975  24592384  11,7G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Boot Manjaro (21.1.4) live USB in BIOS mode.
2. Start Manjaro installation. Select the external HDD with extended partitions.
3. Select manual partitioning. Install Manjaro in the existing extended partition (no EFI) (Screenshot 2).
4. Wait until installation is successfully finished.
5. Reboot. Boot fails, grub rescue prompt is shown.

Expected behavior
In step 5, after reboot, the grub menu should be shown, containing all the OSes on the HDD. Selecting an OS from the menu should boot into the respective OS.

Screenshots and Logs
Screenshot 1 - Wrong "After" partitioning (incorrect disk size)

Screenshot 2 - Manual selection of the partition ('/dev/sdc6' in this case)

Calamares has an installation log (usually ~/.cache/calamares/session.log)

I haven't found the log. In user home directory, there is no .cache. In \root\.cache, there is no calamares.

[philmmanjaro]

21.1.4 had an issue with Calamares. Fixed in 21.1.5 release. Latest is 21.1.6 for download ...

[plzak]

Thanks for information. So with the new version, the installation should be possible into a MBR extended partition without problems?

I ask because there was an opinion in Manjaro forum that Calamares do not support the extended partitions. Thanks.

[adriaandegroot]

If there are issues with extended partitions, please file a separate issue with full details and steps to reproduce (see the https://calamares.io/issues/ reporting guide). I'm going to close this as "already solved with later Calamares releases and Manjaro ISO images"